VivaNedFlanders

This blog has moved....

2008-01-01T19:28:00.000-05:00

...to WordPress. Please visit me at http://vivanedflanders.wordpress.com

New Blog on the Block...

2007-03-13T19:48:00.000-04:00

If you haven't already checked out the new blog Main Street Plaza, I suggest that you do. Hellmut has spearheaded the whole thing with help from various people around the DAMU. As the blog states, it's for anyone interested in Mormonism. I have my doubts about much participation there will be by believers, but the point is that everyone is welcome. It is my impression that the blog will deal mostly with the cultural implications of Mormonism, and not so much the doctrinal or religious components.

There's already a great discussion going on here about baptism as a social rite and whether "post-Mormons" can have their kids baptized without being marginalized.

I think it's encouraging that the disaffected side of the Mormon internet is gaining more and more blogs. Although I love the freedom of message boards, their impact seems to be more limited than the potential audience of blogs. Internet searches can bring up old (but still informative) blog posts, but they won't find an equally enlightening message board discussion of the exact same subject. Also, blogs can handle larger numbers of readers and they encourage the formation of even more blogs.

While I don't think the DAMU needs to form its own wing of the bloggernacle (as the two communities are fundamentally different), I do think blogs are the way of the future.

Ned sells out

2007-01-10T18:49:00.000-05:00

Well, I took the job. I'd had since Monday to think about it, but I still wasn't sure when I walked in the door to work this morning. Part of the problem was that Maude was so busy at work Monday (she didn't get home until after midnight, by which time I was already asleep) that I wasn't able to tell her until yesterday. (I'll have to do a post this week on being a law widower.)

We talked briefly about it over dinner, but we were at a table in the middle of the restaurant, and few important life decisions can be made in such a situation. We talked about the possibility of me going back to school, but this was hampered by me not knowing what I want to study. Maude said she would be willing to move in a few years if there was a specific program I could only get elsewhere (there's only two big universities around here, and one is way too good for me to get into).

All in all, it's a decent source of money while I try to figure out what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. The work isn't always the most fun, but I do seem to get along with my co-workers. And, it's not permanent. I won't have the freedom from responsibility that a temp has, but it's not like I'm chained to this job forever.

I'll have to be more careful what I say about work from now on. I don't want to get Dooced. If I go out, I want to go out like George Costanza. Being a temp is great in a way because you've already been fired. The only thing you're negotiating is the day you leave.

Now, I have a little more at stake. Like two whole weeks vacation.

If I stay it will be double...

2007-01-08T18:49:00.000-05:00

It was 72 degrees here on Saturday. 72 degrees in January. At least, that's what the weatherman told me. I didn't leave the house.

I spent the entire weekend watching football and trying to make good on some of those things that are definitely not New Year's Resolutions. I've been temping at the same place since May, and this weekend was the first serious push I've made since then to find a new job. I applied for a bunch of interesting jobs on-line and vowed to apply to at least one new job every day.

So what happens today at work? I get the ominous please-come-into-the-office-with-the-door-closed routine and they offered (finally) to take me on permanently. On the one hand, this is great news, since I will be getting paid more than a temp. On the other hand, this isn't really my field and I'll be doing more work that is less interesting. Unfortunately, I will also lose a lot of my flexibility for taking time off. I may be becoming French in my old age, but two weeks vacation seems pretty ridiculous to me. When you're a temp, they don't have to pay you, so they don't care how much time you take off.

I have to make up my mind fairly soon, but I'm leaning towards taking it. At least it legitimizes me somewhat, and I might even start getting copied on the Employees-All emails. Still, sometimes it's nice to think at the end of the day, "This is only temporary, this is only temporary."

Re-inventing the wheel

2007-01-05T20:12:00.000-05:00

I am not what you'd call an "early adopter." Those are the people who have to have the latest experimental plasma TV and the cell phone that can open their garage doors. I'm more of a late adopter; I want all the bugs worked out and the price to come way down.

This is why I'm considering upgrading my current Nintendo 64 to a Playstation 2. Now, before you confusedly check the date stamp at the end of this post: yes, it is 2007, and yes, I still have a Nintendo 64.

Despite having been born right in the middle the video game generation, I've never been much of a gamer. This is also despite my parents buying several of the early video game platforms (if you knew my parents, you'd know how weird that is. They were young once, apparently.) I remember my family having a Texas Intruments computer when I was very young (the TI-99/4A)), and the only game simple enough for me to play was called Hunt the Wumpus. We then upgraded to an Atari 5200. My mom was a fanatic of the game Megamania, which again is totally out of character for her. Megamania is basically Space Invaders but instead of alien ships, you shoot at flying hamburgers and bowties. What can I say? It seemed really clever at the time. I still remember a hearing the adults talking about a friend who reached the vaunted 45,000 points and took a picture of the screen to send to the company.

None of this really rubbed off on me, and despite becoming very skilled at Pole Position, I remained indifferent to video games. Like everyone else in America, we got a Nintendo system sometime during the late 80s. Even after playing Super Mario Brothers for hours upon hours, I was probably the only kid in America not to beat the game. A few years later, when I was still in my teens, we moved overseas and we couldn't make the Nintendo work with our foreign television.

(A funny side note on that: When we moved, we had to ship all our stuff months before we left. The mission president that my father replaced was a local and he had a son about my age. Apparently, the son and his friends heard that we had a Nintendo, so they opened all our stuff when it arrived and got the Nintendo out, but they couldn’t get it to work. A real class act, that family.)

During the first few years of college, I was too poor to even have a TV, let alone a Playstation. Finally in February 2000, Maude, who I was dating at the time, convinced me to buy a Nintendo 64 as a Valentine’s Day present for both of us. The price had finally gone down to $99 and she wanted to play MarioKart. And that’s where we stand today.

Since I don’t spend a lot of time gaming, I can’t imagine spending $400 for an Xbox or $600 for a PS3. Plus, all the games cost 50 bucks on top of that. But now you can get a Playstation 2 for just $130 and there are hundreds of cheap games now. Still, 130 bucks could buy a lot of books, instead of just time wasted sitting in front of the television.

On the other hand, if I get the system, at my current rate, I’ll be set until 2014. That’s a lot of time to try to beat Metal Gear Solid.

Do NOT Go In There

2007-01-04T21:54:00.000-05:00

There are certain things that are so simple that it boggles my mind that our society can't implement them. I know it's an old cliche to say "We can put a man on the moon, but we can't do______." The blank usually involving something really important like inventing squeezable peanut butter or eliminating check-out lines.

However, I really don't understand why we continue to build millions of public bathrooms in this country that have doors that swing in, instead of out. What's the point of washing your hands if you're just going to have to touch the same surface as the guy straight from the stall?

The bathroom at my work is a perfect example. It has two doors, with a short hallway in between (for privacy); however, the first door swings in and the second swings out. After washing my hands, I can nudge the first door open with my foot, but the second door traps me. There is no wastebasket in the small hall, so I can't even use a paper towel to open the second door. This wouldn't be so disconcerting if I hadn't had to follow the same guy out of the bathroom two days in a row now.

Beardy McBearderson, as I'll refer to him, belongs to that school of hand-washers known as the Splashers. In today's corporate environment, few people will simply walk out the door unwashed in front of witnesses (also known as the Poppie School of Hand-Washing). When a Splasher spies you standing there, they'll walk over to the faucet and turn it on and off so fast that only a few molecules of water actually touch their hands. Having made this sacrifice to communal norms, they'll then dry themselves and act like this spritz of moisture had some sort of antiseptic effect. It is almost certain that Splashers wouldn't bother with the pretense of turning on the water if you weren't there. Like an electron, the simple act of observation changes their behaviour. Once, I caught a co-worker leaving the bathroom while the urinal was still flushing, making it mathematically impossible that he washed his hands. You can never look a person the same after.

I don't think we need a surgical scrub station in the bathroom, but it would be nice if we could escape without having to resort to pinkie fingers, wadded up paper towels, and elbows. I mean, after all, we did put a man on the moon.

Eat, drink, and be merry (because tomorrow's kind of iffy)

2007-01-03T18:21:00.000-05:00

Every once in a while I remember how improbable our existence is in this cold, dead universe. I suppose that mathematically, there has to be life somewhere else too, but who knows what it looks like or how far it's advanced. Not just that I exist, but that I'm alive now, and not at any point in the previous 200,000 years when we were clubbing each other with rocks and lived a short, nightmarish existence of insecurity, disease, and discomfort. Obviously, my unique combination of (mostly faulty) genes couldn't have existed at any point previous to this one, so it's a moot point, but these are the kind of things I think about when I have too much time on my hands.

I'm currently reading a history of the Punic Wars that I picked up at random in the local library while waiting for my wife. It's amazing that we know the names and stories of these people who lived more than two thousand years ago, but it can be depressing. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers died fighting for a country that wasn't even theirs and was, in any case, doomed to be destroyed. What's the point for any of us? We're trapped on a rock that's fated to be reabsorbed into the sun and ultimately have its atoms strewn across the universe.

That sucks. The fact that I will die sooner rather than later sucks. Some people think that when you stop believing in God, you lose all inhibitions and decency, because there is no final reckoning looming over you. I disagree. I find that losing my faith in God has made me want to be happier and help others more, precisely because there is no balancing of the scales afterward, there is no divine justice.

You can't fight annihilation, because it's coming for all of us. The only thing we can do is make this improbable miracle of existence less painful and more enjoyable for everyone in the meantime. No trace of my existence will remain in a hundred years or so, but at least I had a chance to live.

New Year's irResolutions

2007-01-02T18:24:00.000-05:00

I've always hated New Year's resolutions because they seem pointless. Either you're going to do something, or (more likely) you're not. So the following are not resolutions, but rather things I would really like to happen, and soon.

1. I need to find a real job. I've been temping for 9 months now, and at my current assignment for over 7 months. It's time to start getting paid more than 14 dollars an hour. I'm turning thirty in a couple weeks and I'm on the verge on a mid-life crisis (mid-life because I eat a lot of bacon). I can't be happy if I don't enjoy what I do for forty hours a week for the rest of my bacon-truncated life.

2. I'd like to go to Europe or South America. Last week, I discovered that I've let my passport expire. Yep, I'm now one of those statistics that make Europeans cluck their tongues and feel superior to us. Really, I love travelling, but for the last couple years my wife and I have been going to Hawaii on vacation, which she enjoyed more than me. I'd love to go back to Buenos Aires, but even though everything is very cheap there, the flights are still expensive ($1000 per person).

3. I need to get my house in some sort of order. Right now, even though we moved here over a year ago, it still looks like an episode of Cops. All I need to do is get arrested shirtless on my couch and the look will be complete. My wife works 60-75 hours a week, so I really can't (and shouldn't) expect any help from her. Plus, she's half of the reason it looks like it does.

That's it. If I could just accomplish just these three things, my life would be incomparably improved. So, in other words, don't count on it.

The Brick Testament

2007-01-01T23:36:00.000-05:00

There's always one person in the office who is about five years behind on Internet fads. You know, the one who forwards you the recipe for Neiman Marcus cookies or a link to SaveToby.com and thinks it is the first time you've ever seen it.

So at the risk of being that guy, I give you The Brick Testament. Thousands of Bible scenes (3,048 to be exact) illustrated exclusively with Legos. Now before you start making plans to buy the book for your nieces and nephews, you should be aware that the artist's interest lies almost exclusively in the most salacious and violent Bible stories, that is to say, most of the Old Testament. Murder, rape, incest, genocide, prostitution: it's all here.

My favorites (WARNING! EXPLICIT LEGO IMAGES!): Samson and the Prostitute, The Second Circumcision, and definitely the dirtiest picture you can make out of just Legos and the Bible, Onan. Wow. I really don't know whether that is safe for work or not, but don't say I didn't warn you.

2007-01-01T10:38:00.000-05:00

Dark at 4:30 pm

2006-10-30T23:20:00.000-05:00

There is no more depressing day than the first Monday after Daylight Savings Time ends.

It shouldn't be dark when you leave work. Isn't there some way we can adopt Daylight Savings Time permanently? Just say, from now on, 4 is 5. Or better yet, just let me out of work at 4.

I'm getting depressed working my crappy temp job from 8-5 every day. The job isn't that bad, but it's depressing to be nearing 30-years-old and only making $24,000 a year. A year ago I was making 10 grand more and having considerably more fun.

I'm not complaining, I have a house and a wife and a car, all things that at one point seemed out of reach for me, but I like to at least have the illusion that my life isn't slipping away from me. And it's hard when it's already dark before you even leave work.

God hates the Mets: Tales from Game 7

2006-10-20T20:53:00.000-04:00

I stumbled into work this morning a half hour late, unshaven, bleary-eyed and with a voice two octaves lower than normal. I blame Carlos Beltran. Had he been able to get a base hit last night, I might have been able to stumble into work triumphantly, still waving my "Let's Go Mets" towel above my head, and having no voice left at all.

Maude and I were able to get tickets to game 7 to watch our beloved Mets take on the St. Louis Cardinals. Unfortunately, it didn't turn out quite the way we had hoped. We left for the game at 3:30 pm and didn't get home until 3:10 am, a sacrifice that would have seemed trifling had the Mets won, but turned out to be grueling in defeat.

We decided to park at the train station and take the train in to the game, having learned the hard way during the season that driving to and from Shea Stadium on game night is best left to sociopaths and masochists. In the train station parking lot, we rode on the elevator with a young couple. The man, noticing our Mets shirts, asked if we were going to the game. Then he said, "We're going to a Broadway play; want to switch tickets?"

"Hey!" his date objected. "What about me?"

Two hours and two trains later, we filed off the subway and walked towards the ballpark, as spontaneous chants of "Let's go Mets" erupted along with deep-throated growls. We neared the stadium in an electric stream of orange and blue, walking behind two red dots: man with his five-year old son, holding hands and wearing matching Pujols jerseys. I imagine that at some point in the game the kid looked up at his father and asked, "Daddy, why do all these people hate us?"

Shortly after we had taken our seats, the game began. I have never seen a more keyed-up crowd in my life. The entire first inning, not a single person sat down, and every strike pitched by Oliver Perez was greeted with a roar that sounded like a touchdown had been scored. 55,000 people screaming in unison and whipping the air with our complimentary white towels for a 1-1 pitch. It was incredible.

Our seats, of course, were not. It didn't bother us as we were just happy to be part of that crowd, but the Mets should really be ashamed to sell the seats we occupied. We were so far under the overhang that any fly ball was instantly out of view; we had to read the body language of the outfielders to tell if it was a pop-up or a homerun. To add insult to injury, there was bedraggled bunting hanging from the upper-deck that blocked our view even more. These seats only cost $20 during the season (which is fairly reasonable) but it's a bit harder to swallow when you're paying 80 bucks a pop for this at a playoff game. Hopefully, our $160 went directly into the new stadium fund to ensure only great sightlines.

As the game progressed, social barriers came down. After great defensive plays by the Mets, the crowd would yell in elation and high-five any stranger in slapping distance. It was like a Catholic mass when the priest invites you to shake the hands of people sitting around you. I didn't know any of the people in my section, but I slapped all of their hands. There is something oddly satisfying about this, especially in a city like New York.

Ultimately, though, it was not to be. The combined voice of 50,000 people cannot make a bat hit a ball. We were dejected because we had come so close. Sure, the Mets and the Cardinals were just playing for the honor of getting thumped by the Tigers in the World Series, but it would have been nice just to be invited. The entire trip home, strangers would ask if we had been at the game and commiserate with us.

Sitting on a commuter train at two in the morning is not most fun place to be when you're thinking about how you have to be at work the next morning. I was deflated. However, as we drove towards the exit of the train station parking garage, we saw the same couple from earlier in the evening. They must have been in a different car on the same train, returning from their Broadway play. I imagined that they were glad they hadn't traded tickets with us after all, but, despite it all, so was I.

There is camaraderie even in defeat.

Commuting with Krakauer

2006-10-05T01:18:00.000-04:00

Before moving last year, I had always commuted to work via public transportation. It wasn't always fun having to check the subway seat for urine, but it did have certain advantages. Leaving the driving to someone else, I could read books. In fact, the majority of my reading time came during my morning and evening hour on the train.

Now I live in the land of cars, and I have to drive 40 minutes to get to work and sometimes as long as an hour to get home. Sitting in gridlock for an hour and a half each day can get pretty old, but it's even worse when you feel like you're just wasting the time. In the beginning, I listened to NPR obsessively, but there are only so many stories I can listen to about Hurricane Katrina, the Bush White House, and the fascinating subject of porches. I had to find a more productive use of my commute.

Finally, about a month ago, I had an epiphany: I could check out audiobooks from the library and listen to them while I drove. There are so many books that I want to read, and I know I'll never get to them all. This is the perfect way to be able to get some "reading" done while sitting behind the wheel.

Audiobooks aren't perfect. You are at the mercy of the narrator's voice, which all too often is inflected with obnoxious mannerisms or over-the-top accents. Also, it's a lot easier to follow a complex thought on the page than to listen to it read aloud. Sometimes, when someone cuts me off in traffic and I'm cursing at them through my windshield, I'll completely tune out and have to rewind the CD to get my bearings again.

Since I don't get as much out of books on tape, I keep to strictly non-fiction. I figure it's kind of like attending a lecture in college. It doesn't matter if I don't absorb every word as long as I get the gist. So far, I've already listened to three books on CD: Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and most recently, Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith.

I had never actually sat down and read Under the Banner of Heaven, though I had skimmed through it extensively when it came out in 2003. What surprised me most while listening to the audiobook version is the change in my reaction from then to now. When it came out I was full of righteous indignation even though I hadn't been to church once in the previous five years. I didn't really believe in Mormonism, but I still wasn't certain that it wasn't true either. I had unwittingly retained a vestigial belief and with it a great deal of defensiveness.

My objections at the time were that Krakauer: (a) didn't do enough to distinguish LDS from FLDS, (b) blamed on mainstream Mormonism the actions of a few madmen, and (c) delivered a particularly low blow on Elizabeth Smart. I didn't read the book all the way through (Maude had bought a copy and read it already) because it made me so mad.

Three years on, after losing all of my belief, the book didn't upset me at all. I still think non-Mormons could be confused between the FLDS and LDS, since Krakauer shifts from talking about one to the other frequently. However, I hadn't realized at the time how many of the FLDS in question were born mainstream Mormon and only became FLDS later in life. The Lafferty brothers and Brian David Mitchell were regular Mormons who somehow morphed into violent fundamentalists; this is not something that is acknowledged in most church circles. Because they had been excommunicated by the time they committed their crimes, they are seen as completely unconnected to Mormonism. This despite the fact that these heinous acts were overtly religious in nature and specifically tied to Mormonism and polygamy.

I still think Krakauer missteps badly in his almost casual assertion that Mormonism helped victimize Elizabeth Smart by making her conditioned to accept authority. It's certainly a plausible theory, but it seems unseemly and unnecessary to me to speculate on the mental condition of a sex abuse victim. There is plenty to focus on in the perpetrator and his religious motives for the crime.

Apart from these objections, I thought it was a very compelling book that did a good job of condensing 200 years of church history and highlighting the dangerous fringes of faith. I think a lot of my earlier hostility towards the book stemmed from my assumption that Krakauer was digging through the dirty laundry to try to discredit the church and imply that all of us Mormons were dangerous fanatics. Now I can see that he is simply trying to explain how extremism (in this case Mormon Fundamentalism) can appeal to some people and cause them to justify frighteningly inhumane acts.

There were a lot of things that I simply didn't want to hear or believe about the church three years ago, so it's probably a good thing that I didn't force my way through this book back then. I had to figure these things out for myself first, before I was willing to accept the word of an outsider.

The most important thing is that I learned a lot more in the week or so it took to listen to Under the Banner of Heaven than I would have learned listening to NPR. I think I'll take my pledge drive money and donate it to the library instead. Take that, Terry Gross.

Gratitude Group

2006-09-28T18:49:00.000-04:00

A couple of us recovery-type bloggers have a little e-mail "Gratitude Group." The incomparable annegb got it started, and it's really small and kind of erratic.

It provides such a lift to my day when I get an e-mail with the subject "gratitude." One of the things that I really like about it is how personal it is. I would like to expand it a little bit, but I don't know how we could do that without losing its intimacy.

Is this something that could work as a blog? Why or why not?

Dear DKL: I love LDSelect.org, but...

2006-09-20T22:23:00.000-04:00

I love the LDSElect aggregator. I will probably put a link here soon, if Ned says it's OK. I love being able to customize the boxes so I see VNF in Box 1. Yay VNF! I know it's in box 4 as a default, but self-delusion is highly underrated.

I have one teensy problem though. I tried to create a login, and I never was sent a password. I tried to create the login again, and it won't let me, because it says I'm already signed up. This may be true, but a login without a password is entirely useless.

I wouldn't mind so much, because my savings are "remembered" on my main computer, but I use other computers, too. I don't want to have to recustomize them all. Plus, my shameless self-promotion (VNF in Box 1! Huzzah!) has no effect if I'm not logged in when I set it up.

So, dear D., if you would be so kind as to let me know what to do to get my password, I would be pickled tink, as Ned would say.

What Mormonism Left Me

2006-09-13T19:27:00.000-04:00

It's tough on those of us who don't believe. I know, I know, we get to sleep in on Sundays and spend our extra 10% with abandon, but it's hard to turn your back on something that helped mold who you are.

Ambivalent is the word. I feel pulled in two directions. On the one hand, I can't imagine my life without the overpowering architecture of Mormonism looming over it. On the other, I don't like a lot of the shadows that it cast over my life.

Like a lot of Utah Mormons, my family was organized around the church almost exclusively. Almost all our friends were from the church, and almost all our free time was spent there or at other church activities. Between Scouts, Young Women, Relief Society and my parents' callings, church occupied more time than anything besides school for me or work for my parents.

When I was an adolescent, my father was called to be a mission president in a foreign country. (Incidentally, I think it's insulting the way they ignore the spouses of Mission Presidents, but that's a rant for another day.) Instantly our whole life was changed.

This came as quite a shock. First of all, we were a solidly middle class family in a middle class Utah ward and my dad was fairly young. He was nowhere near retirement age, had no assets to speak of besides our house, and was a Young Men's advisor. The highest calling he had ever held was 1st counselor in the Bishopric.

Nevertheless, my parents both quit their jobs with no prospects of getting them back and sold our house at way below market value--talk about a motivated seller. I left my school and all the friends I had accumulated since kindergarten and moved to a foreign country, where a new house, a new language, and a new life awaited me.

Needless to say, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I was exposed to so many new people and places and experiences that I never could have had back in Utah. At the same time, being a Mormon and living in a different country always made me the outsider looking in. Adolescence isn't easy for most kids, but I think Mormon adolescents experience a special kind of hell. When you're just trying to figure out what's right and wrong, it doesn't help to have the constant pressure to be perfect weighing on your every decision. I wanted to be able to have fun, and not worry about whether I was procrastinating the day of my repentance.

It was hard fitting in as the outsider, and all the Mormon pressure weighed on me a lot; consequently or unrelatedly, I went through alternating cycles of depression and elation. I would be happy (due in large part to my new, exotic locale and friends) and then, suddenly, depressed that I was so unworthy and faithless. Like manic depression, Mormonism seemed to allow me to reach greater heights (by magically transforming my life through the move) but also reach new lows by drumming into me how unworthy and faithless I was.

I remember at one point casually asking my mom what would happen if I were to die accidentally. She said they'd almost certainly be released immediately and sent home. It sounds weird, but one of the factors that argued against suicide in my adolescent brain was not screwing up this sweet gig for my parents.

I hated going to Seminary and I disliked Church, but I loved hanging out with the office missionaries. My many friendships with the Elders passing through had no religious overtones; we were just normal friends who all happened to be in a foreign country for an overtly religious reason. Again, the Church brought all these great people into my orbit, but I didn't receive anything of value to me from the religious end of the Church, just the administrative end.

During one summer break during high school, my dad wanted me to do a mini-mission for a couple weeks. I had a blast doing typical missionary things, throwing rotten fruit off balconies, almost getting killed on my bicycle, constant practical joking living with three other guys, but I didn't enjoy the religious part. I fell asleep during scripture study, after lunch, and at church. I tried hard to follow the rules, but I didn't get anything out of it. I recently came across a letter one of the sister missionaries in my zone wrote me when I left after the two weeks. It said, joking of course, that I should be ashamed because I didn't give away a single Book of Mormon and that they all knew I was an apostate. (I know, she was very prescient.)

Similarly, I loved my real mission (a few years later) for all the friends I made on it, both Elders and families we met, and for all the places I would never have been able to visit without it. On the religious end, I struggled with faith and doubt and guilt, and ultimately, I came to hate the petty bureaucracy that seemed to dominate the Mission leadership. I had "spiritual experiences," but they seemed unrelated to the heavy-handed rules and dull lessons that the Church imposed.

So I find myself most deeply shaped by experiences that are uniquely Mormon, yet I am completely without faith in the positive influence of the very institution that made them possible. Mormonism turned out great for me--it let me live several years abroad and expanded my horizons--but it also made me more miserable than I can express. That is why I am ambivalent about my Mormonism; it made me who I am today, but it also made me an outsider. I'm too deeply marked by my upbringing and life experiences to fit in with others, but I can never be part of a believing Mormon community either.

I guess that's why I can't leave it alone, because it never leaves me.

Conversion Story, Part 2, in which I Figure Things Out

2006-09-06T21:11:00.000-04:00

Baptism became the elephant in the living room very early in the How to Be a Mormon instructional process. It wasn’t a decision I took lightly. Joining the Mormons is not like joining Toastmasters.

My now ex-husband claimed neutrality on the matter. “Do what you want. But you really ought to just do it or not. Decide.” He had a point.

I had some serious reservations. Baptism would require me to make major lifestyle changes. Beer and pot would have to go.[1] I had quit smoking just before I got pregnant with the baby mentioned in Part 1, so tobacco cigarettes were no longer a concern. However, coffee and tea were problematic. At least nobody seriously expected me to only eat a little meat during the winter.

The Joseph Smith story was not one that sat well with me. Angels and gold plates that the angel took back when the translation was done. Riiiiiiiiiiiight. How convenient!

The doctrine of baptism for the dead did not make the decision any easier. Why couldn’t I just forego baptism in this life and wait for the next one? It offered the best of both worlds: I could have eternal life later, without giving up my entrenched word of wisdom vices. The elders responded that my refusal to be baptized would inform my spirit in the post-mortal world; having refused the ordinance once, I would not be likely to accept later.

On the plus side, I liked church. I felt like I could be part of something bigger than myself. I liked the idea of making a commitment to a path that looked like a good one. Those plusses made me take the issue seriously. I didn't feel like the negatives made baptism an obvious non-starter.

By the time I brought up the subject of being baptized to the elders, I had been thinking about it for a couple of weeks, but I’d never really prayed about it. When they assured me I was ready, I decided to decide.

That night, after I went to bed, I prayed. I wasn’t really sure where to start, or what to ask, so I asked God about the issue that was MOST problematic for me - if the Book of Mormon was really a scripture like the Bible. I didn’t ask about anything else; asking that part was difficult enough. The words caught in my chest and pressed on it like a weight on the inside. It was hard to catch my breath. I choked them out anyway.

I heard a very clear “Yes.” Not audible, but the thought, fully formed, along with the very strong impression that baptism was the right thing to do. The weight lifted. I could breathe again. I felt relieved.

The elders came back a couple of days later. I asked them when we could schedule my baptism. They practically jumped out of their chairs to pull out their planners. We set the baptism for after the next missionary zone conference, in less than ten days, so Jake could be there to confirm me.

[1] Well, beer at least. There was that whole “useful herbs” part of the Word of Wisdom that might act as an escape clause for giving up pot.

Part 3: Nobody mentioned that I needed to bring a towel...

Conversion Story, Part 1, In which I meet some cute boys

2006-08-30T23:06:00.000-04:00

According to missionary lore, circa 1985, you have to knock on a thousand doors to find one person who will join the church. I was one in a thousand. Elders Jacobson and Munsee, unbidden, unannounced, with no member missionaries to pave the way, knocked on the door.

Elder Jacobson was tall, handsome, and blond. Elder Munsee was taller, handsomer, and dark.

"We're from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and we'd like to share a message with you."

It was late June, hotter than hell, and I was severely pregnant. I really wasn’t in the mood for visitors, even cute ones. I was uncomfortable, swollen, and didn't have air conditioning. I told them to come back next week, after I'd had the baby.

They came back the next week. The scheduled c-section had been cancelled in favor of a trial labor, so I still had not had the baby and still did not want to talk to them. I recommended mid- to late-August.

In mid-August, they came back. I have since learned that if you tell the missionaries to come back later, they always will. I showed them the baby. They admired the baby and my (now ex-) husband’s record collection. They asked if I had a Bible. I pulled it out and blew off the dust. The blond one coughed lightly, then read aloud the two sticks thing in Ezekial. He told me they had a great message about the purpose of life and asked if they could come back when my (now ex-) husband was around to teach us. They really were cute boys. Also, my six year-old daughter had expressed interest in attending a church. I said yes.

My (now ex-) husband was not interested in taking the discussions, but had no objections to me doing so. The elders and I had a lot of fun visits and some interesting conversations. I enjoyed learning about the church. I liked reading the highlighted/Cliff’s Notes edition of the Book of Mormon. I went to church a couple of times. I attended a convert baptism. Jake gave me a tape of a re-enactment of a talk by J. Golden Kimball. The Relief Society President was stunned when I told her so.

Sometime in September, Jake left, and was replaced by Elder Fox. He was also very cute.

Early in the teaching process, I had made comment about “no way I’m paying 10% of my income to a church.” Jake and Munsee coincidentally stopped teaching real discussions after #4, “The Law of Chastity.” When Fox came on board, he assessed the situation and pressed forward with Discusion #5 – “The Law of Tithing.” There were only six discussions, so we wrapped up pretty soon after Fox’s arrival.

I went to General Conference on TV on a Saturday. I had a nice conversation after the session I attended with my junior high school algebra teacher. The elders were impressed that I knew him. Seems he was in the stake presidency.

Within a few days I asked how I would know when I was ready to be baptized. The guys said, “You’re ready.”

I replied, “I dunno. I'll have to think about it. I’ll let you know.”

Coming in Part 2: Figuring it out.

Does Anybody Out there have a JOB?

2006-08-23T23:51:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I think Ned and I are the only Mormon people who blog who also go to work for other people for money doing something other than lawyering or teaching.

I've always worked. I get up when I'd rather sleep and then commute (or not) to the office. I clock in and put on my headset to start the day. I write reports and SQL stored procedures and install software for customers over the internet and solve the tough technical problems that other people can't and occasionally, if I'm not going to be on the phone, listen to Live365. I need to get in my 40 hours a week, and I'm not allowed to work overtime, and I always have too much work to do and then, when I'm done, I clock out and start a different kind of work.

In my free time, I try to do some writing and I play stupid computer games to relax.

Do all the Mormon blogging university professors already have tenure? Have all the blogging Mormon lawyers already made partner? How do you invest any time in your own spiritual growth when there's no time to even BREATHE? Is the reason nobody writes about work/life balance because nobody is actually working?

I HATE NED.... Lamont

2006-08-17T00:55:00.000-04:00

I don't usually post about politics, because I have political views that are shared with precisely one other person in the world. But this post isn't about politics, it's about HATE.

I hate Ned Lamont. And not just for ruining the name Ned for an entire generation (or at least a news cycle). I hate Ned Lamont because he's a beady-eyed, trust-fund-baby, Joe-smearing, Senate seat-buying, know-nothing selectman. Seriously people, he's a selectman. That means he'll go from considering whether to grant TGI Friday's a liquor license to solving our nation's most pressing problems. God forbid he ends up on a Senate intelligence committee. We might as well appoint the City Manager as head of the CIA.

I feel I can say these things about Ned because I am a Connecticut resident, and I've put up with his beady stare for lo these many months. At first it was amusing, as the gist of his campaign ads was that Joe Lieberman personally helped George Bush drown people in New Orleans. In all seriousness, his ads opened with images of people on the roofs of their flooded Louisiana homes, and then segued somehow into "Joe Lieberman won't stand up to George Bush."

It was funny for a while, but there was no response from our man Joe. I dislike probably 90% of United States senators, but I like a few: McCain when he's not crazy, liberal Republicans, conservative Democrats. I like Joe. But he didn't respond to the negative advertising. Then Lamont started up the radio ads. The Lite FM station that my racist cubicle-mate listens to featured Ned Lamont's voice more than the actual DJ.

Joe started falling in the polls. People said it was because of anger about Iraq, or the infamous State of the Union makeout session, but from my perspective as a potential Connecticut voter, it was clear that it was because Joe had ceded TV and radio to his opponent. Every day was a relentless "Joe won't stand up to George Bush" mantra repeated in as many media as possible. There was no Lieberman response.

The week before the election, polls showed Lamont up 13 points on Joe. Finally, with just days to go before election day, I heard the first pro-Lieberman radio ad on Lite FM. Bill Clinton came to campaign for Joe. There might have even been an ad during the local news. It was too little, too late. Even so, Joe closed a large gap in just a week.

In the ten days leading up to the primary, Maude, a registered Democrat, received a different piece of direct mail from Lamont EVERY DAY. One featured Lieberman's scowling face and another showed flood victims in New Orleans (a favorite Lamont motif, it seems). Total direct mail received from Lieberman? Zero.

I have no idea why Joe ran such an anemic primary campaign. According to news reports, he still had 2 million dollars in the bank afterward, which is crazy. Had he defeated Lamont in the primary, he could have campaigned in drag and still defeated the Republican challenger in November. Why save your money for an expensive independent run without any party support, when you could crush your only serious competition in August? I think Lieberman was one serious campaign ad away from a primary victory, and he blew it.

So as for my despised doppel-namer Lamont, he is still trailing an independent Lieberman in the polls, 41% to 46% (with Republican Alan "I Do Not Have a Gambling Problem" Schlesinger at just 6%), but I am not optimistic about much more Joe-mentum picking up. Lamont now has the support of the entire Democratic party and can always dip into his large personal wealth to help close the deal.

But don't worry, if any zoning disputes come up in the Senate, Ned has the necessary experience to handle it.

Googled!

2006-08-15T21:54:00.000-04:00

Thanks to the sharp eye of Jeff Milner over at Our Thoughts, I found out that VivaNedFlanders was mentioned, inexplicably, in this Google Current clip. For those of you who don't want to watch all three minutes of the video, they basically talk about various things that are popular searches on Google, like Simpsons references. Then they highlight a site where you can shoot Ned Flanders and his family. From that, they segue to:

But Flanders gets his share of love too, especially from Christians. For instance, VivaNedFlanders is the name of a Mormon blog with some very un-Ned-like postings.

I think the orthodox Bloggernacle, at least, will be relieved to find out the Google considers Mormons to be Christian. Onward Nedward Soldiers!

Hit by an Unlicensed Driver: Advice Needed

2006-08-04T18:52:00.000-04:00

About an hour ago on my way home from work, I was rear-ended on the freeway. Earlier, I had noticed the car in back of me weaving aggressively, and I made a mental note to be careful. Unfortunately, there was a slow-down on a curve and BOOM, I got hit in the rear bumper.

After we pulled off the freeway, the driver came up and asked if I was all right. She was very agitated, and kept looking at the damage on her car. Fortunately, there wasn't a lot of damage to my car, but the back bumper piece had a huge dent in it and was hanging off the car.

"I don't have a license," she told me. She told me that she had to go before the police came. She said that it wasn't her car, and gave me the name and phone number of the owner. "Call him right now," she said. Then she got in her car and peeled out of there like a bat out of hell.

I've never been in an accident before, so I called my insurance company to make sure I didn't have to call the police to come to the scene. They said I didn't, and I started to file a report. I wanted to get off the side of the freeway, so I told the insurance company I'd finish the report later, but I haven't told them the name of the owner or license plate number of the car yet.

My question is what should I do when I call the owner? I don't know if he even has insurance, and I imagine he'll want to take care of it off the books (assuming he actually exists). Judging from the appearance of the woman who hit me, they might not even have enough money to pay for the repairs.

Should I just go through my insurance company? I can't imagine that she could get in trouble for driving without a license from just my report. Should I decline any offers by him to take care of it himself, since he probably doesn't have the resources or the intention to pay me?

Why oh why couldn't I have been hit by a Lexus?

A Persistent Idea

2006-07-28T23:44:00.000-04:00

I had a persistent idea the other evening, and I couldn't make it go away.

Over on my other blog, I mentioned that my husband and I had exchanged memorized religious texts. I recited the Nicene creed, from my long ago time as a Catholic. He recited the first concept of the first missionary discussion, from his long ago time as an LDS missionary.

It was an interesting experience, listening to him talk to "Mr. Brown." He ripped through it pretty quickly, as if he was reading "The Cat in the Hat" for the 8,000th time. He didn't seem to stumble or hesitate anywhere. We exchanged pleasantries during the process a time or two, then he picked up right where he left off. Sort of like how Joseph was said to have translated the Book of Mormon.

The experience brought an idea to mind. It was a weird idea, and I had very mixed feelings about it. I tried to ignore it. But it wouldn't go away. All the next day, while I was working, it kept popping up. I decided to just go with it. Worst case scenario, I spend a couple of hours with my family doing something I wouldn't ordinarily do.

My husband is going to teach me the missionary discussions.

Washing Machine Blues

2006-07-26T18:56:00.000-04:00

Frankly, there are only two good things about owning a house. The first is that you don't have to share any walls with noisy neighbors. I didn't really appreciate this aspect until a few years ago when an extremely amorous couple moved in to the apartment next door and installed a home theater with a sub-woofer that shook the entire building.

The other good thing is finally having a place for your own washer and dryer. No more trips to the laundromat, washing your pillowcases and sheets in the machine right after the family with the potty-training problems.

These two advantages may not sound like much, but they almost make up for a lifetime of grass mowing, wall painting, and snow shoveling. Almost.

Maude and I were fortunate enough to be able to buy a new washer and dryer when we moved into our new house last summer. The Monkish side of my personality was thrilled: I could drool on my pillowcase without reservation now. Only Ned and Maude germs would be present.

Our Kenmore washer and dryer have worked great for the past 11 months. On Sunday, after several days of procrastinating the day of my laundry, I finally decided to do a couple loads so I would have something clean to wear to work on Monday.

Thunk! That's the sound the dial makes when you pull it out and nothing happens. The hot water is flowing fine, but there is no cold water. Though I am not very mechanically inclined, I was able to disconnect the cold water hose from the washer and test the valve. The cold water shoots out of the hose without any problem once you've disconnected it from the washing machine. I even cleaned out the filter that's inside the washer next to the hose. Thunk!

I was out of ideas, so I scheduled an appointment for Sears to come look at it. I did it on their website on Monday night. I was disappointed that they didn't have any openings for Tuesday, but I scheduled a repairman to visit on Wednesday between 8 am and 12 pm. I took this morning off work and proceeded to wait. At about 10:10 am, I was getting restless, so I double-checked the email I had received from Sears. Sure enough, it said: "Your appointment is on Wednesday, August 2nd." Thunk!

Several swear words later, I called up Sears and confirmed that a week from today is the soonest they can get out here. It's rough; I had to wear a long-sleeved shirt to work today. I'm wearing clothes that I had put away for the winter, and now I find out that I have to wait another week?

I guess it's back to the laundromat for Maude and me. As for Sears, makers of the 11-month wonder machine, I think the least you can do is give me an Extreme Home Makeover. Just make sure you put in a Whirlpool. Thanks.

Cast Out?

2006-07-23T10:23:00.000-04:00

DMI Dave has defined the Bloggernacle - and Viva Ned Flanders is not in it. He didn't exile us entirely. We're in a new area he's calling "The Borderlands."

This is a really good illustration of what happens to New Order Mormon-types.

We realize, for whatever reason, that we no longer believe some or all of the church's exclusive truth claims.
We decide that we want to stay affiliated with the church: for family reasons, for the community, because we think it's as good a place to find God and worship as any other, or any combination of the above.
We tell people or not, depending on our own circumstances. "Telling" usually involves things like letting the bishop know we can't teach, but that we're willing to serve in other ways. We try to work out a place for ourselves in the tent.
We're marginalized. Our honest search for God where we find God isn't faithful enough, and after all, we might damage somebody's fragile testimony (like the third member of the Godhead can't stand some a little heat and light).

I asked Ned to let me co-blog with him because I thought it was a good fit - Ned and I are in different places in our faith journey, but we both seemed to be able to interact with believers that they didn't find threatening. I know that my participation in the bloggernacle has been an enormous benefit to me in helping me to continue participating at church. I think after a long period of wandering, I may have found God again.

Apparently, that's not good enough.

I have an enormous amount of respect for Dave. For a guy whose last name I don't even know, he's been a huge influence on my ability to continue to see the good in the church. After a couple of years in the DAMU, finding DMI was a revelation to me. Here was a guy who talked about church stuff dispassionately. He talked about culture, history, and practice in a neutral tone. I didn't get the feeling that he had an agenda - that he was just interested in the subjects, and that he was writing down what he had learned. What a refreshing change of pace from the apologetics/polemics wastelands! And then the Bloggernacle emerged around DMI (at least, that was my perspective) and when BCC turned up (Democrats!) and Feminist Mormon Housewives hit, I figured maybe I can make this Mormon thing work after
all. Maybe these folks will have something to offer and will treat me like an equal, regardless of whether I buy into onlytrueness.

Apparently not.

I'm not sure where I'll go from here. When VNF moved to an "other islands" category on the Mormon Archipelago I thought maybe something was cooking. Now I suspect that it's just a matter of time before we're quietly dropped. The audience here is pretty small anyway. Losing our listing might just kill it. Maybe that's the point.

I do appreciate the folks who take us seriously and share their perspective without being obnoxious (Seth R. especially. That man can tell a story and share an opinion without setting off my BS meter even one little bit.) And my "New Order Mormon Guide to the Doctrine and Covenants" has been perking along in my brain for over a month now. I had thought that the experience might make a good essay to submit elsewhere, but the way the material was shaping up, the bloggernacle was looking more and more like the right venue.

Except now I'm not in the bloggernacle any more.

I'll try not to let the door hit me on the butt on the way out.

Disingenuous Fellowshipping?

2006-07-21T18:41:00.000-04:00

I was taking out the garbage the other night when Maude brought me the cordless phone.

"It's the Mormons," she said. "They said something about game night." These last two words were pronounced with something I can only call bemused horror.

I turned on the phone and discovered that, sure enough, one of my previous visitors from the church was on the line. The guy was very nice and said he was inviting Maude and me over for desserts and games at his house along with the other man and his wife. I immediately felt bad. First, because I knew that this proposed event would never happen. And secondly, it's hard not to feel a little guilty that four people are willing to give up their Friday night, and possibly hire a baby-sitter, too.

I would be open to going to something like this, but I know Maude would not be. I have a lot in common with these people, but she does not. I can understand not wanting to be submerged in an alien social setting, with people who probably have half an eye on converting you into their strange religious sect. She doesn't know the extent of my deconversion, either, so she probably fears that I'm a couple of lemonade socials away from falling back on the wagon.

At any rate, I plead prior commitments to the nice guy on the phone. It was difficult because he tried to use the commitment pattern on me to schedule a new date. (I catch my parents doing this all the time, invariably about secular things, but it is still annoying.) Eventually we settled on the polite fiction that I would call him when I found a time that would work for us.

After I hung up the phone, Maude looked at me. "Game night?" she asked, one eyebrow raised.

"They're Mormons," I said, trying to explain. "They can't drink, so games are the only way they can socialize."

Reflecting on this episode later, I realized that the whole reactivation process can't help but sow seeds of mistrust. During their previous visit, I explicitly told my visitors (are they home teachers or reactivators? Who knows?) that I had zero interest in anything religious. Now, their invitation to Maude and me may be completely sincere and secular in nature. But how can it be? We were probably assigned to them in an effort to get some more priesthood holders active in the ward. They probably have to report on their progress with us during Elders Quorum. At first it's just Jello and Pictionary, and the next thing you know they'll be inviting the missionaries over.

Is it possible just to have a regular friendship between former Mormon and a current one? I think so, but probably not in these circumstances. The specter of reactivation will always loom over us.

Is suicide preferable to Lite FM?

2006-07-19T19:46:00.000-04:00

I'm currently temping at a company until I can find something more permanent. Lots of temp positions are awful, so I feel pretty happy about my current situation. It's at a good company, the work isn't stressful, and the people are really nice. Well, most of them.

I share a cubicle with a 60-year-old woman. She lives alone except for the company of five cats, and I can only assume that she sees me as her main source of human interaction. At first, I felt bad for her, and tried to be friendly. Sometime between my first day and the day she forwarded me a racist email, I became less sympathetic. In that brief period of time, I was regaled with hundreds of stories, all told in mind-numbing detail, with absolutely no prompting from me. I know everything about her, her two daughters, and especially her five cats. I probably know more about her grandparents' lives than my own.

Dealing with people who cannot (or simply refuse to) recognize social cues from others is frustrating. I've become adept at not giving her any opportunities to start conversing at me, and being only minimally responsive when she starts anyway. I know I sound like a jerk, but I challenge anyone to spend five minutes with this woman and retain any charity towards her. Jesus himself would be tapping his watch, saying "I've really got to go."

Anyway, one of my many problems is that she listens to Lite FM radio. We share a large cubicle, so whatever she is listening to, I am listening to.

If I were Satan, and I was trying to settle on the soundtrack for hell, I would hesitate between Country Western and Lite FM. However, considering a large percentage of hell's population (possibly even a majority) will consist of country music fans, I would have to settle on Lite FM. That's nobody's favorite. It's the lowest common denominator of music.

If that isn't bad enough, the local Lite FM station has an extremely narrow playlist. I hear the same songs every day, only shuffled up into a different order. I'm sure some people are saying to themselves, "Surely, Ned is exaggerating. A radio station wouldn't play the exact same songs five days a week."

Unfortunately, I am not exaggerating. There is some rotation in and out of the playlist, it's true, but there is a hard core of songs that are played without exception, every day.

They are:

"In the Air Tonight" by Phil Collins
"Hotel California" by the Eagles
"Live Like You Were Dying" by Tim McGraw
"Escape (The Pina Colada Song)" by Rupert Holmes
"Someday" by Sugar Ray
"Rocket Man" by Elton John
"The First Cut is the Deepest" by Sheryl Crow
"The Heart of the Matter" by Don Henley
"Complicated" by Avril Lavigne
"Another Day in Paradise" by Phil Collins (yes! two by Phil!)
"Leader of the Band" by Dan Fogelberg
"Margaritaville" by Jimmy Buffett
and last but not least, "Kokomo" by the Beach Boys.

Mix liberally with Air Supply, Seels and Croft, and Rod Stewart and you have my day. (And no, I can't listen to my iPod at work.)

I think the worst part is that my cubicle-mate (I'll call her Angela) doesn't even like the music. She only listens because it's the only station she can pick up on her radio in the building. I'm convinced she only listens because they periodically give things away to callers.

I could really use a vacation to Aruba, or Jamaica...

One of the many reasons I love my wife...

2006-07-17T19:25:00.000-04:00

Maude and I were watching the World Cup on TV when Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" started playing over the loudspeakers at the stadium.

"It's sad, but you know what I think of every time I hear this song?" I asked Maude.

She replied, "Die Hard?"

It's important to point out that I haven't watched Die Hard in ten years, and I certainly can't remember ever watching it with Maude. Sometimes it's scary how we know exactly what the other is thinking.

Maybe we need to start hanging out with other people.

Being Sustained and Sustaining

2006-07-10T23:12:00.000-04:00

I was sustained for a calling yesterday. Building Scheduler and Ward Webmaster. I think it's an excellent fit; I spend about half my life on a computer anyway. I think the tasks involved will just be making sure there aren't any building use conflicts, and keeping the calendar up to date. I told the bishop I considered this calling a wonderful opportunity to send uplifting messages to everybody in the ward with an e-mail address. He kind of paused for a minute, but then I laughed and said that it wasn't really my style. He sort of exhaled and agreed with me – that it wasn't really my style.

On the other hand – sustaining. When my husband got his calling, we talked about it very carefully, and I decided that I was going to support him in doing it. And mostly, I do. The only thing that really bothers me are the Sunday morning meetings. Under the old regime, the morning meetings started an hour and a half before our first meeting. Plus, he got a Sunday off every month. That didn't interfere too much with him cooking my breakfast, so it was OK.

However, under the new power structure, he doesn't get a monthly Sunday off. Also, on the Sundays when women attend the regular meeting, there is a separate PEC meeting a half hour earlier that he needs to attend. Even though it's only twice a month, for only a half hour, I really resent the extra time. I think it's because they need an extra meeting without the women in order for it to “count” as PEC. I'm sorry; that just sets my quills ready to fire.

I told him how I feel about it, because there's no sense simmering in resentment – that would just make it worse. I'm not doing anything to put obstacles in the way of his attendance, or being mean about it or anything. I do feel, though, like this is an obstacle for me – that I'm not sustaining him as I agreed I would when he took the calling. And I'm being petty. Ick.

Healthy Skepticism

2006-07-04T23:39:00.000-04:00

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than that a drunken man is happier than a sober one - George Bernard Shaw

I seem to be quite easily troubled by stories from people who see the sacred in the mundane. Such behaviors are certainly not limited to Latter-day Saints. For example, I once read an essay about a Christian woman who used to give God credit when a parking space would open up at the grocery store - as if parking spaces in a parking lot were a miraculous thing.

I know I benefit from people who are able to see the miraculous in the mundane. They help me to see possibilities that I may have missed. Stories of miraculous printer repair remind me that there are people whose focus is ALWAYS turned toward God, and that they are happy and feel blessed. They remind me to look for God in my life.

However, I think the world also benefits from having people firmly grounded in reality. After all, sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.

The main advantage the Earth-bound folks have is that we do not feel the need to squish every life event into a box labeled "God's Plan." For example, I don't believe God sent Hurricanes Katrina and Rita to Louisiana to implement some grand purpose for the South. I don't believe AIDS is a plague sent to punish homosexuals. And I don't think George W. Bush was elected to bring to pass the last days (though I admit I could be wrong about that one.)

It requires less theological gymnastics just to accept that Bad Things happen. Free of the need to assign Divine Purpose to the minutiae of life, the Earth-bound can take things at face value. We can invest our mental energy in working to solve our problems, and to enjoy our good fortune, instead of trying to figure out what God is trying to tell us by sparing our house from hurricane damage, when so many better people suffered so much.

Sunday in sacrament meeting, several people shared testimonies that bothered me. By "bothered," I mean that they shared stories that were powerful and sacred to them, and my inner teenager rolled her eyes and thought, "Yeah, right, whatever." I don't think of myself as more enlightened than the people who shared their stories of a miraculous (for them) experience. Quite the contrary: I felt bad for sitting there, listening to their sacred accounts of their miraculous experiences, and not really seeing anything miraculous at all in the event.

I'm glad for them that they felt God's presence in the happenings they described. Maybe I'm missing something really important by not seeing things the same way. But in the words of Simone Weil, "the poison of skepticism becomes, like alcoholism, tuberculosis, and some other diseases, much more virulent in a hitherto virgin soil."

Maybe in my case, a skeptical point of view is inoculating me against a purely cynical one.

Scary new project

2006-06-26T19:19:00.000-04:00

My husband and I are sort of reading the Doctrine and Covenants together. It was my idea. Unlike the Book of Mormon, I don't have any issues with the D&C. I think I can read it at face value. Reading with my husband may help me to have some insights I might overlook if I were to read it on my own. He respects my ideas, he has my best interests at heart, and I am usually on my best behavior with him. I think those are ingredients for an interesting, perhaps uplifting dialogue.

I probably won't be blogging too much about this. I am going to do some writing, but I will keep it private until I'm either done, or I quit. At least, that's my plan. However, I expect that my thoughts and concerns and inspirations and despirations about reading the Doctrine and Covenants will be varied and disconnected. So, if I feel the need to blog about the project, it will probably be the process rather than the content.

I plan to read hopefully, and with an open mind.

The Best and Worst 2006 World Cup Jerseys

2006-06-23T16:58:00.000-04:00

Living overseas as a teen, I'll never forget the day my sleepy town's soccer team won a promotion to the country's top league. The whole city was electrified, and my father brought me home two of the team's new jerseys. Thus began my passion for soccer and for soccer jerseys.

Technically, it doesn't matter what you wear when you play soccer, but I find it hard to cheer for a team that has an ugly jersey. I think this holds true not only on the club level but also on the national level. If I am going to buy and wear your replica jersey, the least you can do is not make it hideous.

Obviously, sometimes you are just stuck with a country that has an unfortunate color pattern going. For example, I am a huge fan of the Argentine national team. Unfortunately, light blue and white vertical stripes are not the most aesthetically pleasing combination. That is why I would only purchase and wear the Argentine team's second jersey, which is usually a sharp-looking navy blue.

Since this is the last day of group play in the World Cup, and half of the teams will be going home now, I thought I would round up the best and the worst of this year's team jerseys.

Some generalizations first: if you are a very poor country, or an Islamic country, your jersey will probably be made by Puma (Ivory Coast, Ghana, Angola, Togo, Paraguay, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia). Switzerland, Italy, Poland, and the Czech Republic buck the trend by also using Puma jerseys. Puma is by far the largest manufacturer at this World Cup, and I think they've done a decent but boring job. I like that all of the jerseys have the same design in the back and lowercase font for the names. The African jerseys are cool because of the nice colors (green and orange for Ivory Coast, yellow and green for Togo). Unfortunately, Poland and Switzerland have basically the same red and white boring jersey. Italy's all-blue outfit is an abomination with it's gold numbers and lettering. Also, I think the Puma jerseys look cheap because they don't seem to absorb any sweat at all. The players look like they've been doused with a bucket of water.

If you're wearing a Nike jersey, you're probably going to the second round (Brazil, the Netherlands, Portugal, Mexico, Australia) (sorry U.S., Korea, and Croatia). Nike's jerseys are always clean and classic. I especially like Portugal's wine and green colored jersey.

Umbro has only two teams, England and Sweden, and they decided to stitch into the shoulder seams an awful-looking St. George's and Scandinavian cross respectively. Umbro is usually a quality manufacturer; I don't know what got into them this year. England's second jersey is solid red and thankfully doesn't have the cross in the shoulder seam, but it does have reflective gold numbers on the back. I think Umbro really dropped the ball.

My wife commented favorably on Lotto's Serbian and Ukrainian kits. I don't like the asterisk pattern, but I have to admit that these are the only jerseys that take advantage of the shorts.

Adidas runs the gamut this year, in my opinion: from boring (Germany) to sublime (Trinidad & Tobago) to classic (Japan, Argentina) to awful (France and Spain). The new Darth Vader collars are really ugly too.

The two dark horses are Costa Rica sporting an amateurish jersey by Joma, and Ecuador with an even worse jersey by Marathon. It looks like a jungle cat has scratched the Ecuadorian national colors into the middle of the jersey.

Best Jersey: Trinidad and Tobago. Classic and simple with bold piping, and I love the asymmetry of the design around the neck.

Worst Jersey: (tie) Ecuador and Italy.

What do you think?

Prayerfully

2006-06-13T20:11:00.000-04:00

The other day, I read one of my husband’s secret priesthood papers. I was looking for a phone number I had thrown away, and found the priesthood paper in the process. Hey, if he doesn’t want me reading his secret priesthood stuff, he shouldn’t throw it in the trash can in the same office where I work all day.

It wasn’t anything super secret, like home teaching reports or the official 2006 high priests’ chant. It contained some guidelines and instructions. A word that was used repeatedly in the text was “prayerfully.”

My prayers of late have been pretty perfunctory. Not thoughtless, but certainly not heartfelt. The emphasis on prayerfully and lovingly following the guidelines in the secret priesthood document struck me as quite a contrast to how I’ve actually been praying. I haven’t even been praying prayerfully, let alone pursuing any of my other activities that way.

Since reading the guidelines, I have been trying a little harder to be more intent with my prayers. I visualize myself reaching up with my prayers, like the evangelicals do with their hands during their praise music, except with my heart. I think it helps. If nothing else, it helps me to feel like I’m not talking to myself.

However, I wonder what other things besides praying I ought to pursue prayerfully, if any. The agnostic thing is a real obstacle. Praying is usually an end to itself, not an approach to another task. I’m a pretty secular person; I would find it awkward to ask God to bless or direct things as I do them.

Maybe a good place to start would be with my Mormon stuff. Most of my Mormon stuff is on the internet now. Maybe I could approach my Mormon internet stuff prayerfully.

Do any bloggers out there blog prayerfully?

Goooooooooooooooool!

2006-06-12T19:51:00.000-04:00

My goal this year was to watch 56 games of the World Cup. (There are 64 games in total, but on the last four days of group play, FIFA schedules the games simultaneously to avoid having meaningless games.)

Four years ago, I had just moved to a new city and was unemployed for the entire month of June. I probably watched two-thirds of the World Cup matches from South Korea and Japan, even though I had to set my alarm to wake up for most of them.

So, as the 2006 World Cup approached, I seriously considered taking the month of June off from temping and dedicating myself to the circular deity of football. However, I am in a pretty good temp situation, and I can't really afford to take the whole month off. So I am doing the next best thing, and Tivo-ing all 56 matches. I don't have enough time to watch 4.5 hours of soccer after work each day, but I can watch at least one game a day (and all the games on the weekends) and fast-forward to the good parts in the others. Also, I watch an hour of soccer during my lunch-break at work due to a projection TV in the lunchroom (I told you it was a good temp situation).

Anyway, these are my World Cup thoughts so far:

It's about time we abandon this silly notion of "own goals." I think an own goal should only be termed as such when a player directs the ball into his own net. When the ball glances off a defender and into the goal, it doesn't make a lot of sense to call it an own goal. Sure, it takes some responsibility off the goalkeeper, but I can't think of any other advantages of our current system. It's ridiculous to credit Beckham's thunderous strike against Paraguay to the defender who barely touched it.

Speaking of the England-Paraguay match, it was not fun game to watch. First of all, the Jumbotron and it's spidery supports threw all kinds of horrible shadows on the field. They should really only be allowed to play night games at that Frankfurt stadium. There are billions of people watching on TV, as opposed to the sixty-thousand people who can see that stupid Jumbotron. Let's have some perspective here.

Secondly, the game was unbearably boring. England looked painfully stiff, and Paraguay played just awful. Comparatively, the Argentina-Ivory Coast match was a beauty to watch. I was pessimistic about the Argies since they always seem to choke, but despite some suspect defending, they look good.

My final complaint is about the American broadcast announcers. Are there any worse announcers than Dave O'Brien and Marcelo Balboa? They sound like they aren't even watching the game and continually call players by the wrong names. Dave O'Brien is a BASEBALL announcer. And just because former baseball players make good color commentators, it doesn't mean you should dig up some player from America's soccer wilderness years and give him a microphone. I can't believe this is ABC's "A" team. That means these idiots will be calling the final. Embarrassing. Especially since ABC has two great announcers who would make a superb team, JP Dellacamera and Tommy Smyth. I'd watch Nascar as long as Tommy Smyth was calling the action. He makes every punch in the onion bag exciting. There plenty of qualified soccer announcers; why are you giving us amateur hour, ABC? Shameful.

11 games down, 45 to go. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a Tivo full of soccer to watch.

Reasons to stay

2006-06-07T22:36:00.000-04:00

My list of reasons to stay waxes and wanes. It's been waning lately. It was pretty much down to one thing:

1. I love my husband, and I think he would like me to go to church with him.

However, today, another reason appeared:

2. In support of D. Fletcher, who has every reason to leave, and yet, stays.

Life is really complicated.

Nice people don't make Mormonism true, but they don't hurt either

2006-06-06T23:49:00.000-04:00

I was sitting at home this evening, reading blogs and waiting for my wife to come home from work when the doorbell rang.

Since I haven't ordered anything lately from Amazon.com, I knew it was the Church. Which should tell you something about the state of our social life, but that's not the point.

It's been almost ten months since I moved and they finally tracked me down. I suspect my parents were involved, but who really knows? Maybe some data-mining retiree on a second mission for the church finally turned up my postal forwarding order.

I actually recognized the two men standing on my doorstep. When I went to church twice last fall, I only talked to three people, and now two-thirds of them were here. So when they asked if they could come in, I felt like it would have been rude not to let them. After all, I had come to church of my own free will just a couple months ago, it would have been weird to say that now I didn't want any contact.

Both of the guys were very nice and we only talked about our families, sports, and home maintenance. It reminded me that I don't really have local friends or a social network since I moved. I don't know any of my neighbors and I don't have the opportunity to meet new people besides at work.

For perhaps the first time in my life, I felt comfortable around my would-be reactivators. I think it was because I knew that the possibility of me regaining my belief is zero. But that doesn't mean that I can't be social with people who still do believe. There is no reason people with a lot in common can't be friends without any religious overtones.

I realize that part of my ease comes from the fact that I know my wife is an unlikely candidate for Mormonism and my children are still safely ensconced in the future (hopefully). The dynamic changes completely when other family members are involved. But for now, I feel good about our interaction. The only time they even broached religion was to ask me if I wanted home teachers or if I wanted to be informed of ward activities (I swiftly nixed both ideas). I told them that I was completely uninterested in anything religious.

It's kind of nice when church recedes into its proper place (in my opinion) in your life. How much unhappiness could we avoid by just treating church like any other social society? As Ann says, it's just church. It's only taken me 29 years to finally believe it.

How out of the loop am I?

2006-06-06T21:57:00.000-04:00

Last night, I was leaving the pool/club after water aerobics. I saw a guy who smiled and nodded.

I stopped. "How do I know you?" I asked.

He look surprised. "Uh, from CHURCH."

"Oops."

I have no clue what's going on in the ward. I don't know who well over half the people are.

in case your still not sick of talking about SSM

2006-06-01T18:22:00.000-04:00

i don't understand why the brethren are so hung up on the whole SSM issue. growing up in the church it was quite obvious that a temple marriage was the only kind of marriage that mattered in jesus' eyes, so i can't understand why it is so important that we try to clarify the definition of a civil marriage. whether or not gays are allowed to enjoy the legal benefits of marriage really has no bearing on what kinds of marriages the church can choose to perform and sanctify within the walls of the temples. just watch the expression on a mormon's face the next time someone talks about a young mormon couple having a civil ceremony and you'll see just how high of a regard the average member has for non-temple, civil marriages.

to me it's largely a legal issue. is there any good reason why same sex couples shouldn't be allowed to file taxes jointly, be assigned social security death benefits if their spouse dies, or be denied any of the other privileges given to married hetero couples? to me that's all it really boils down to.

i don't buy the argument that by legally recognizing SSM will somehow undermine "traditional" marriages. it's like kinky friedman says, "i support gay marriage. i believe they have a right to be as miserable as the rest of us."

Deja Vu All Over Again

2006-05-31T23:55:00.000-04:00

The flyer said: Legislation is being debated in committee to vote on whether to send a defense of marriage act for the state of Texas to the legislature for a full vote. Members should write or call the committee members and urge them to vote to send the bill to the full legislature. Here are the committee members names. A list followed.

The origins of the flyer were convoluted. Area Presidency guy asked Stake President to let the wards know about the committee meeting. Stake Pres was to get the word out to members; he did so by advising the wards’ stake high council representatives. One of the folks along the way wrote up a flyer with the particulars.

During ward council, a member of the bishopric passed them out. I received a stack of about ten flyers. “Please announce this during your meetings, and hand these out to the adults in your organization.”

I was the primary president. I didn’t announce the information during primary closing exercises. I did hand out the flyers to the adults. I felt lousy about it for days.

A few weeks later, an interesting counterpoint arose. One of my favorite cousins is a lesbian. Her partner was not an American citizen. Partner had finished school, and had been unable to secure a green card for long-term employment here. The United States would not allow her to remain as a “spouse” for immigration purposes. However, the two of them could go the other way: the partner’s country allows the same-sex domestic partners of citizens to live and work there. Documentation of the partnership can include leases, bank statements, and letters from people testifying to their relationship.

My cousin asked me to write a letter for her. I did. I wrote that I had observed them living as a couple for five years; buying a house, raising dogs, planting a garden, planning a future. Writing the letter was cathartic. I was cleansed of the flyer.

Five years later, I feel like I’m reliving that ward council meeting. While the stage is national this time, and the request doesn’t seem so cloak and dagger, the issue is the same. My feelings about that issue have not changed.

I did not attend church on Sunday (I did not see any point in attending just to walk out). I have opted out of church attendance for a while. I don't want to get my hands dirty again. I did follow the instructions in the letter and write to my elected representatives; however, I don’t think I wrote what the first presidency had in mind.

I am not as angry as I was three days ago. Mostly, I’m disappointed. Every time I think I can make a place for myself; that the church has a pretty big tent and maybe I can worship with the Mormons as well as anywhere else, the suits in Salt Lake muck it up.

Me=You (or, Me=Everybody)

2006-05-26T11:10:00.000-04:00

Here in the bloggernacle and on the DaMU, writers mesh their personal stories with ideas about doctrine and politics and current events. The personal experiences adds intimacy to the medium, and can give us new ways of thinking about both ideas, and each other.

Sometimes, in our posts and discussions, we take our experiences and use them to support general statements. But anecdotes do not equal data. Personal experiences are not global. Other people know all the same things I do about church history, and yet have not come to the same conclusions as I have about the mission and character of Joseph Smith. While I tend to look at my experiences as "normal," that doesn't mean that my responses are "the norm." They're just mine.

A comment exchange starting at #71 in the FMH Trailer Trash thread brought this subject up for me. It was a good exchange, about God-as-cosmic-vending machine. The statement "this is what happens to me" received the reply "that doesn't mean what you are saying." It all resolved very nicely, and interestingly, with a reference to Buddhism (so it must be true). But the initial exchange is one I've seen over and over: "This happened." "That doesn't mean what you say."

"Lead balloon moments," when contradicting data comes up in a class discussion and the room falls silent, are a well-worn experience in the DaMU. My own LBMs, however, have been few and far between. In one Gospel Doctrine class, when I piped up with "I don't agree with that at all," and went on to explain why, it resulted in an interesting and insightful lesson. I didn't add much beyond my initial disagreement; the other participants really moved the discussion forward. I wasn't the only one who didn't believe the premise being offered, and the resulting discussion led us to explore a richer variant of that premise. Just the same, only different.

Personal conversations and lessons have the advantage of immediacy. We don't really have that here in the 'nacle. It takes longer to get through the dialogue:

"This Happened to Me."
"That doesn't mean what you say."
"I know that. But it's what happened."

But as the discussion on FMH shows, we are often able to get there eventually. I think it's an example of what's best about the 'nacle: moving from sharing experiences to understanding, and thinking of old ideas in a new way.

Preparedness and Fear

2006-05-24T21:52:00.000-04:00

"If ye are prepared ye shall not fear." (D&C 38:30)

I don't believe it.

I do believe that if ye are prepared, ye are prepared. That seems pretty obvious, though. Being prepared is good for its own sake. It's good to have water stocked up. It's good to have a ready supply of non-perishable foods. It's good to know where the sleeping bags are stashed. It's good to have lots of size D batteries for the flashlights, and a rechargeable lantern. A grill. Charcoal. A portable stove.

Some people are more prepared than we are: they have a generator, firearms, and ammo.

Even with all the preparation, though, I'm still afraid. Afraid that the levees won't be repaired in time. Afraid that even if they are, they won't hold. Afraid that next time, the trees WILL fall on my house. Afraid that if it happens again, there will be no recovering; that the people who want to write off the city as a bad investment will prevail; and the city will be lost. Afraid of the nightmare of bodies floating down Canal; search and rescue hieroglyphs, meaningless except for the occasional "1 body"; 24/7 footage on CNN of the city dying. Again. My city.

I'm prepared. I'm as prepared as I can be. But I'm still afraid.

Hurricane season begins June 1

Discernment

2006-05-21T17:33:00.000-04:00

How do you tell the difference between divine inspiration and your own ideas?

My best friend tells me he can tell the difference, but he can't explain how. I, on the other hand, have no idea where the boundary is. Maybe that's because I always get such great ideas.

I don't think it's enough to say, "well, if you're being prompted to do something good, it's from God." Because I sometimes want to do good things all on my own initiative.

Does it even matter what the source of an idea is?

Hyperbole

2006-05-17T22:23:00.000-04:00

I use a lot of hyperbole, myself. I'm sort of a drama queen. Things aren't "nice," they're "awesome." I don't get nervous, or concerned, but rather, "scared witless." To be fair, it's not an act. I'm an emotional person. I react fast and hard, and I'm over it, whatever it is, in minutes. I'm quick to anger, quick to beg for forgiveness, and very sincere about all of it.

So, as someone who is given to grand sweeping statements, I am a little unnerved by how irritating I find the Hyperbole of Holiness. The latest annoyance popped up last night, when I read somewhere a reference to breastfeeding as "sacred." Huh? Since when is lactation holy?

The same subject came up over on the DAMU in the form of snarky comments about Russell M. Nelson's new wife. I don't have any direct quotes, and I've never read her stuff. It's not unlikely that what I've read about her writing may have been taken out of context. Even so, I found her purported admonition to remember that God is the third person in the room when you're having sex with your spouse a little over the top.

I think the reason the hyperbole of holiness is so irksome to me is that I'm inherently suspicious of those who live on a "higher plane" than I do. Breastfeeding was a great experience for me, but I wouldn't describe it as sacred...just rewarding. Sex is great, but I don't think of it as exactly "holy," either - maybe "divinely approved," but not holy.

Maybe there are people who are able to sense the divine in everyday matters. I think, though, that by elevating all experiences to the level of sacred, the sacred is rendered mundane.

"Holier than thou" is not a pejorative without reason. I think it makes those of us muddling along in the mundane world, awaiting experiences that we feel are sacred, feel like there's just no point. We obviously aren't on the same level, so why bother?

The Church in my Dreams

2006-05-13T10:33:00.000-04:00

When I dream about church stuff, it almost never bears any resemblance to the church in real life. For example:

Last night, I dreamed that DH and I were in charge of a big ward activity, so they direct deposited $10,000 into our checking account, in advance, to cover our expenses. Alas, I did not also dream that they said, "Keep the change."

As part of the same dream, the closing song in Relief Society was "California, Here I Come."

Michael Stipe as a Vehicle for personal revelation

2006-05-11T21:13:00.000-04:00

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed Sunday. I had considered foregoing church the day before, but decided to suck it up because something good might happen. But I slept late and we were running late because I made DH fix me breakfast even though it was fast Sunday. He can fast some other Sunday, when he can't make me breakfast because he has an early meeting, right?. So he was anxious and rushed, and I HATE being rushed, even though he wasn't rushing me.

I got to church in time to take the sacrament in the foyer. I went into the chapel during the first testimony. The second testimoney was from a person who moved here after the storm. The first few sentences out of this person's mouth were how much better his other ward was. Not in those exact words, of course, but I was in a bad mood, remember? That's how I heard it, so I looked at DH and said, "Well, I think I'm going to go." It was probably the shortest amount of time I've actually attended a church meeting. I think I was in and out of the building in under ten minutes.

After I got home, I put on some streaming audio and started to clean the kitchen. The kitchen was a mess. I worked on it in fits and starts, stopping on occasion to sit and browse the internet. I thought off and on about the annoying testimony, and the person who had borne it. This was not the first time this person had annoyed me, and it wasn't even the most annoying. Why did this bother me so much? Why was I giving this person so much power over me?

During one of my sitting down times, REM came on. I like REM. I cranked up the song very loud, and sang along.

A couple of minutes into the song, I thought about this person again. It was during a chorus...

It's the end of the world as we know it
It's the end of the world as we know it
It's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine

...and I remembered driving into the City on Lundi Gras, and the indescribable devastation I saw there. This person is from an area that has been almost entirely wiped out, and has probably lost everything.

This person is probably not going to be less annoying to me in the future; he just has that kind of personality. But I am not him, and do not live his life, and do not have his struggles, and actually know almost nothing about them. But I do know one thing: he has lived through the end of the world as we know it.

Maybe I can cut him some slack.

Guest Post: What's Next?

2006-05-08T23:03:00.000-04:00

I have known Square Peg for several years, in the way you know people you've only met on the internet. He's a wonderful writer, and I'm glad he's allowed me to post his story on Viva Ned Flanders.

At the beginning of the year over on LDS Liberation Front, RoastedTomatoes ran a series called "What's Next?" The series told the stories of people who had undergone a change in faith, and discussed where their journeys could or did take them. (Full Disclosure: I was a major instigator of this series.) Not all the stories that were written were posted. This one was one of my very favorites. You snooze, you lose, RT! :)

My So-Called Heretical Life

An episode of the public radio program This American Life featured the story of Carlton Pearson, an Evangelical pastor in Tulsa, Oklahoma who—until sometime in early 2003—was widely regarded as “a rising evangelical megastar.” Reverend Pearson had it all: a thriving congregation in Tulsa with more than 5,000 members, close personal ties with leading members of the Evangelical elite, a seat on the Oral Roberts University Board of Regents, financial security, respect, honor.

Less than a year later, Reverend Pearson’s congregation had shrunk from 5,000 to 250. He had been denounced and rejected by virtually every leader in the evangelical movement, including Oral Roberts, the man who often used to refer to Pearson as his adopted son. He stood on the brink of bankruptcy and financial ruin. He had been rejected by many of his closest, most intimate friends. In what must have seemed like the blink of an eye, Carlton Pearson had gone from a celebrated leader to a complete pariah in the eyes of the only religious community he had ever known.

So how could this sad tale of a fallen Bible Belt preacher have anything to do with my own spiritual journey as a 5th-generation Idaho Mormon? The answer starts with the reason for Pearson’s dramatic downfall. There was no salacious sex scandal or financial misdeed. Nope. Carlson Pearson’s whole world came crashing down around him simply because, after a period of intense reflection and prayer, he stopped believing in the traditional Christian version of Hell—and started preaching that Christ’s atonement is sufficient to redeem “all of creation, including all human beings.” Because he refused to keep quiet about these (from an evangelical perspective) shocking beliefs, Pearson was branded a heretic and unequivocally rejected by the community he had dedicated his whole life to.

On the surface, I have very little in common with Reverend Pearson. I have spent most of my life as a quietly devout, believing member of the LDS church. I’m not particularly charismatic. I probably couldn’t give you a respectable AMEN! or PRAISE GOD! if you paid me. And I’ve certainly never aspired to any kind of leadership position—either inside or outside the LDS church. Until recently, I was one of the quiet, unassuming masses who simply tried his best to keep most of the boxes on the official “Worthy Mormon Male” checklist dutifully checked.

But despite our differences, Carlton Pearson’s story profoundly moved me for reasons that transcend our backgrounds and experiences. First, I too am a heretic—in my own quiet, low-key way. A couple of years ago, after an intense period of study and reflection, a gradual accumulation of vague doubts flowered into full-blown disbelief. I won’t bore you with the details—the circumstances and experiences that have led to my disbelief are as personal and unique as my own fingerprints. It’s enough to say that I no longer believe most of the foundational claims of the LDS church, and although anything is possible, I think it’s highly unlikely that I ever will.

But despite my heretical beliefs, I still feel deeply connected to the only religious community I have ever known. My wife, children, and extended family on both sides are all devout, active members, and I live in the heart of Utah County, where so many aspects of daily life are inexorably intertwined with the LDS church. I long to feel comfortable and accepted in the church as I once did—despite my unorthodox beliefs.

I have spoken with or read about many who remain active, faithful members on their own terms—often in spite of doubts and unorthodox views. These stories offer me hope that perhaps there is a place for me in the church—a place that will allow me to be true to myself and doesn’t force me to choose between my beliefs and my religious community.

But then I hear stories like Carlton Pearson’s (or Grant Palmer’s or Michael Quinn’s or Lavina Fielding Anderson’s) that remind me how much conservative religious communities fear and distrust heretics, and I realize that unless my beliefs somehow change, I will never again be completely accepted by (or acceptable to) the LDS community. In practical terms, this means I will probably never hold a temple recommend. I will never be able to participate in most cherished LDS rituals. In my very conservative ward, I will be gossiped about, strategized over, and fellowshipped. I will most likely not even be able to participate in my own children’s weddings, which frankly, seems inconceivable to me.

Of course, the costs of my private, low-key heresy are trivial compared to what Carlton Pearson and many others have been forced to pay. But they still feel pretty damned steep to me. So from my perspective, the answer to “What’s Next” boils down to two possibilities: I can continue to participate in the LDS community as a quiet heretic—and simply live with the fact that I will always be partially unaccepted and unacceptable. Or, like Carlton Pearson, rather than quietly going along to get along, I could choose to leave my religious heritage and begin the painful process of finding or building a new community that is more compatible with and accepting of my beliefs. The first option seems easier and more convenient—but also possibly less fulfilling over the long term. The second option feels more difficult and much more painful—but possibly more rewarding, honest, and meaningful.

Right now, I’m straddling the fence, considering both options but choosing neither. Someday, probably soon, I will make my choice, and I can honestly I don’t know which road I will choose. In retrospect, Carlton Pearson says that if he’d known, when he first started preaching his gospel of inclusion, that it would cost him so much, he would never have opened his mouth. But he also says that God doesn’t show you everything at once for a reason. And now that what’s done is done, there’s no way he’d go back. After I complete my journey, whatever I decide and whatever the outcome, I only hope I can say the same.

Dialoguing with the Others

2006-05-03T22:18:00.000-04:00

My first contact with internet discourse about Mormon stuff was on soc.religion.mormon, a Usenet group that is moderated for topicality and civility. SRM was my earliest model for what conversation between believers and non-believers should look like. Two years as a moderator showed me how this model behavior was cultivated: through the miracle of software and a dedicated moderation team, discourteous posts never get through.

Prevention is built into the charter. One hot button is defined as discourteous: Is the church a cult? Another is defined as off-topic: Are Mormons Christians? Discussion of the temple ceremony is prohibited.

This is not to say that everybody who posts on SRM is a believer, or even supportive or positive about the faith. Posters have come and gone who are adamantly opposed to the teachings and practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but they were unfailingly civil in how they presented their disagreements. That's because if they weren't, their posts didn't see the light of day.

Over at LDS Liberation Front, I got my underwear in a bunch about the reasonableness of divorcing an otherwise acceptable spouse because said spouse doesn't believe any more. The discussion made me think about discourse between Mormons and Former Mormons.

The stereotypical conversation is a shouting match between the prissy, offended LDS who thinks the ex-mo "can't let it alone" and should just go away quietly, and the angry ex-mo who thinks all those &%*$(#@! Mormons are *$@!*%+ idiots. But if you're outside the corridor, isn't that kind of confrontation rare? Isn't it pretty rare on the internet, too? I've been impressed, overall, by how pleasant most of the folks on the 'nacle have been to me, my Transitional Mormon status notwithstanding. Even the occasional uber-Mormons have been very polite.

I contrast this with the way each group talks about the other in their "safe spaces." Some places on the DAMU* would be downright horrifying to a believer to read. I have read some assumptions about ex-Mormons in believing spaces that are not exactly charitable, either.

Are we being fake in our dialogues with the Others? Are we putting on the show that's expected in our "safe spaces"?

Do you restrict your reading to believing blogs? Do you read boards like FAIR? Do you ever peek in on RFM? How does the discussion of the Others among themselves affect your perception of them?

I sense the need for a poll.
---------------
*DisAffected Mormon Underground. It's a great acronym; admit it.

Full-body Singing

2006-05-01T18:31:00.000-04:00

I filled in for the ward chorister yesterday. She's a friend, and trusted me not to switch the lyrics to "Praise to the Man" to "Scotland the Brave." Maybe she knew we weren't singing "Praise to the Man."

Leading the music is different from singing with the congregation. One major difference is that everybody is singing toward me. The sound is focused toward the podium, which is where the chorister stands. I found myself singing louder than I usually do (and I'm not usually a shy singer). The congregation seemed to sing louder to drown me out. Most of our songs were of the enthusiastic nature, so "loud" worked for everybody.

Leading the music also means I get to pick the tempo. If the organist slows down, I tend to just follow along, but she seemed to like the pace, too. Since the songs were enthusiastic, "fast" worked well with "loud."

Since the congregation is facing me, that also means that I'm facing them. I enjoy watching the congregation sing. I pick out faces and watch how they are responding to the music. Lots of beaming countenances during our loud, fast version of "The Spirit of God."

The best thing about leading the music, though, is that my whole body is singing the song, not just my brain and my voice and my breathing. Leading the music means a lot of flailing, but it's rhythmic flailing, and it connects my self with the music and the message in a way that just singing doesn't. It's really cool to be fully engaged with

"And then, wondrous story, the Lord in his glory, will come in his pow'r in the beautiful day."

I just can't be immersed in a song like that and not be joyous about it.

Later in the day, I had another transcendent experience with full-body singing. I saw Bruce Springsteen at Jazzfest in New Orleans. After all that's happened here, and how hopeless things still seem sometimes, he sang "My City of Ruins," and the audience wept, and raised hands in Hosanna during the chorus,

Come on, rise up! Come on, rise up!
Come on, rise up! Come on, rise up!
Come on, rise up! Come on, rise up!

I'm not much of a fan of popular praise and worship music; I think it's manipulative. I do sometimes wish, though, that there was a way that more people could experience, during a normal sacrament meeting, how profound it can feel to become part of the music. Because not everybody gets to be the chorister, or to pray in unison a song for the healing of your city on a beautiful spring day.

Announcing New Perma-blogger: Ann!

2006-05-01T18:30:00.000-04:00

VivaNedFlanders is thrilled to announce that Ann will be joining on a permanent basis (or at least until she gets sick of me).

Ann's posts and comments in the bloggernacle have always been intelligent, thoughtful, and kind, and I think I'm pretty lucky to snag her as a co-blogger. I had to trade away most of my draft picks for the next couple years to get her, but it will all be worth it.

Thanks for joining, Ann.

Guest Post by Enochville

2006-04-28T12:42:00.000-04:00

I'd like everyone to offer a kind welcome to Enochville, who has graciously allowed me to post his story here. I think this makes an interesting companion piece to Ann's guest post earlier in the week.

Without further ado, here is Enochville's post:

Leaving the Church was a lot to give up, but I am pretty much at peace with that now. The only thing that is making things hard now is the way my wife's family and my family are dealing with it. The greatest consolation is that my wife is leaning towards the same conclusions about the Church that I have come to. It is just taking her a little longer to give up the desperate hope that her old beliefs might still be true. It is one of those things that one has to study out for one's self, and I had about a six month head start on her. She knows where her research will lead her; it is just a matter of emotionally preparing to accept it.

What caused me to come to the conclusion that the Church never was true had nothing to do with my inability to become ok with something Joseph did. I had the capacity to become ok with Joseph using his magic peep stone in the translation of the Book of Mormon, his hiding his plural marriages from Emma, and a host of other things. It was not an inability to match the scriptural record with any hard archaeological evidence. I found ways to perform mental gymnastics around no DNA evidence for a common ancestor for all humans that lived 6,000 years ago, or no DNA evidence that any native inhabitant of North or South America descended from the Hebrews, no evidence of pre-Columbian horses, elephants, or barley, etc. I could look past or around a ton of things and found the uncertainty or ambiguity in the arguments against the church so that I still had enough room for faith, however unlikely my explanations had to be.

But, I eventually came across evidence so strong, so indisputable, that it left no room for doubt/faith. I read all the pro-LDS explanations from Hugh Nibley to John Gee and none of them worked because they each ignored parts of the evidence that made their theories untenable. I emailed informed apologists to try to discuss these things, but the case is too strong. I combed it through, checking and rechecking, examining every assumption that might be flawed, trying to get my hands on every source material that I could. Eventually, I had to come to the conclusion that Joseph Smith was not a prophet, seer, or revelator.

I went back and re-examined all the evidence I thought I had that the Church was true. I found that I could no longer rely on the what I used to call the Spirit as a reliable source of truth, and all the supporting evidence of multiple witnesses of heavenly manifestations, the reintroduction of "lost truths" held in the primitive church, the "miracles of the Priesthood", the archaeological findings that supposedly support the Book of Mormon or other scripture had easy non-supernatural explanations.

Once I knew that I could no longer believe I talked with my wife about it and when she knew that she could never believe again either we discussed what we should do now. We considered faking it, acting like we believed and going on like nothing happened. But, I could not do that. I had to act with integrity. I could not knowingly mislead my friends and children. We considered just being released from our callings and being the "foyer members". But, that is too uncomfortable, because everyone suspects that you have sinned and keep trying to encourage you into greater activity. So, I decided that I would talk to the Bishop, turn in my recommend, and leave the church altogether.

The Saturday following conference, we talked with my mother-in-law about it. She wanted me to fast and pray, so I did, but by that point I had no faith in the Spirit. She did not understand that I had already been through all that and that I can still feel "the Spirit" just fine, but recognize the "burning in my bosom" as the psychological emotion of elevation, which is no more a reliable source of truth than any other emotion, such as confidence in your answer to a quiz question that you later find out is incorrect, or the sensation of your dreams being real.

I miss the sense of community in the church, the moral values that are reinforced in the Primary and Youth programs, the emphasis on service, and the feeling of elevation. And though I do not believe in God anymore (which would require a separate explanation), I am learning how to create the feelings of elevation and reverence and awe without a belief in the supernatural. I spend my Sundays now creating family home evening lessons for my future children that reflect my new beliefs and my new foundation for morals. I am in a sense creating an Atheist church, of which there are a few already in existence, but I am dissatisfied with them and they are far from here.

I purposely have not shared with you my evidence. I respect the right of Mormons to believe as they wish. Leaving the church ruins a lot, and most would rather stay content with what they have, and I can't say that I could blame them. I began this quest so that I could be a great apologist and help struggling members resolve their concerns. I had been good at that on my mission and when I taught in the MTC. I thought the church could stand up to any criticism, or at least that the anti's could never disprove the church was true so I would inspire faith in that opening. The church does not have a banned book list like the Catholics so I felt free to read anything so that I could point out the flaws in their arguments. I never dreamed in a million years that it would be the anti's who were right all along.

Anyway, I am doing fine and will be better when my family finally accepts that I am no longer a part of the Church. I am so glad I have my wife. Strangely, she means even more to me now than ever before.

-- enochville

Guest post: Believing again

2006-04-23T23:58:00.000-04:00

Many thanks to Ned for allowing me to post this entry on his blog. I don't have a Mormon blog, and Ned's is really good fit for my status with church stuff.

Church stuff hadn’t been going well since we returned from Katrina Exile. I had been having suicidal thoughts during Sunday meetings. I had a singularly awful experience during a terrible Relief Society lesson about the Proclamation on the Family. A minor kerfuffle in the Disaffected Mormon Underground caused me much more anguish than it warranted. Because both ends of my Mormon experience were equally miserable, I decided that the best solution was to abstain from all things Mormon.

I went on sabbatical from Mormon Stuff. I stopped posting on the DAMU discussion boards, scaled back my reading on the Bloggernacle, and left church immediately after the sacrament was passed. I did not take the sacrament. I went to church only to deliver my little boy, because my husband has morning meetings. I took a trip out of town that caused me to miss two Sundays entirely. I got a more realistic sense of my “place,” and it wasn’t nearly as central as I had imagined. It was a useful and pleasant experiment.

Palm Sunday was my first week “back” at church. I had not planned to stay, but when the bishop announced that a local ward had been dissolved, because the whole parish had been destroyed, it hit me hard. I cried for a few minutes and decided to stay. My husband was there. I wanted to be with my husband.

During the sacrament, while on sabbatical, I have allowed my mind and thoughts to wander where they will. On Palm Sunday, I do not know what I had been thinking, but while the sacrament was being passed, something happened. In my believing days, I would have experienced the “something” as the presence of the Holy Ghost. It was not my typical sitting-in-sacrament-meeting feeling. I felt connected.

I have experienced this feeling of connectedness before. It hasn’t come often. The last time it happened, I decided very consciously not to try and hold on to it, or analyze it. I did the same thing this time: I just experienced it. I noticed my thoughts and ideas without examination. I followed the thoughts where they led.

The thoughts and ideas that crossed my mind this time were unexpected. I watched the young men pass the sacrament. I observed the trays moving down the rows, the Saints taking the sacrament, and remembered what it means to them. Unlike other times I’ve observed this, I did not feel alienated or “other.” I felt like I was one of them.

I thought, “I used to be a part of this. I used to believe this.” And then the thought came to me: “You can believe again, if you want to.”

I didn’t turn away from the thought, or embrace it. I tried it. “Joseph Smith is a prophet.” Yes, that was fine. “The Book of Mormon is a Scripture.” That worked, too.

I didn’t pursue the matter any further. I just continued to notice the experience, to “be,” and waited for the feeling to slip away.

The rest of the meeting was pretty uneventful, (lame, even) except for the final speaker, who said some inspiring things.

I wanted to talk to my husband about this after the meeting, but he got waylaid by a quorum buddy. So, I left, just like I always do after sacrament meeting.

I did not relate this experience to anyone. I mentioned to my husband that I wanted to talk about something, but didn’t follow up.

The following Sunday was Easter. I didn’t experience anything out of the ordinary. I did have the nagging memory of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s comment in her essay Lusterware, about how the Bible speaks of bits of leaven. I enjoyed the congregational singing very much. Leaven.

I have written that losing my faith was like losing my arm. I’m starting to think this isn’t a good analogy. Apparently, some part of my brain or the Collective Unconscious or God thinks it’s possible for me to grow a new one.

I don’t know if I want to believe. I am a cynic now. It’s like being fat: I don’t like being fat, but it’s hard work to lose weight. So much is expected of believers. Do I want to work that hard? Will I suddenly desire to pay tithing; attend the temple; serve in callings; pay attention to the GAs? I don’t see any of that happening, so what difference will believing make?

On Easter, I talked to my husband about the Palm Sunday experience. I told him that I don’t know how I should proceed. Rather than admonishing me to desire to believe and to pursue faith, he has suggested I just see what happens.

I don’t have any expectations. But I’m interested to see what comes next.

Announcing Guest Blogger: Ann

2006-04-23T23:56:00.000-04:00

I am "pickled tink" to announce that Ann, prolific bloggernacle commenter and all around class act, will be guest blogging here at VivaNedFlanders. I've had a sneak preview of her post, and I think most people will be quite surprised by what she has to say.

Thanks, Ann! I am looking forward to the discussion that is sure to follow from your unexpected post.

A dreaded sunny day, so I meet you at the cemetry gates

2006-04-17T00:01:00.000-04:00

It was a superb Sunday. Cool, gently breezy. Above all, comfortable. It's not Easter for Maude, since she's Eastern Orthodox, and I guess it really wasn't Easter for me either. I doubt that the events we celebrate this week actually occurred 2000 years ago, but it didn't matter to me. It's enough that I'm alive, comfortable, and spending time with my wife (she's been working some crazy hours lately).

We decided to take a walk to a nearby graveyard. Like most New England cemeteries, it's pretty old and a little neglected. I pass it every day on my way to work and I always want to visit it, but I've never gotten around to it.

I thought that Maude would only want to walk around the edges of the cemetery, but she wanted to check out all the really old headstones, which was a lot of fun. The oldest headstones (I presume they were the oldest) were illegible, unfortunately. The marble has melted away like soggy marshmallow. There were quite a few broken and cracked headstones, too. Most of the readable grave markers dated from the mid- to late-1800s. Let that be a lesson to all you would-be Ozymandiases: You've got a little less than 200 years to be remembered.

The saddest stones, of course, were all the ones for children. They often listed the age of the child in months and years and they seemed to almost outnumber the markers for adults. It was sad to see all the illegible and broken headstones as well. I hope someone has taken pictures or copied the information before they became lost to us. On the other hand, what's the difference? Once the stone is effaced, is there anything really to hold on to? Is a scrap of paper in the local historical society really going to be anymore permanent than the marble that failed their memory?

There was an article on today's New York Times about celebrities giving their kids weird names like "Pilot Inspektor," but we discovered that women's names from the past, if anything, are even weirder. Among the names we spied on grave stones were: Electa (not Electra), Octa, Sophronia, Dianthe, Glarinda, Achsah, Azubah (there were two different Azubahs), and our personal favorite, Hepzibah. I know biblical names are coming back in fashion, but I doubt anyone is dusting off Achsah or Hepzibah. (Yes, we did have to Google them to see if the were from the Bible.)

Even more oddly, there were new graves scattered in among all these graves from the 1800s. I like this because it keeps all the old graves from being consigned to a neglected part of the cemetery, and it means that they won't be able to dig up the graveyard and turn the tract of land into a Circuit City for a long while still. As long as there are still living relatives, the graveyard still seems alive. There is nothing sadder than a dead cemetery.

So we go inside and we gravely read the stones
All those people, all those lives
Where are they now?
With loves, and hates
And passions just like mine
They were born
And then they lived
And then they died
It seems so unfair
I want to cry

All in all, a good day. I almost forgot that I have to go back to work tomorrow.

recent fetishes/obsessions

2006-04-04T03:04:00.000-04:00

here's what i'm into lately.

explosions in the sky...they did most of the soundtrack for friday night lights, which was a surpisingly good movie. man, i love billy bob.

my harmony remote control (believe me, they're wicked awesome)

netflix (i know i'm late to the party)

lost (an ongoing obsession of mine--the theory thrown around over on kulturblog that locke's dad is the original sawyer blew my mind!)

splinter cell

the housing bubble blog

urban dictionary

i'm starting to overdo some of the above, so i'm looking for suggestions on new things to obsess myself with. any ideas?

The Dinner Party

2006-04-03T20:23:00.000-04:00

I survived the dreaded Dinner Party, and thought I'd report back on how it went. It probably would have gone a lot better if I'd had annegb telling me what to say through an earpiece.

I try to be friendly in social situations, but it doesn't mask the fact that I am very socially awkward around people I don't know. Once you get to know me, you'll find out that I never shut up, but when I am meeting people I am very reserved and shy.

There were only about 14 people total at the party, which was held at the house of a very senior (and very important) partner. He was a dead ringer for Arvin Sloane from Alias, so I'll call him Sloane. The first problem (during the meet and mingle part of the dinner) was that they didn't have any non-alcoholic beverages. Now, I don't believe in the Word of Wisdom, but I've never had any alcohol for a variety of complicated reasons. I wasn't going to have my first glass of wine at some stuffy dinner party. So I was the only schmo standing around without a glass. It took great amounts of self-control to keep from fiddling with the cuffs of my suit coat. It helped that everyone at the party was very nice, but it's hard socializing with people my parents' age. We just don't have that much in common.

When the mingling part was finally over, we were invited to find our names on the dinner table and sit down. I found mine, but Maude kept walking until she was on the opposite side of the room. They had split everyone up, and inexplicably sat me next to Arvin Sloane, and Maude next to his wife on the far side of the room. He spent most of his time talking to the associate seated on the other side of him (I'll call her Sidney), and I didn't say much.

After a while, the conversation between Sloane and Sidney turned to books, which is one of the few topics I know a lot about, but they mostly talked about books I haven't read, like The Da Vinci Code. I mean, I know it took three years to come out in paperback for a reason, but I didn't realize that Maude and I are the last two people on Earth who haven't read it. Sloane said he wasn't a big reader, but that he did enjoy the Harry Potter books. The woman on the other side of me asked him if they would be appropriate for her six-year-old. He said they probably weren't inappropriate but they got darker. I brilliantly commented that they were good for kids because they started out slowly, and gradually became longer and more complex.

Ned: "I mean, the first one is only 150 pages and the last one is about 800 pages long."
Sloane: "No, it's not 150 pages. It's not that short."
Ned: "Uh..."

What can I say? He was right. I was exaggerating. A socially-skilled person would said something, anything, to move the conversation along. Me? I shoveled some more steak into my mouth and waited for the conversation to move on. (Full disclosure: I've only read the first 3 and a half Harry Potter books. Maude's a big fan. The first two: meh. The third one wasn't bad.)

I didn't really mind going to the dinner, I just hated letting Maude down. I mean, these events are mostly just for networking and getting to know people at the firm. Maude is a great lawyer (especially for a first-year) but I'm not exactly helping getting her name out there with my awkwardness. I mean, what is Sloane going to remember from the dinner? Probably nothing, but he may remember that he had a nice conversation with the associate sitting on the other side of him. The whole evening would have been perfectly fine if Maude and I had been able to switch seats.

In retrospect, it probably would have been better if I'd told the knock-knock jokes.

***

Finally, on an unrelated note, I'd like to thank my guest-blogger M for his coding prowess and getting my picture back on the front page of the blog. M, you are appreciated. As well as a very cool song by the Cure.

Potpourri, Flanders-style

2006-03-30T22:02:00.000-05:00

I am, apparently, not very good at coming up with general topics to blog about. The last two weeks at Various Stages of Mormondom have been my topics, "giving up" and "coincidence." There have been a total of 2 other posts out of a possible 10. Yikes. But in better news, my latest post about Mormon coincidences is now up. Check it out, as it just may be the very last post ever on VSoM. I'm kidding. At least, I hope so.

In other news, I need some advice from my readers.

Dilemma 1: I am ashamed to admit it after all my carping recently about my money woes, but my wife recently earned a nice windfall and bought me an extravagant present. A black video iPod. Does anyone have any suggestions about cases/screen protection? Apparently, the black ones scratch super-easily, and I've just come from reading several hundred product reviews for iPod cases on apple.com. Half of them say, "this case scratched my iPod and made the wheel sticky" and the other half say, "Lies!! There is absolutely no stickiness and it saved my screen." Suggestions are welcome, otherwise, I'm sticking it in a sock, but not a thirty-dollar one.

Dilemma 2: Since Maude is a lawyer, I have to attend a few lawyerly functions with her. So far that's only consisted of one office Christmas party. Unfortunately, this weekend we have to attend a formal gala and have dinner at a senior partner's house. What I need are topics for conversation.

This is what I have so far: "So, I hear you clerked for Justice Marshall? I work at a garbage company."

Also, I have a series of "knock knock" jokes prepared should the dinner conversation lag too much. What do you think?

Bullying People into Baptism

2006-03-27T18:40:00.000-05:00

Or, Ned's Unethical Post about Unethical Missionaries.

I'm not a big fan of Randy Cohen, the self-styled "Ethicist" of the New York Times. I think too often he misses the forest of common sense for the ethical trees. Also, I doubt he'd approve of this post.

An acquaintance of mine recently forwarded me several pictures of a wedding in an email. Apparently, she forgot to delete a couple emails between her and a friend that were attached. Her friend is currently serving as a sister missionary in the south of Argentina. As neither my acquaintance nor her friend speak English or read the bloggernacle, I think it will be safe if I transcribe (and translate) a disturbing paragraph from the sister missionary's letter. Sure, it may not be 100% ethical, but I think it's interesting enough (and harmless enough) to post.

Here is the relevant passage. I have translated with my rapidly atrophying Spanish skills, so I will gladly post the original in Spanish if anyone wants to clarify any subtleties I may have smudged over in my translation.

"Another thing going on is an investigator that we have; the elders taught him years ago, and later sisters, and now I have taught him since I arrived. He is not too old but he suffers from paralysis, walks with a cane, is incorrigible, and has extremely young children. He is 70 years old, and lives alone with his kids.

"The fact that he can't stop smoking is a big problem. We tried everything; we made him do the Seven Day Program [Ned's note: I assume this is some sort of mission program] with no success, with the result that now the Elders are teaching him. They cleaned out his house which was a nest of rats, and smelled like grime. He doesn't even bathe, but he is so nice, and he makes us laugh so much with all his stories. The Elders even cut his hair, and made him smoke a cigarette soaked in milk, which is disgusting, but nothing works.

"We went to his house and I saw him through the window and he was smoking. One of the Elders was really angry, and we were all sad too. The Elder threw a picture on the floor and told him to step on it. [Ned's note: she doesn't say what picture, but I assume it had to be the Del Parsons' Jesus, the Temple or Joseph Smith. Missionaries don't carry around too many other pictures or laminas.] He said he wouldn't do it and the Elder bore his testimony so strongly that it made me cry. We chastised him a ton, but I didn't say anything because I felt so bad. We all felt a little sorry when we left for all the things we had said, but that man needed it, and Sunday he showed up at the church alone."

Perhaps some people will think I'm making too much of this, but is this what missionary work has come to? Challenging people to step on Jesus to make a point about smoking? Sure, from a strictly medical viewpoint, this guy needs to quit smoking for his children's sake, but is this the way to do it? I harassed so many people on my mission, took away so many packs of cigarettes after the fourth discussion, but did anyone ever quit?

I remember one cranky guy I met on my mission who had a wife and two teenage daughters. His first daughter was baptized before I arrived, we baptized his second daughter, and his wife was taking the discussions after that. We were stalled on the fourth discussion for quite a while because she just couldn't quit smoking. The husband never had any interest in us, but he became really angry one day because we were making his wife feel so bad about her smoking. He didn't care what we did if we were making his family happier, but he wouldn't allow us to hurt his wife.

Looking back on it, we're probably lucky he didn't smack us around (though I'm sure he was tempted). There's nothing wrong with some positive encouragement, but let's not bully people into making the right life choices. As much as I don't like Del Parson's art, I think stomping on it is a bit much.

Money Money Money!

2006-03-23T20:24:00.000-05:00

I finally got my first paycheck the other day. It was only for one day of work, but it was $94. I was surprised it was so much. I couldn't help but think how much harder I'd work if there was some fatcat in a suit at the end of the day who peeled off $94 in greasy bills and handed them to me.

What can I say? I'm a petty, petty man. I calculated that I make 19.5 cents every minute, or about a cent every three seconds. Go get a drink of water? That's 39 cents right there. Blow your nose? 2 more cents in the piggy bank. Calculating how much money I've made so far that day is about the only thing that gets me through the workday.

I try to imagine all the books I could buy with the money, but in reality, it's all going to pay off my outrageous credit card debt. I'm actually excited to send off my first big paycheck to the credit card company. I promised a year ago that I would pay for that Panera sandwich, and I'm finally going to make good on it.

The other positive thing about working a miserable job is that it has taught me the value of money. My spending has gone way down; not just because I have no free time, but also because I can't bear to think of all the hours I'd have to put in to pay for something I don't really need. Paper plates? Eh, I'll just do more dishes. We have a well, so the water is free.

All in all, having a job is the best thing for me, though it makes me miserable. Like an out-of-control teen on Maury, I need structure. Otherwise I stay up all night, watching TV and reading blogs, and then sleep through the day. Then I feel like I haven't accomplished anything and I end up feeling miserable anyway.

Which is better? Miserable or miserable with $94?

My credit card company says it's the latter.

Work is a four-letter word

2006-03-13T18:10:00.000-05:00

My first two days back at work were a lot harder than I imagined. Have you ever taken a two-week vacation and then returned to work? It's a lot like that, but multiplied by 14. I can't believe it's been almost exactly seven months since I last had a job.

On the other hand, have you ever had a co-worker come back from the Mexican Riviera tanned, rested, and relaxed, who then spends the entire first day back bitching about how work sucks? And under your breath, you mutter, "I was here answering your emails and covering your phone calls while you were drinking mojitos under a beach umbrella, so I don't want to hear about it." Yeah, I know I'm that guy. You can punch me if you want.

I was hoping temp work would be mindless busywork, possibly something I could do while listening to my iPod. No such luck. So far, I've spent all my time faxing people, and then calling them to make sure they received the fax. Sure, it's mindless, but I don't understand the system and I get asked all kinds of questions that I can't answer. The hardest part of jobs for me is getting acclimated. By the time I feel comfortable in this job, I'll have to move on to another.

The upside is that I don't have to worry about doing this long-term. Whenever I start getting stressed about not understanding something, I tell myself, "you're just a temp." I think I need to start repeating that to myself, like "Serenity Now!"

So, if someone calls you on the phone to confirm that you've received a fax, go easy on them. They're probably just a temp.

Ned gets a (temporary) job

2006-03-09T17:33:00.000-05:00

First of all, I want to thank everyone who offered advice and support in connection with my job hunt. I am really touched that so many strangers took an interest in my problems.

The good news is that I have a temp job that starts tomorrow morning. The bad news is that I have to be there at 8 am. The better news is that I don't have to sell anything.

Now, is it a coincidence that just 30 hours after Snarky decides to help me find a job, I finally have one? (Cue Twilight Zone music.) Needless to say, I'll be on a sharp lookout for chihuahuas on the job site.

Great CD cover art

2006-03-09T05:01:00.000-05:00

People don't buy very many CD singles any more. What's the point, when you can download the song for 99 cents from iTunes?

Only hard-core fans and completists buy singles nowadays, which is why the trend lately has been for CD singles to come out in two parts. The same single is on CD1 and CD2, but with different b-sides. This is a cynical ploy by record companies to squeeze a few extra bucks out of rabid fans, but I've made my peace with it.

It may not come as a total shock that I have every b-side that Morrissey has ever released (they are often as good, or even better than the album tracks). When I pre-ordered both versions the new single, "You Have Killed Me," I noticed that part 1 and part 2 have different covers:

CD1:
CD2:

iTunes can't compete with this. I love Morrissey.

Death of a Salesman

2006-03-08T06:06:00.000-05:00

I've been undertaking my job search casually. So casually that 5 months later, I still don't have a job. By last week, it had suddenly become apparent that unless I got a job soon, we would not be able to make our March mortgage payment. As it was, I had to do some creative accounting to get all our February bills in on time. I declared to myself last Monday, "I *will* get a job today!"

I visited four Barnes and Noble locations to drop off resumes, and I got a lot less picky about what jobs I applied for online. By Monday night, I had a job interview with RPM Marketing (names have been changed to protect the sleazy). It was my first actual interview in five months of job hunting (I've been sending out a lot of resumes, I swear.)

I had noticed job ads for this marketing firm before, but I had avoided them because they seemed to be mostly sales positions. However, the ad I responded to was for a Customer Service position. I went in for my interview on Tuesday in an office in an industrial park. The tiny office was covered in various logos like the NBA and Warner Brothers; it looked like they were trying too hard. My interviewer, "Donald," didn't say a lot about the work I would be doing but stressed that it would be promotions and that I could move up to manager quickly. He dropped a lot of big corporate names, like Disney, that he claimed were clients of the firm.

"Direct Marketing is more effective than traditional media," Donald said. He told me that the second interview was an entire day out with another manager, so you could see what the work was like, and that you would know if you had the job by the end of the day. I knew by now that the "Customer Service" label was not accurate; it was just another way to lure people into the interview. But I also didn't feel like I could turn down a job interview when I've had so few prospects and such dire money problems. Besides, what would I really do on Wednesday if I didn't go on the second interview? Sleep in, watch some TV, and read a book. I might as well go.

On Wednesday morning, I put on my suit and arrived with plenty of time to spare. As I waited in the front of the office, some thirty young people in suits ambled out the door and into a variety of cars. I briefly talked to Donald again, who told me that "a one-eyed monkey" could do promotions and that I should focus on learning about the management opportunities. He introduced me to the guy that would be showing me the ropes, "James." Frankly, he looked like a missionary, a white-bread guy with a receding hairline in his cheap suit and overcoat. We would be going out with "Kevin," who also looked like a missionary (young, bad haircut, and ill-fitting suit).

James motioned me over to Kevin's car and pulled out a thin wooden briefcase. He cracked it open, revealing a set of pencils, pastel crayons, oil paint tubes and watercolors. He handed me a print-out. "You've heard of QVC, right? Well, today we are doing a promotion for them. This case of art supplies retails for $59.99; on QVC, they're going to sell it for $39.99. Today, just to get the name out there, we're selling them for $10." I have to admit, my first reaction was, "Wow, that's really cheap." When handed an official looking sheet that says $40, your mind really does think that 10 bucks is a good deal on a cheap wooden case of cheap art supplies. I didn't even notice that there was no "name" that we were "getting out there." It was a no-name brand, and no QVC logo appeared on the packaging. So much for "marketing" and "promotions"; we were nothing more than salesmen who may or may not have a connection to QVC. Emphasis on may not.

That was the moment that I knew that I would never take the job. I'm not a salesman. I don't have that type of personality. It was hard enough to approach people when I was a missionary and I thought my salvation depended on it. How much less motivated would I be for this? It was 9:45 am; I was supposed to spend all day out in the field with Kevin and James. I suppose I could have bowed out right then, but I felt stupid doing that. I didn't have much to do, so what the hell? I'd spend the day selling these art sets and see how it went. If it got really bad, I could always pretend I was writing one of those in-depth articles for the New Yorker.

James told to me to get into Kevin's car, a 1991 Toyota Corolla, that was about 2 inches off the ground. "190,000 miles," Kevin said proudly when I asked him about it. "I got it for 200 bucks." The car was filthy inside; I pushed an Subway sandwich bag out of my way and sat in the front seat. James wedged himself in the back seat, barely fitting next to boxes and boxes of art supplies.

The second surprise of the day is that we would be traveling about an hour and a half south to our sales area. It was practically in New York City. To tell the truth, I was glad. That would be an hour and a half there and an hour and a half back that I wouldn't have to be selling. It was pretty chilly outside (hovering around 32 degrees) and I only had on my thin suit. I wasn't looking forward to spending too much time outside. My feelings reminded me so much of my mission, when I would relish the intervals in proselyting time when I wouldn't have any pressure to approach people or guilt for not being excited about missionary work.

On the way to our sales area (an expensive NYC suburb), I was able to ascertain that this was not really a marketing firm. Selling cheap items is all they ever did; the product would vary, but it was just selling to anyone and everyone. I was a little concerned about how we were going to find people to sell to. James assured me that we didn't go house-to-house but rather canvassed the business district. I didn't understand how we'd be able to sell to people who were trying to run their own business, but I didn't say anything.

While we drove down, James was trying to cover the information I needed to know to advance in the firm. He made some questionable claims, such as that RPM Marketing was a Fortune 500 company. (I looked it up when I got home: it's not, unless it's owned by someone else. Which I doubt, because I don't think they would have passed up the opportunity to name-drop a large corporation.) We drove around for about 45 minutes before James finally decided which strip malls we would be stopping at. We parked and James and Keith each loaded a ratty black bag with several art kits. They also had a few fancy phones (it's a calendar, calculator, talking caller ID all in one! For just 10 bucks! Through Sharper Image, we swear!) in case people weren't interested in the art kits.

This was our modus operandi: we would enter a business, find an employee, and go into the spiel. "We're doing a promotion for QVC..." James would crack open the case and show the array of pencils and pastels. Most people were not receptive. To say the least. Humiliation is walking into an upscale antiques shop in the richest county in America and trying to sell a $10 pencil set. But we tried at every business, because the "Law of Averages" told us to. According to James, about one in ten people would be interested in our product. Therefore, the law of averages says that if you contact 30 people, you will have 3 sales. You just have to contact enough people and you will be able to sell.

The scary thing is that he was right. The most surprising thing to me was how many people actually bought things from us. Our first sale was at an Italian deli. The owner bought two art kits immediately and then asked the deli workers if they wanted some. We sold six art kits and a couple of phones. Then, customers at the deli gathered around James and his ratty bag, convincing each other that it was a great deal, and I had to run to the car to get more inventory. We sold $180 in merchandise in the deli in about 20 minutes.

"That's called 'bandwagoning," James told me. "When you sell to one person and a whole bunch of people get interested." People are wary of being ripped off when they are alone, but seeing strangers buying or being encouraged by their friends lowers their inhibitions considerably.

By the end of the day, James had sold $400 in merchandise and Kevin over $300. Neither of them would reveal what their commission was, but Kevin did inform me that it was their only compensation. I tried to stay upbeat and inconspicuous during the day; I really could write a 20-page New Yorker article on some of the stuff I heard and saw, but I will skip to the end.

They had sold everything in the car but three items. James was no longer crowded by boxes of merchandise in the back seat. It had all been sold. It was getting late so we started our hour and a half drive back to the office. We arrived at the office to find it dark and locked. Donald, the head of the branch (and my interviewer from the previous day) was still out selling. I wanted to just go home but I thought it would be rude to leave without saying something to him. I waited in the cold for twenty minutes as more and more salespeople returned.

When Donald finally showed up with the key to the office, he vanished with the other employees and James handed me a quiz to test my knowledge of the elements of a sales pitch, the Law of Averages, and the benefits of "direct marketing." I filled out as little as possible, because I just wanted to tell them I wasn't interested and go home and tell my wife some of the outrageous stuff I'd seen.

James gave me a Disney novelty pen to complete the quiz with. "We were selling these last week." The pen, fittingly, did not work. I gave my paper to James and, after a delay, I was summoned to Donald's office.

"No one has ever not completed the form before," Donald said, looking annoyed. In bright red marker, there was a giant 0/10 printed on top of my test. "I assume you know your name. What's your last name again?" "Flanders." "Well, that's one point at least."

He got to the question on the test about how soon I would be available if offered the job. I seized my opportunity at once. "I just don't think it's a good fit for me right now." I felt like I was trying to break up with a girlfriend. "I didn't want to waste your time, that's why I didn't fill out the form all the way."

As soon as I had told him I wasn't interested, his eyes glazed over instantly, and I suddenly saw why so many people disliked salesmen. As soon as you told them you weren't interested, you ceased to exist for them. They live in a world, not of people, but of potential sales. Once that sales potential disappears you might as well be invisible. That was how it was Donald. His manner turned instantly icy and brusque as if any courtesy would drain his energy superfluously. He shook my hand and I left the building. In the garage next to me, the sellers were settling up, extracting their meager commissions.

What bothered me most was that there was no risk for the company. They provided nothing. No wage, no benefits, no transportation. All they gave you was a cheap product and sent you off to burn your own gas, wear out your own car, and get sick on your own dime. They simply cashed in on almost free labor to push their cheap crap. These weren't employees, they were simply earners on your sales pyramid. "It goes up to three generations," James informed me.

Though we were dressed slightly better, we had essentially the same job as those kids who sell candy on the subways in New York.

I noticed a lot of uncanny parallels to missionary work. The cheap suits to add a veneer of respectability. The assigned area to work. Open your mouth mantras. The only difference was that we only wanted ten bucks out of people, not their souls. And I can also say that art sets are a considerably easier sell than Mormonism.

I still don't have a job. However, every other job in the world suddenly looks a heck of a lot better to me. Not a bad way to spend a Wednesday.

It's alive!

2006-02-16T03:27:00.000-05:00

As all of you probably know, I also blog over at Various Stages of Mormondom. (That name always bothers me; it really should be Various Stages of Mormonism. "Mormondom" connotes a physical location to me, not a religion.)

What you may not know is that we've finally got the blog back up and running after a month or two of dormancy. Our experiment with not having assigned days was, as Geoff J prophesied, a disaster. No one posted anything, and the longer no one posted, the better the next post would have to be, and it looped into a vicious cycle.

Well, we've gone back to assigned days but have made the assigned topics much more vague. I think VSOM had already gone through all of the Mormon hot topics anyway. Anyway, my new posting day is Thursday, so you can look for my posts over there each Thursday morning. (But stick around for the other days, because they are all great bloggers over there.)

Here is my first post for the newly resurrected VSOM: Ned's Wager.

I sincerely hope I won't offend anyone with that post (though I can certainly see how it might be viewed as provocative). My intention is explore my new world and see how it's changed without Mormonism or religion in it. If you have any comments on the post, please leave them over at VSOM.

Anyway, I have to promote my VSOM post on my website, in Box 3 of the Mormon Archipelago, because Kim Siever is determined to bury everything in Box 4 under an avalanche of Canadian Olympic news. Hey Kim, we all have access to Internet. If I want Canadian sports headlines, I'll go to the CBC. God help you if you bury my post under curling news, Siever!

When it absolutely, positively, has to be there overnight...

2006-02-15T05:29:00.000-05:00

Maude and I usually don't do much for Valentine's Day. It's a made-up holiday that ranks only slightly above "Love Day" and "Spendover." (I do wish I could have gotten her Lord Huggington, though.)

However, this is the first Valentine's Day since we've been married that Maude has worked in an office. We watched the American version of the Office on Thursday, which has a running joke about the secretary, Pam, and how horrible her fiance Roy is. Everyone in the office gets a Valentine gift except for Pam.

Roy: "What's wrong?"
Pam: "Nothing. It's just that I had to sit here all day while Phyllis got like an entire garden delivered to her."
Roy: "What, you're mad at me?"
Pam: "I mean, I know that we said no big gifts but I was kind of hoping that you'd get me something for Valentine's Day."
Roy: "Well, Valentine's Day isn't over. Let's get you home and you are gonna get the best sex of your life."
[Cut to a shot of Pam, exasperated, staring at the camera.]

Obviously, TV is not a documentary (though the Office is shot in a mockumentary style) but I didn't want Maude to be the only one without flowers at the office. I went to FTD.com and ordered her some flowers. I had to get the more expensive bouquet to ensure it would get to her on Valentine's Day.

During the day, I called her up. Nothing had arrived. She called me as she was leaving, and still nothing had come for her. I bought her some back-up flowers at the supermarket with all the other schlubs (and which were a fraction of the cost of the FTD bouquet).

I called customer service to cancel my order at 10:30 pm on Valentine's Day. The recording warned that wait times could be over 45 minutes. To get my sixty bucks back, I thought it was totally worth it. So I turned the volume on the phone all the way up so I could monitor the tinny hold music and watched some terrible men's figure skating with Maude. (By the way, did you see that skater with the "007" rhinestone outfit? He pantomimed throwing grenades, shooting into the audience, and boxing with an invisible opponent. The worst thing I've ever seen, and not just on TV.)

At about 11:15 pm, I started doubting whether there was more than one person working at the customer service center. I decided to set the phone down, off the hook, and do the dishes, get ready for bed, etc. When I picked the phone up again at 11:45 pm, the hold music was still going strong. Finally, a couple minutes after midnight, an extremely weary sounding woman came onto the line. I felt bad for her, because I could imagine what her day had been like. I gave her my order number and waited as she investigated.

She told me that the warehouse had been shut down all day due to a biohazard scare, and that was why my flowers hadn't arrived, but that they would get there tomorrow. I wish I had asked the customer service woman the following questions: 1) What kind of biohazard could a flower warehouse possibly have? 2) There's a warehouse? Doesn't FTD just forward your order to a local florist? 3) Why would I want to send my wife flowers from a biohazard zone? Happy Valentine's Day, honey! Please don't kiss me, I want to wait and make sure you don't get sick. Has that mole always been there?

Unfortunately, I didn't ask any of these questions. There was an awkward pause while I tried to line up my justifications for a refund in my mind. First of all, I had purchased a more expensive item just so that it would be there on Valentine's. Secondly, I had already bought replacement flowers. Thirdly, sixty bucks is a lot of money. So I persevered, "Um, is it still possible to cancel the order? I kind of wanted them to be there on Valentine's."

I felt bad, like I was asking this minimum wage telephone operator to eat the cost of the flowers instead of a huge flower cartel who apparently can't get their act together on the most important flower day of the year. "Okay, I will refund your money and tell them to destroy the package," she said. This sounded like something out of a spy movie ("Destroy the package!") but she made it seem like I had personally chopped down part of the rain forest and thrown it away.

Will I actually get my money back? Will the infected flowers find their way to Maude regardless? I don't know, but I'm ordering a bunch of stuff from here, just in case. I just hope they can get it to me overnight.

Ned's Random Secular Musings

2006-02-14T06:17:00.000-05:00

This is where I collect all of my Kulturblog-esque observations that don't really fit in with my usual posts. Here are my recommendations for movies, music, and television.

Movies

Match Point

The first thing you'll hear about this movie is that it is a Woody Allen picture. Personally, I love Woody, but I know he turns some people off. This is not your typical Woody Allen movie. For starters, he's not in it, it's not a comedy, and the plot doesn't involve an ugly old man hooking up with an improbably young and attractive young woman. This is a complete departure from his recent work and you'd never guess in a million years that he wrote it.

Did he write all the British dialogue? There is only one American character, and this movie is full of British slang. How good is this movie? It's so good that not even Scarlett Johansson can ruin it. See this movie.

Music

Death Cab for Cutie, "Plans"

When I was younger, I used to worry that eventually I'd stop liking new music. My parents never seemed to like anything recorded after they had graduated from high school and I guess I thought that was normal.

Fortunately, this hasn't happened to me (yet). Some of my favorite bands have come out in the last couple years, like Bloc Party, The Bravery, Franz Ferdinand, The Killers, and The Postal Service. I thought Death Cab's previous album, "Transatlanticism," was just okay, but this new one is great. I love-love-love this album, especially "Soul Meets Body." It's so good that it will soon get way overexposed. I heard it at a Starbucks the other day, so you've been warned. Enjoy this album before it shows up in a Volkswagen commercial.

Television

The Alternative, VH1 Classic. Shown Wed., Thurs., Sun., 11 am and 11 pm Eastern.

Do you remember when MTV used to play music videos? It wasn't all that great. They played the same videos over and over again, usually something terrible like "Naughty Naughty" by Danger Danger or "Funky Cold Medina." However, there were always two hours a week when they played great, new music, during the alternative music show "120 Minutes." There used to be a time when getting a video shown just once on 120 Minutes could make a no-name band. Most famously, when the members of Garbage were looking for a lead singer, they saw Shirley Manson on 120 Minutes and recruited her.

MTV eventually moved the show to MTV2, where I watched it for a few years (when I actually got MTV2). They finally killed it off in favor of Wild Boyz re-runs. Isn't that how life works? Well, 120 Minutes may be dead, but into the breach steps "The Alternative" on VH1 Classic. It's only an hour long, but it's on three times a week. Does anyone actually get VH1 Classic channel? Yes, it's one of those sixty channels in the hundreds range on digital cable that no one ever watches. Well, you should watch this show.

I tivo the show so I can fast-forward through the videos that I don't like. They skew mostly eighties and nineties alternative, which is perfect for my musical taste. Many of the videos from the early eighties are very amusing but nearly unwatchable. That is okay, because the music is great. I've already ordered two cds because of this show. I saw a Nick Cave video ("Do You Love Me?") I hadn't seen since I was 16 and had forgotten how much I liked. Also, though I am a huge Depeche Mode fan, I had never heard early DM song "Get the Balance Right."

To give you a better idea of the type of music, here is a list of the videos shown on the most recent episode (I've bolded the songs I like):

The Church, "Reptile"
Liz Phair, "Supernova"
Sonic Youth, "100%"
P.J. Harvey, "Down by the Water"
They Might Be Giants, "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)"
Dramarama, "Last Cigarette"
Bob Mould, "See a Little Light"
Live, "I Alone"
My Bloody Valentine, "Only Shallow"
The Cure, "Fascination Street"
Depeche Mode, "Shake the Disease"
Gang of Four, "Cadillac"
Utah Saints, "Something Good"
Fishbone, "Everyday Sunshine"

Sure, there are a couple of duds in there (sorry, Susan M!), but who knew they were still playing Cure and Sonic Youth videos on actual television? Not me.

is belief voluntary?

2006-02-03T11:19:00.000-05:00

a while back i asked ned if i could do a guest post and he said "yes." the only problem was that i had no idea what i was going to post about. i've been reading his blog pretty much since the beginning and really identified with a lot of what ned was going through, but life got busy and it took me a few months to actually get around to doing a post. anyway...

by way of introduction, i'm a thirty-something guy, mormon all my life, mission, married in the temple, relatively new dad and all of that. not quite two years ago i stopped believing in mormonism. i'll spare you most of the nitty-gritty details, but let's just say that i was never what one would consider an orthodox member (by this point in my life i had become pretty good at being a cafeteria mormon), but when push came to shove i still believed in it, and tried my best to live life as an active member. then one day i got a book that changed my life, a copy of krakauer's under the banner of heaven. i had read and really enjoyed some of his previous books (into the wild and into thin air), and wanted to know what all of the fuss regarding this book was about.

i found the book fascinating, but it also brought up a lot of issues with mormonism that i had either never heard about or had a slight awareness of but had never really looked into on my own. just the classic laundry list--seer stones and hats, papyri, polyandry, crazy quotes from ol' brigham from the journal of discourses, etc., etc., etc. upon finishing the book i still had my belief in mormonism intact, but was left with a nagging feeling that i had to learn more about the issues that were bothering me to 1) see if there was any validity to them, and 2) to figure out how to reconcile this new information with my belief in mormonism.

well, after one night of binging on whatever i could find on these topics on the internet i was no longer a believer. i actually remember the exact moment. i was reading some sermon by brigham young from the JOD and just had a "what the f***!" moment and that was it. i remember saying to myself "oh my gosh, it's really all just made up." from there on out it was over. i kept on going to church for a while, and did a ton of reading and some serious soul-searching over the next few months, but i wasn't able to make myself believe like i had before. i know that when i finally get around to telling my mom about all of this that she's going to cry and beg me to believe again. but she might as well ask me to believe that the intergalactice warlord xenu is the cause of all mental illness, because it would do about as much good. and so this brings us around to the my opening question, "is belief voluntary?"

after thinking long and hard about this my answer is "no," but i'd like to know what others think. it seems to me that my choices are voluntary, as in i can choose to read my scriptures or not, i can choose to go to church or do something else on sundays, and i can choose to live a mormon lifestyle. but belief to me is more of a reaction to our emotions, information and how we process it, our experiences, upbringing, and our own desires. i know plenty of people who have done everything on the mormon checklist (scriptures, pray, go to church, bear testimony, be nice) and then stop believing, and on the other hand have met many jack mormons who have not set foot inside a chapel for years and yet will defend the faith to their death.

i often hear people say that they choose to believe and i just don't buy it. i think that belief chooses them, and that in their current state they have no option but to believe. this makes it much easier for me to be tolerant of those with different beliefs, because i see them as currently having no choice. whatever it is they believe in has them in a bearhug, and unless something happens in their lives to change that they're going to continue in it. slumming around in the bloggernacle i used to wonder how so many people could know all about the issues that made me stop believing and still have such a strong testimony, but now i realize that they don't choose to believe any more than i choose to disbelieve. none of us have any agency in the matter.

Ned's Laws of Religious Inertia

2006-01-31T04:06:00.000-05:00

I seem to have ticked off a lot of people with my last post, so let me clarify a couple things.

I believe in religious inertia. This is not a scientific theory, just one I've cobbled together based on my observations. There are people who defy the laws of religious inertia; I am simply trying to explain the behavior of the majority of people.

Ned's Laws of Religious Inertia

1. Most people do not change religions during their lifetime.

2. Most people are not interested in changing their religion.

3. It often takes a shock to the system or a fundamental change (e.g. marriage to a spouse of a different religion) to break someone out of their religious orbit.

4. Strong social forces like families and friends work to keep people in their existing religious orbits.

I don't think these laws are very controversial. Obviously there are lots of exceptions, but I think that this is generally how the world works.

Sympathy for Jehovah's Witnesses

2006-01-30T01:30:00.000-05:00

As I was preparing to leave my house on Saturday, I was approached in my driveway by two Jehovah's Witnesses. They were both middle-aged women, wearing coats and holding armfuls of Wake Up! magazines. It was an unseasonably warm day for January but there was still a chill in the air, and I immediately felt bad for them. Here they were, wasting half of their weekend, going door to door in a strange neighborhood.

One was older, with white hair and she did all the talking. I tried to be as friendly as possible.

JW: Have you ever seen our magazine before?
Ned: Sure, I've seen a lot of them, but I'm not really interested today.
JW: Would you like to have a magazine?

I would have accepted but I suspected that they might come back if I took a magazine, kind of how as a missionary we would always return to visit the people who accepted a Book of Mormon from us.

Ned: No, thanks. But thank you very much.
JW: How about just this pamphlet?
Ned: Sure. Thanks a lot. Have a great day.
JW: You too. Goodbye.

They went across the street to knock on my neighbor's door and I left, with a JW pamphlet on the floor of my car. It's still there.

This incident depressed me for several reasons. JWs depress me more than Mormon missionaries. I think both groups are probably equally futile or equally effective, depending on your point of view. Both groups recruit those without social networks and plug them into a ready-made community, which can be a very positive thing, especially for those on the fringes of society. However, in the long run, both groups are having only incremental success in spreading their message.

The reason JWs depress me more is because (and correct me if I'm wrong here) every member has to go out and knock on doors. Mormons squeeze all the proselyting into a two-year rite of passage. You're young, away from people you know in real life, and you have a definite end in sight. JWs that proselyte are working in their own towns, while holding down their regular jobs, and probably have to do this for as long as they are JWs.

I didn't want these older ladies to be walking around in the cold. I wanted them to be sipping hot chocolate, enjoying the weekend before they had to go back to work on Monday. As missionaries, we used to rationalize our failures in tracting, saying we were planting seeds. Being on the other side now, I realize that there are no seeds, just crumpled, unread literature.

I wanted to shout, "Stop wasting your life, and start enjoying it!" They wouldn't have listened. Missionary Ned wouldn't have listened to this advice either. We all have to find our own path to happiness. For all I know, their path includes being cold on Saturdays.

Praise to the man

2006-01-16T19:30:00.000-05:00

I'll admit that I still hold a couple of grudges against my parents for the way they raised me. I think they made some spectacular blunders, possibly scarring me for life.

One quick example, brought to mind by the recent BCC discussion of evil spirits and possession, happened when I was just 8 or 9. I was watching some television show by myself (it was a weekly show like The Twilight Zone, that had a different scary story each week) which featured a young boy being attacked by his grandmother, who was a witch. It scared the daylights out of me, and I went to my parents to comfort me (and possibly let me sleep in their bed). I remember very clearly that my father said to me, "You know, the scary thing about these stories is that there actually are witches and demons out there." That's just wrong on so many levels that I don't even know where to begin.

That, obviously, is just the tip of the iceberg of my parental complaints. I have a ton more. However, as I was reading Susan M's post about how she met her husband at a Cure concert, I couldn't help remembering my first concert ever.

I was fifteen and had just gotten into the Cure. They were coming to a nearby town (located about an hour away) and I really wanted to go. I had never been to a concert before. Obviously, I couldn't drive there, so the only solution was for my Dad to drive me. My older sister came along too, even though her musical taste ran more towards Kip Winger and Great White. My Dad dropped us off at the concert and drove to a deserted parking lot where he read the scriptures under the streetlights for a couple hours until it was time to pick up my sister and me from the concert.

Somehow, the image of him straining to read his giant quad in some strange, empty parking lot at night, just so I could go to a concert, chokes me up. It's a little early for Father's Day, but let me just say, thanks Dad. You're alright.

Does Polygamous Ancestry Help You Believe?

2006-01-09T06:30:00.000-05:00

Like most Americans with no discernible ethnicity, I hunger after any knowledge of my ancestors. I think we envy those who can say, "I'm Italian" or "My grandparents came over from Slovakia." Oh, to have such interesting forebears!

My family line on my mother's side is murky. So murky that all I know is that my mother's maiden name might be from Wales. Otherwise, that side of the family tree is just a melange of WASPy, white-bread names. On the other hand, my grandmother on my father's side supposedly did extensive genealogical research (though I've never seen it). From this alleged research, I know that my great-great-great...(I forget how many greats)...grandfather came over to America from Scotland and that is where my surname comes from.

On the basis of this slender belief, I buy books like How the Scots Invented the Modern World; I daydreamedly browse through the inevitable picture books of the Scottish countryside in Barnes and Noble (why are there always so many picture books of Scotland, by the way?); and I even own a tie the color of my surname's tartan.

The odds that I am even one-sixteenth or one-thirty-second Scottish are not very good, yet still I am fascinated by my possible ancestors. I want to know more about them and understand their lives. There's a good chance I am at least an eighth or even a quarter German. For some reason, my German ancestry doesn't have quite the same romantic pull as the Scottish, but I still want to know where my German forebears came from and when and why they emigrated.

I think this is highly relevant to many discussions of Mormonism. My mother is a convert and my father converted with his family when he was very young. My Mormon ancestry dates all the way back to the 1950's. That's it. I have little empathy for or understanding of the strange pioneer families with four or five wives. I simply can't relate: those aren't my people. My people were dirt farmers or city dwellers during this era. They weren't trekking across the country for what might seem to me to be a suspect reason. This might explain why, when I went on Pioneer Trek as young man, all I got was blistered and malnourished, instead of inspired.

I know from various discussions that several members of the bloggernacle are descendents of pioneers and polygamists. I think I understand how they can reconcile their feelings towards early Mormons and polygamy while I find the practice extremely off-putting and creepy. For them, it's their tartan kilt. They wouldn't be here without it. It's hard to condemn something that would erase your very existence.

I also can't help but wonder if my lack of Mormon roots makes it easier for me to abandon my faith. It's not like I'm letting down five generations of Flanders; would I feel the same way if one of my ancestors had been killed by a mob?

I don't honestly know how I'd feel about polygamists if I had polygamous ancestry, but I'd probably be less critical. Let's be honest: even though I'm not in the same pickle as Australians (sorry, Aussies!), my ancestors were likely the dregs of European society. If they weren't, they never would have come to America. Nevertheless, I romanticize their lives and their legacy, even though they were probably drunks, tramps, and thieves. Never mind that, I'm late for my bagpipe lesson!

What next? Coming to terms with disbelief

2006-01-07T06:25:00.000-05:00

Roasted Tomatoes has been hosting a great series at LDSLF entitled "What next?"

RT has solicited essays from various people describing their crises of faith and how they dealt with the aftermath. He has been kind enough to post my essay here. (D-Train has posted a thoughtful response to my essay here.)

Be sure to also check out RT's and Ann's installments in the series. I am looking forward to future posts, including Hellmut's (which I have already had a sneak peak at).

Kudos to RT for providing space for a discussion that we rarely have, even in the bloggernacle.

Laughing while crying: a Malaysian Setting for the BoM

2006-01-03T09:22:00.000-05:00

I don't know whether to laugh or cry, so I will do them simultaneously.

I happened to be reading a comment by Dan Vogel over at Sunstone Blog, when I found a link to this March 2004 Sunstone article (pdf file) proposing a possible Malaysian-Thai setting for the Book of Mormon. I think the article is fascinating, if only as an experiment in how much "evidence" one can find for just about any theory about the Book of Mormon. (It must be particularly discouraging to apologists that just as much evidence supporting the Book of Mormon can be found in Southeast Asia as in the ancient Americas.)

The author, Dr. Ralph Olsen, seems quite sincere about his theory and has even assembled a 301-page manuscript (pdf file) outlining his arguments. I have only skimmed through the 300 pages, but I believe his point is that if the Book of Mormon Hill Cumorah isn't the same as the New York State Hill Cumorah, as currently argued by FARMS, then why couldn't the original have been in Asia instead of Central America? (I can think of plenty reasons, but still.)

I believe that this kind of bizarre theorizing is the logical result of the Limited Geography school of thought. FARMS and the Limited Geography Theory have decided to throw out all of Joseph Smith's and his contemporaries' statements about the United States and the Western Hemisphere being the land of the Nephites and Lamanites because it doesn't fit the archeological evidence. Well, if Joseph didn't know where the Book of Mormon happened, how come it couldn't have been in Asia? Or on the moon?

At some point, it seems to me like we are arguing over the true location of Rivendale and whether Frodo really could have reached it from Bag End in such a short amount of time. Fascinating for sure, but more than a little absurd.

Yabba-dabba-do!

2006-01-03T09:01:00.000-05:00

I'm pretty sure I disagree vehemently with everything that No-Death-Before-the-Fall Gary has every said or thought, but his crack about playing General Authority poker on M* cracked me up. I think we need a card game called "Priesthood Authority." Stake Presidency cards are practically worthless, Scripture cards are powerful, but the Living Prophet card trumps all!

Oh wait, they already play this game every day over at M*.

Because I liked Gary's quip, I will refrain from giving him a Flintstone's-inspired nickname, even though he believes dinosaurs and humans co-existed.

Christmas spirit

2005-12-27T15:33:00.000-05:00

I hope everyone had a nice holiday break. I stopped blogging for a while and I actually read a couple books. It's amazing how that works. If I stopped blogging completely, I might actually put a dent in my reading list. I think this is where you're supposed to brag about what you got for Christmas, so I'll let you in on my coolest gift:

Pretty freakin' sweet.

My holidays were not very enjoyable, due to my in-laws staying with us and their cat. I'm having a little trouble coming to terms with the fact that I'm never going to have a fun Christmas or Thanksgiving ever again. I know I should suck it up for my wife's sake, but I can't help resenting her family for spoiling all my holidays from now till eternity. Apparently, I'm not as much of a grown-up as I should be at this point in my life. Oh well.

I'm just tired. I wanted to crank out an outraged post about Times & Seasons new guest-blogger, Dr. I-don't-prescribe-birth-control, but I don't have the energy. If you want to make your blog a joke, go ahead. It's embarrassing that the most prominent Mormon blog has so many contributors with such reactionary views, but what can I do? I can only watch as I become less and less Mormon each day. These aren't your people, Ned.

Don't get me wrong, I know that there are a lot of Mormons out there that agree with me. And that is encouraging. It's just that I recognize that it's now their fight, not mine.

Anyway, this wasn't a very fun post. I'm going to go read some of the books I got for Christmas, and start cheering up.

The scarlet thing in you...

2005-12-14T02:58:00.000-05:00

Inspired by D-Train's last post at Unofficial Manifesto (I've really enjoyed UoM's recent renaissance, by the way), I will attempt to explain something that I'm still not quite sure I understand.

I apologize in advance if this sounds too Times & Seasony (you know what I mean).

For a long time I've struggled with the fact that my most profound, happy, and transcendent experiences have all been non-church related. Music, literature, and relationships have been the primary catalysts for these experiences. I can't just come out and say what these things are because there is something extremely personal and proprietary about them. Also, they would sound lame if I tried to explain them.

Even so, I will try to give an example of what I mean. Even though I'm a former English major, music has always affected me more sharply and immediately than books. I remember being a teenager and listening to certain songs that could just cut right through me. Most of them still can. I basically have three categories of music: stuff I don't like, stuff that I enjoy as good music, and finally, music that makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. It is this third category that I find so important. If I want to connect with something greater than myself, I need only put on some Morrissey or Radiohead. This is when I am happiest.

Music is only one example of these transcendent experiences. It's difficult to explain, but I feel like I am who I am because of these things. Perhaps it's just a part of how we construct our own identity, but I feel like these experiences are the reservoir of the REAL Ned. People can see and interact with Surface Ned, but I am firmly anchored by my secret inner life.

I said that there were no church-related experiences in the reservoir. I think for that reason, I don't feel (and perhaps have never felt) intrinsically Mormon. If you strip me down to my essential personality, there is no Mormon-ness there.

I will go one further. The church experiences I've had have felt almost like a counterfeit of my true happiness. Nothing I've ever felt at church can compare to the rapture I've felt, say, listening to Depeche Mode or reading a great book. I've had spiritual experiences but they seem to fade as soon as they're gone. The warm and fuzzies I've felt in church contexts have occasionally been nice, but they always seem freighted with too much baggage to enjoy. I can remember feeling good at Church, but never truly happy.

What does this tell me? Well, first of all, it tells me that perhaps it is unwise to look for the source of happiness in a place that doesn't provide it to you. The church is a source of great happiness to a seemingly large number of people, which is great. They know what is in their own reservoirs, not me. Secondly and more importantly, there isn't anything wrong with me if I don't experience my happiness on the church's terms. I think that's the hardest lesson to learn. Don't twist yourself into pretzels to please the church, but make sure that whatever the church is providing you is indeed good. Its incompleteness is not the problem. I believe it was wise commenter Ann who said, "It's just church."

The church hasn't touched my inner-self, and perhaps no church ever will. There's no point in beating myself up in guilt over that. If there is a God, he has created us each to experience joy in our own way.

Comparison shopping for the priesthood

2005-12-13T09:38:00.000-05:00

As you may or may not know, I use Gmail for all of my real-life and blog-related correspondence (VivaNedFlanders at gmail.com, if you want to contact me). It's easy, it's free, and it's anonymous. It's perfect.

Well, it's not perfect, but it's worth the money. Some people refuse to use Gmail because Google scans your messages and provides targeted advertisements on the side of your messages. Most of the time I don't even notice the ads, so I can't imagine Google is making too much money off of me.

Mostly, the ads serve as a source of unintentional comedy. Recently, the topic of vegetarianism came up with a vegetarian friend of mine. Google's robots helpfully provided this link: Amazon's Exotic Meat Store.

Delicious.

Anyway, I don't know what kind of heresy I've been emailing out, but when I logged on to my Flanders email account yesterday, this was my featured link: Get Ordained by the International Church of Atheism.

How could I resist clicking on that? Now, before you dismiss them, please note that they have a very similar priesthood policy to that of Mormonism. "We aim to ordain as many Ministers in our Church as we can." Well, I guess except for the whole woman thing. The point is that it is a very democratic not-religion that tries to de-mystify and de-privilege traditional notions of clergy by ordaining everyone.

That's the pro column. The $9.95 it costs to get ordained definitely goes in the con column. This might smack of simony at first, but it's probably cheaper than the Mormon equivalent. It's kind of like buying the lifetime Tivo service instead of paying installments each month.

Also, the International Church of Atheism encourages its "ministers" to get the title of Reverend added to their drivers licenses and passports, etc. In Mormonism, you only get to rent the title of Elder for two years. And you definitely don't get the cool clothing:

vs.

No contest there.

Actually, never mind; I found a place that will ordain you for free. God bless the Internet.

Handyman Ned; or, why I love Mormon Stories

2005-12-09T13:30:00.000-05:00

I am not a very handy guy. I blame my father, who breaks out in hives every time we pass a Home Depot. If we ever had to go to the hardware store, he'd take a deep sniff, grimace, and say, "This place smells like work." This is not to say my father is lazy; on the contrary, he's burned through more precious Saturdays than I can remember sweating it out in the yard. But I think he resented yard work and home repairs so much that he resolved to protect me from them as long as possible. Good man. I've only lived in apartments since I moved out of parents' house, so it's never been an issue till now.

Until a few months ago, I had never painted a room, cleaned out a rain-gutter or used an electric drill. It's good to know how to do these things, but I am not looking forward to a lifetime of home maintenance. You may say, "Ned, my pregnant wife builds bookcases in the garage and my 8-year-old daughter mows our lawn. Get over it." My response is, how do you feel about doing service projects for late-twenties, stay-at-home not-Dads? Can you bring your own tools? Thanks.

Yesterday I decided to finally replace all the blinds and curtains in our living room. I wasn't looking forward to it, so I decided to listen to something while I worked. I really admire what John Dehlin is doing over at Mormon Stories, but I'd never actually gotten around to listening to one of his podcasts. Every time I meant to, I'd tell myself that I didn't really have an hour to sit and listen. For some bizarre reason, I didn't think you could fast-forward and pick up a podcast where you left off, so I thought I'd have to listen to the whole thing in one shot.

Well, I got to work, started up the computer, and went a bit crazy. I ended up listening to five of John's podcasts yesterday, or almost half of all he's done so far. They were great. John is still working out the kinks, but I am excited about the future of these broadcasts. The early ones are (way) too long at an hour and a half, but it looks like he's brought in all the newer ones at a lean 45 minutes.

I listened to John's interviews with: the mason, the anti-Mormon, the apologist (1st part only), and RoastedTomatoes and Serenity Valley (2 parts). (This sounds like the set-up of great joke.) John does a good job at letting these people tell their own stories, although sometimes you wish he'd press them a little harder. In particular, I think John did a good job of letting both the anti-Mormon and the apologist present themselves on their own terms but still putting some tough questions to both of them.

If you have some time, I highly recommend listening to some of these podcasts at Mormon Stories. I think I am going to start playing the podcasts on my computer in the background while I browse the bloggernacle at the same time. Thanks for all your work, John; it certainly made mine go by much faster.

My mom raised me better than this; or, why I blog anonymously

2005-12-08T09:02:00.000-05:00

There are two types of people in the bloggernacle: the onymous and the anonymous. I think our community is somewhat of an anomaly, in that so many participants use their real names. I admire the courage of Rusty, Ronan, Elisabeth, etc. who put their real names out there. Every once in a while though, some bloggers using their real names will complain about the anonymous masses. We anonymous types don't have anything at stake, they say; we don't have any incentive to behave. Perhaps they are right.

For my own part, I don't care about my anonymity. I don't actually know any Mormons and I'm not currently active in my ward. I can't embarrass myself in the Mormon community if I'm not really part of it. Also, I have a very common name. It is so common that the day I checked into the MTC, there was another Elder [Ned Flanders] reporting for duty. We had the same first and last names and they initially gave me his room assignment. (He went to Oregon on his mission, the poor bastard.) So even if I used my real name, people are just as likely to confuse me with my Oregonian doppelganger or one of the other thousands of other possibilities.

So why don't I pull an Athena, and reveal myself? My parents.

My parents are both very bright people, but they are singularly incurious about Mormon history or issues. I think my parents would rather have found a dirty magazine than a copy of Sunstone under my mattress. We had the usual assortment of faith-promoting Deseret Books (though I never saw anyone actually reading them) plus the Standard Works. End of story. What else do you need? A couple of months ago, my mom did give me an article about Joseph Smith that she printed out from the Internet. What site was it from? Meridian. Sigh.

I don't post onymously because I don't want someone to sidle up to my mom on Enrichment Night and say, "I read the most heretical thing on your son's website the other day." Among Mormons, it has become unfortunate custom to brag about the righteousness of your children. "I have five kids and they've all served missions and are married in the temple." It's like a Mormon batting average. My parents are batting pretty well for a baseball player but not too great for your standard Mormon couple. I've already screwed up their average, I don't want to add my apostate views on top of that.

I also wonder what effect the faithfulness of the children has on the callings of the parents. I once had a GA tell me that they don't call Mission Presidents who have children with problems. I don't believe that's true, but I wonder about it. Do any of the Seventies have wayward children? The Apostles? They must, right? Especially with the amount of kids Mormons have. I still think that unless your last name is Benson, it's probably not a good idea to have an apostate in the family.

While looking up an entry in my mission journal for yesterday's post, I stumbled upon an experience that I had forgotten. I had been in the country for about a month and lived in a tiny apartment with my companion and two other missionaries. The other companionship would come into our room at 6:30 am each morning to sing a hymn and say a prayer to start our day. One morning I didn't feel like getting out of bed to sing, and one of the elders told me that I was a disgrace to my father. (Nice guy.)

I don't believe that, but at the same time, I don't want to saddle my parents with any extra grief at this point in their lives. If that means lying low on the Internet, then so be it.

I will always be Flan-diddly-anders to you.

Flanders' Shocking True Life Confessions

2005-12-06T15:04:00.000-05:00

Everybody likes to hear other people's confessions. It piques our curiosity and often makes us feel better about ourselves. "My life may suck, but at least I'm not that screwed up!" St. Augustine wouldn't be half as popular today had he titled his book "Interminable Religious Ramblings." He certainly wouldn't have a Spring Break city named after him.

Geoff J.'s comment on my earlier post and his follow-up post at his site have prompted me to confess something. According to Geoff, studying the Church is all fine and dandy, but at the end of the day, you have to ask God for confirmation. You have to, in his words, puncture the veil. My confession is that I have never punctured the veil. Furthermore, I have never attempted to test Moroni's promise, despite telling innumerable people on my mission to do just that. Yes, I'm a hypocrite of the worst kind.

The question arises: why not? After all those years growing up, and during two years of a mission, why the hell didn't you ask? I was scared. I was scared that I would pour my whole soul into it and not get an answer. I was happy surviving off the occasional warm fuzzy and not taking the big gamble. I had plenty of doubts, but the Church was true enough for me.

This worked fine until one day when I was teaching a discussion to a woman during my mission. I recorded the event in my mission journal:

"... the reason [the discussion] was so disturbing was that [Elder X] gave his testimony that he asked God if the Book of Mormon was true and if Joseph Smith was a prophet and he was answered by a good feeling--and I thought, 'Good, I don't have to say anything.' So I told her I knew Joseph was a prophet and the Book of Mormon was true because I felt it inside. She point-blank asked me if I had done the same as [Elder X] and I said yes and felt terrible. I don't think that was true. I haven't asked and received an answer like [Elder X] but I know it's true; it's hard to explain. But she knew just where to pin me down and she won. That was incredibly disturbing. I felt as though for the first time my lack of testimony, lack of preparation was hurting someone else. I felt at that moment that if she didn't get baptized her blood would be on my head."

I was attempting to skate a Clinton-esque line and my investigator called me on it. What was I supposed to say? "You're right, I haven't asked either. I'm secretly afraid that my religion isn't even true. I don't even know why I'm here." Well, that probably would have been preferable to lying, but we can't change our past choices. I decided to go with the party-line and hope for the best. I still feel guilty when I think about that discussion.

The logical question that follows is, now that you don't believe, why not ask now? Well, I'm still scared, but perhaps the other way now. Maybe I'd get an affirmative response. (It is at this point, reader, where you can make the exclamation, "My life sucks but at least I'm not as screwed up as Ned!")

I'm beginning to have doubts about the validity of the whole enterprise of asking God. It seems set up to favor only one outcome. If we ask and don't receive a response, then possibly we weren't asking hard enough or we hadn't studied it out in our minds properly. Perhaps we felt nothing because we had sins that blocked the Holy Ghost or we weren't sincere enough. How can we distinguish between a negative response and a non-response? Maybe we didn't want to believe enough.

I think that's part of the problem. I don't want to believe. There are so many things that bother me about the Church, I can't imagine the size of the shelf needed to house all my concerns. How can I ask sincerely if deep down I don't want to have to deal with all the thorny issues? I think the Sunday School answer is that I have humble myself and be prepared to accept polygamy, blacks not having the priesthood, and Boyd K. Packer. I just don't think I can do that.

Does it make sense to ignore facts we don't like and rely solely on a spiritual witness? Does rationality not always apply in spiritual matters? Does it make sense to have different rules and standards for our knowledge about religion than, say, science?

My confession, besides the fact that I am a liar and a hypocrite, is that I don't trust myself to recognize the truth.

Bloggers to commenters: Drop dead!

2005-12-05T04:01:00.000-05:00

The bloggernacle has gone censor-happy. Feminist Mormon Housewives are discussing troll-prevention, while Rusty has thrown down the gauntlet: If I don't like what you say I'll ban you. (For the record, I am 100% behind Rusty. He has been more than patient dealing with obnoxious trolls, and even more to his credit, he left up the original offending comments for all to see.)

The previous examples represent the reasonable wing of the bloggernacle. Meanwhile, an anonymous e-mail tipster (thanks!) pointed me to the first installment of M*'s Rough Stone Rolling reading group. Comments have been disappearing from that thread faster than they appear. I've read some of the comments that Geoff B felt the need to censor (he even deleted one of his own!) and I must admit I'm mystified. They were neither vulgar, abusive, or off-topic. It seems that Geoff simply deletes whatever doesn't strike his fancy. After all, some things are true, but not useful. I applaud commentator Eric S. who continues to post comments, even after getting quite a few deleted. I wouldn't have the patience. Reading M* is kind of like what I imagine teaching history in the Soviet Union was like: you have to be prepared for everything to completely change at any time. I will give a plate of nachos (Flanders style) to whoever can create an M* mirror site that simply posts all deleted comments. Now that I would read regularly!

Over at the Bloggernacle Times, Grandpa Dave (as Ronan calls him) has seen fit to do some major surgery on a minor (and fairly innocuous) threadjack. For the record, I love Dave, but it is beyond bizarre that he feels the need to delete 10 comments about English-bashing on this thread, but allows these two train wrecks to plow on unimpeded.

Of course, perhaps I am asking too much of the man who first introduced the hated comment moderation queue into the 'nacle. I still read DMI (it has some great stuff), but I rarely bother commenting any more. Putting all comments into the queue is like calling someone on the telephone but making them send their replies to you on a postcard. Sure, I know my comment will turn up there in a couple hours, but by then five people will have already said the same thing. It's hard to have a dialogue on a tape-delay.

Of course, the dubious honor of King of Comment Deletions goes to T&S's peevish Adam Greenwood, who famously censored two of Ronan's comments. This prompted Ronan to complain publicly on his blog. Why don't I link to Ronan's complaint? Why, Ronan deleted it, of course.

I've said too much, I haven't said enough

2005-12-02T04:57:00.000-05:00

I stumbled upon the bloggernacle late in its life cycle. By Common Consent and Times & Seasons had already been around for over a year. Dave's Mormon Inquiry was almost two years old. Every once in a while, someone would link to an old thread on BCC and I would be jealous that I missed out on the fascinating conversations.

I had no patience whenever I heard an old-timer complaining about burning out. I was like the guy that showed up to the buffet 15 minutes before closing. Everyone else was sated and I was desperately trying to shovel as much free food into my mouth as possible. "No, don't stop now," I would say in my head, "I just got here!"

Unfortunately, I think I'm in the process of burning out. No, I'm not quitting, I'm just running a little low on energy.

Nine months ago, I hadn't been to church in six or seven years. I hadn't seriously thought about Mormonism since my mission. I was a Mormon in name only. Thanks to the Internet, I've finally been able to ask the questions I never could before, and talk about things that have interested me for a long time. Don't get me wrong, I still have a lot of stuff to talk about and questions to ask. I am still quite ignorant and have tons of Mormon-themed books to read. I probably know less Mormon history and doctrine than the average Bloggernacle blogger. I still have a lot of great Mormon conversations to have, but a lot of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked.

Nine months ago, I was wrestling with my faith and my identity as a Mormon. My faith stopped wrestling back a while ago. My question is: can one still maintain an interest in all things Mormon if one no longer believes? Is there an ideal tension between faith and doubt that fuels interest in discussions like the bloggernacle? I'm just afraid that I've ruined myself for future debates if I already know which side is going to win in my heart.

Range of plausibility; or, Does God keep the Church from appearing too true?

2005-11-30T13:10:00.000-05:00

In conjunction with my last post, I have often heard it said that in order to test our faith, God has suppressed certain evidences of the truth of Mormonism.

No Nephite artifacts? If we had those, there would be no faith required. In fact, just about any concrete corroboration of the BoM seems to be regarded as a potentially faith-shattering event. If evidence was uncovered that a man stood on the walls of a Mesoamerican city and preached about the coming of Christ, apparently people would start signing up with the missionaries in droves. If we actually had golden plates with reformed Egyptian engravings, people would join the Church solely based on intellectual facts, not faith.

This scenario seems to have a couple problems to me. First of all, it is not at all clear to me that more people would join the Church if there was more concrete evidence of, say, the Urim and Thummim, or a close correspondence between BoM and archeological history. I guess we might get a few more converts, but Mormonism is a lifestyle, not just a historical world-view. Even if we had Laban's Sword sitting in a glass case in Temple Square and allowed it to be examined by metallurgists, people would not be chasing down the missionaries to get baptized (except maybe sword-freaks, like Ethesis).

So my question is, does the Lord really suppress favorable evidence just to make it harder to be a Mormon and thus increasing our requisite faith? Would the Lord allow some damaging, false information to come out, knowing that it would destroy the faith of some? It seems to me that hypothetically, if certain information is so damaging that it destroys the faith of some, that it is an involuntary response. Perhaps we can force ourselves to believe certain things simply through sheer will-power, but it doesn't strike me as a particularly good thing or Christ-like. Would we be blamed if we stopped believing?

Why would the Lord try to confuse us in this way? It is my contention (sure to be controversial) that if we allow certain troubling things to damage our testimony, that it isn't really our fault. Would we really blame Abraham if he stopped believing in God after he was told to kill Isaac? It seems like good sense to me that any God that required the murder of your son, probably wasn't the real God.

I wish it were easier to believe. I'm not entirely sure that it's my fault though.

Conservation of matter; or, why did Moroni take the plates back?

2005-11-30T00:10:00.000-05:00

Having grown up in the Church, there are certain details about Mormon history that I have never really thought about before. These stories have always just been. Every once in a while an aspect will jump out at me that I have never considered as an adult.

One thing that has been bothering me lately is the fact that Moroni took back the golden plates from Joseph once he was done translating. Actually, that is not entirely accurate. Despite the fact that we say Moroni took the plates back, he didn't have them in the first place. They were sitting underground for 1200 years, not in heaven. Anyway, I think the common explanation for this is that we wouldn't have to have faith if there was a stack of finely engraved golden plates lying in the First Presidency vault. I don't know if I necessarily agree with this, but this isn't the part that bugs me.

What disturbs me is the lack of conservation of matter. Removal of an artifact from Earth to wherever the angels hang out seems to be unprecedented in the history of the world. God is omnipotent. He doesn't have to beam down here for cheeseburgers. It just seems odd that he would send an angel to physically remove something. Has God ever taken physical objects (not counting humans) from our world into his before? Was the city of Enoch translated along with all of their buildings too?

Secondly, why bother having the plates at all? We know that Joseph barely looked at them; often they were hidden in nearby woods while he translated indoors. He presumably could have made the same translation even had the plates never existed, just like his translation of the Book of Moses. Why mess with the reformed Egyptian and smelting ore to make plates, and laboriously engraving them if they are just going to function as a "faith intensifier" for Joseph?

Are the plates sitting up in heaven or have they served their purpose? If, say, we receive more of the sealed portion of the Book of Mormon, will Moroni have to physically deliver the plates back to the prophet? Why were they okay underground for so long, but now they have to be safe-guarded in heaven?

Obviously, I don't have any answers to these questions. The golden plates are very interesting because of their sheer physicality. It would have been much, much easier for Joseph to just get revelations through his stone, whether he was a true prophet or not. Why didn't he?

Ned in the city

2005-11-27T05:47:00.000-05:00

Though I had to endure another miserable holiday at the in-laws, trying to sleep on a sofa-bed with a bar in the back and a noisy cat mewling through the night, my Thanksgiving went surprisingly well. Unlike everyone else in the bloggernacle (it seems), I have no connection to any of the participants in our little community and had never met any before this weekend. Thanks to Steve Evan's gracious hosting, I met a raft of honest to goodness 'nacle celebrities at the bloggernacle soiree at his apartment on Friday night. I caught a train into the city and escaped my in-laws for an evening at least.

Everyone at Steve's was extremely nice. While it was odd to see people attempt to karaoke without the aid of alcohol, it just goes to show how fearless we Mormons are in the face of adversity. It was great to finally be able to put a face to such illustrious 'nacle names as Elisabeth and Kris. Plus, now when I read everyone's posts I will hear their real voice in my head. Ronan's comments in particular will sound even better with an authentic English accent.

The only sour spot in the whole experience was the fact that I left my Fall issue of Dialogue on the train ($10 down the drain). Perhaps a MetroNorth employee will find it and convert after reading 74 pages on early Mormon polygamists. Now that's a conversion story! Consider them inoculated against future anti-Mormon literature.

Thank you again, Steve. If I had an apartment that nice, rest assured I would never invite anyone like me over (or Rusty, since he seems to drop food a lot).

FAIR's scummy board and its scummy moderators

2005-11-23T01:35:00.000-05:00

I've never particularly cared for apologetics, but this just takes the cake. Over at the FAIR message boards they are discussing this case, which has also been discussed over at BCC. Here are some salient quotes from the news story:

"...Jessica Cavalieri, now 24, said she first told her church bishop in 1994 that Taylor had started abusing her when she was 7. She said her bishop, the local congregation leader, met with her mother and Taylor. But the bishop did not tell her mother about the abuse, Cavalieri said. Instead, he encouraged the family to work out problems through worship, she said.

"The girl was unaware her mother did not know of the abuse, and because her mother did not come to her aid, Cavalieri said, she felt ashamed and frightened to tell anyone else. She endured the abuse for five more years, while Taylor started abusing her younger sister, Ashley Cavalieri, according to court documents."

So she told the Bishop about the abuse and he did nothing. Other stories say that there might have been conflicting reports about the abuse, but frankly, the bottom line is that she told the Bishop and he sat on it for five years.

So how do you think the Christ-followers at the FAIR board reacted to this? (FAIR is a non-official, "amateur" Mormon apologetic organization.) They blamed the victim, of course! How dare she sue the Church! What a money-grubber! After several pages of criticism, the victim (or someone claiming to be her) then posted on the board. Were the posters shamed by the presence of the victim? No, they redoubled their personal attacks on her. At no point did the moderator appear. Finally, someone registered and insulted one of these bullies and was promptly reprimanded by the moderator for personal attacks. (To be fair, a few posters also jumped to Jessica's defense, but they have been shouted down by the majority and the moderators.)

I will post their comments because I think human trash like this need to be shamed publicly instead of hiding behind their scummy moderator.

One user with the ironic handle "Charity" left this message:

"The victim in this case is in a far worse situation now than she was. When you get revenge, you don't 'feel better.' You feel worse because you are disobeying God...you cannot forgive when extracting vengeance. Every dollar she spends of that settlement will drive her further away from a healthy state. "

Thanks doctor!

No, he isn't done. He tops it with this disgusting diatribe:

"Of course, she should have told. And should have told sooner to save her sister from going through what she did. I find that pretty repugnant that she didn't. And I am sure she is suffering pangs of conscience that she could not get up the courage to do that...But in sueing [sic] the Church, she knew she was not going after those most responsible, her father, and her mother for telling her not to tell. She went after money. Money would not restore her stolen childhood. It was vengenace [sic] pure and simple. In our mortal experience, vengeance comes from the adversary. Whenever you give in to the enticings of Satan you are worse off."

This is wrong on so many levels that I'm speechless. Did he just blame a 12-year-old for the abuse of her sister? Yes, he did. I usually don't get all riled up about garbage on the Internet but that makes me want to pound some "charity" into his face.

At this point Jessica (the victim, or someone claiming to be her) has joined the conversation. What words of comfort will the next poster bring? Scumbag #2? You're up.

"Enjoy the bling. It will be so much more comforting than addressing the real issues here...Were you truly LDS and not an opportunist, you would know [that the sex abuse reporting guidelines have been changed]."

Our final slimeball starts out by calling the victim "a greedy opportunist." He follows with a letter addressed to her:

"I'm sorry, but that last remark is simply untrue. It is clearly an attempt to claim immunity from criticism by exploiting your 'Victim'[TM] status. If you read this thread, you will discover what you presumably already know, namely that the Church made specific policy changes in 1994 to address this very issue. The criticism you have bought for yourself with your ill-gotten $4,200,000 is not for being an abuse victim (sob) but for your opportunistic money-grubbing. I don't have a problem with you going after the abuser; so you should. But siccing that vile ambulance-chaser onto us on the flimsy pretext that your stepfather was a member of the Church at the time was utterly cynical and self-serving."

If this is what its amateur apologists are stooping to, the Church should disavow them and their scummy message board immediately. How embarrassing and enraging.

No offense intended but I hope these people rot in hell.

Joseph Smith and Sudoku

2005-11-16T10:57:00.000-05:00

A relatively obscure but fascinating fact about Joseph Smith is that he allegedly often carried what is known as a Jupiter medallion in his pocket. This medallion was supposedly discovered on his person after he was assassinated in Carthage Jail. A Jupiter medallion or talisman contains several several interesting inscriptions, including the astrological symbol for Jupiter and various Latin and Hebrew phrases. It also contains a "Magic Square," a box where the digits add up to the same number (in this case 34) horizontally, vertically, and diagonally. The Magic Square on Joseph's purported medallion uses Hebrew characters to represent these numbers, which in total add up to 136, yet another symbol of Jupiter.

I can't help noticing that the Magic Square is simply another variation on the principle behind the newly popular Sudoku puzzles. For those (poor souls) who are unfamiliar with Sudoku, it is a number puzzle where you fill in a 9 by 9 grid so that each row, column, and 3x3 box have the digits 1-9 in them. There is no math involved, just logic, and it really is quite addictive. I have been enjoying Sudoku ever since the Washington Post introduced them earlier this year.

Now, admittedly Joseph did not use his Magic Square like I use the Sudoku puzzles, but I think both forms hint at the same transcendence of numbers. It is a satisfying feeling when all the pieces fall into perfect place against all odds, just as it is satisfying to see all the numbers in a magic square add up perfectly and improbably.

Though I may not be in church on Sunday morning, I will be filling out my Sudoku and occasionally thinking of Joseph.

[Edited to reflect that Joseph may or may not have actually owned a Jupiter talisman.]

My conversation with my converts...

2005-11-08T15:14:00.000-05:00

First of all, I want to thank everyone who commented on my last post. It really helps to have an outside perspective on these things. Anyway, I promised to report how it went, so here goes.

I called without having a chance to brush up on my Spanish, so it was quite a shock when they started talking to me. This family speaks fast, very fast. The connection wasn't great, either, so I had some difficulty understanding them at first. I spoke with the mother first. We had been talking for about 30 seconds before she got to the question I had been dreading.

The Mom: So, are you still strong in the Church? What calling do you have?
NF: Um, well actually, I moved recently.
TM: Oh, so what calling did you have previously? What callings have you had since the mission?
NF: Er, I actually haven't had any callings since the mission.
TM: [speaking to someone in the room] He must not understand me, he says he hasn't had a calling since the mission. [resumes talking to me] Are you sure you haven't had a calling?
NF: Nope, no calling. I'm not always there, so...
TM: It seems to me you have been lazy with regards to the Church.
NF: Uh, well, yeah, I guess.

At this point someone else grabbed the phone. I had great conversations with everyone, including one son who recently returned from his mission. We talked a little bit about my church activity but not too much. He said he was mostly around Americans in his mission. He didn't say anything outright, but I am guessing that this was a tough experience for him. I imagine that the culture shock of the mission is just as great (if not greater) coming from living in a single apartment with nine family members.

I got to talk to the mom again at the end of the call, and we had a more positive conversation. I tried to communicate to her that it was really her family that was great, not the influence of the church on her family. I also tried to say that her family probably would have converted even without us (her sister was a member before she met us), but she definitely didn't buy that.

I could tell she was disappointed with my inactivity but I am still glad I told the truth. Maybe this will help her be more open-minded if her kids fall away from the Church. Maybe not. But life is too short to go around pretending you are something you're not. Thanks for the advice.

I need advice, I need advice...

2005-10-31T00:57:00.000-05:00

A hypothetical situation presented to you, my devoted readers.

Let's say that you are a returned missionary with a somewhat shaky testimony (some days it has stopped shaking and completely fallen down). You haven't seriously attended church in years and probably won't ever be a General Authority, a Seventy of any Quorum, or even the guy asked to bring bread for the sacrament.

Let us further posit that you have recently regained contact with a family you baptized during your mission. The family has now been sealed in the temple, both parents have stake callings and one of the kids has served a mission. What do you tell them about your activity in the Church?

If you say that you don't go anymore, might not their testimony be shaken? On the other hand, shouldn't you always be open and honest with life-long friends like this? Which is worse, lying or hurting them spiritually?

Should we feign testimony to help those who have yet to struggle with theirs? This is a very uncomfortable situation; any counsel would be greatly appreciated.

Worst Halloween Costume Ever

2005-10-28T10:06:00.000-04:00

Wow, it turns out that I got sick of the whole you-know-what discussion a lot faster than I thought. I'm over it; let us never speak of it again!

Moving on, I wanted to complain about the previous owners of my house. I hate them with the fire of a thousand suns. Besides painting tacky amateurish murals on the walls and jury-rigging all the window treatments with push- and straight pins, they also left everything they didn't feel like taking with them. I mean everything. We had to have a special trash pick-up ($35) just to get rid of most of the stuff. We filled an 8 ft. x 8 ft. x 4 ft. cube with all of their trash.

The only amusement I get is sorting through all of their ridiculous catalogues that now come to us. Please know that I am only exaggerating slightly when I say they get every catalogue printed. Catalogues full of dog costumes? Check! Catalogues full of gaudy Victorian furniture? Check! Yesterday I got their catalogue for Christian Book Distributors.

It contains the worst Halloween costume ever: BIBLEMAN! Yes, that's the real name. Just for your information, the light saber thingy he's holding is called the "Sword of the Spirit." For perhaps obvious reasons, they don't actually call it a Halloween costume.

Only slightly lower on the child abuse scale is this doozy: the Faithgirlz Bible Backpack. I mean, wow. Note that the front pocket has a clear window so everyone can see you are carrying around the Bible. That's how the Phariseez roll, yo!

I'll stop. I could go through the whole catalogue. I think I became a little more Mormon just reading this thing.

Ned's Ultimate Banner of Heaven thread...

2005-10-27T22:58:00.000-04:00

We'll all soon be sick to death of the Banner of Heaven talk (and many already are, I'm sure), so I thought I'd get my licks in now.

I think what bothers me most is that my sense of community has been violated. By Common Consent, Kulturblog, and Banner of Heaven were some of my favorite places to hang out. I was looking forward to meeting my fellow bloggers at Steve Evans' Thanksgiving party. Suddenly, I don't feel like doing any of these things, Steve's half-hearted apologies aside. I'm the idiot because I actually thought I had a connection with these people.

Do I want an apology? No, I'd prefer not to get one. If someone apologizes, you have to forgive them or else you're the jerk, no matter what they did.

Steve Evans-- for someone who has spent so much time helping form this bloggernacle community, it is odd, to say the least, that you are so blase about crapping all over it. That's all.

I'll get over it soon enough; it's not that big of deal. But are these people going to be my friends? No, and that's what sucks the most.

Ex-Mormons are people too...

2005-10-21T01:31:00.000-04:00

The second-most famous couplet in the church, and possibly the only one which we still believe in is, "people can leave the church, but they can't leave the church alone." I used to think the same way. Now, I'm not so sure.

A recent thread on M* about the Church's efforts to track down members with no known address (like yours truly) elicited the usual comments about how if people don't want to be tracked down and visited, then they should just get their names removed from the rolls of the Church. Notice how they never use the word "excommunicated"; no, getting exed from the Church is apparently just like getting an unlisted number. You do it one weekend and then you never think about it again. (Please note: some people do just that, but this post isn't about them.)

Some believers (and I used to be one of them) just can't understand how anyone could be conflicted; there are only two options. Either the Church is true, and you should give it your all, or it's all a sham and you should immediately stop talking about, thinking about, or being interested in the Church that dominated a good chunk of your life. What strikes me is this almost neurotic desire to always be in control about what people are thinking about the Church. You should either think good things, or not bother thinking about it at all. This is more than a little unfair to those who suddenly find themselves unmoored by disbelief.

All I'm asking for is a little compassion. You can't possibly know what kind of familial and social pressures people are dealing with. Aggressively suggesting that inactives remove their names from the rolls is thinly disguised ideological bullying: you don't believe the exact same things as I do, so you must renounce Mormondom, cut all your ties, and stop discussing us. No matter how much tithing you've paid, how many hours you've spent in meetings, or how many years you served a mission, none of this can be part of your life story if you're not one of us.

I'm sorry, but I am one of you. No, I don't keep my name on the rolls to have something to complain about, I do it for my family. Heck, maybe I am trying to hedge my bets come Judgment Day, but I doubt whether my name is in an outdated computer system under a granite mountain will make much of a difference to Jesus. As I remember, he didn't much like bullies either.

Will blog for food

2005-10-12T04:16:00.000-04:00

As you can probably tell just from the sheer number of comments I've been leaving around the Bloggernacle, I am not exactly working at the moment (to borrow a phrase from George Costanza). I wasn't too concerned about a getting a new job after we moved, but now I have been unemployed almost two months. This should be the most enjoyable time in my life, but it's not. Sure, I can sleep till noon, but I always feel guilty when I wake up. I can lounge around the house, but all I can see is all the cleaning and organizing I need to do. I feel cheated: instead of living it up, all I can think about is the growing blank spot in my resume.

The only thing I can do is get a job. Unfortunately, there simply aren't as many companies or openings around here as I am used to. I had a hard enough time finding a job in D.C.; how am I going to find one in Stars Hollow? I think the solution is to start spending at least as much time on job-hunting websites as I do in the bloggernacle.

So, if you see me leaving too many comments or comments at weird hours of the night, just say, "Ned, knock it off and get a job!"

Various Stages of Mormondom

2005-10-02T06:17:00.000-04:00

I just wanted to announce that the good people at Various Stages of Mormondom have invited me to post on Saturdays (or, in the case of this week, very, very early on Sunday). I have already ordered my Mayor Quimby-esque "Saturday" sash to wear around the house. You can check out my first post, on Mormon myths, here.

I've always enjoyed VSoM, and I am honored to be a part of it. JLS is irreplaceable, so hopefully we haven't seen the last of him around these parts.

P.S. I have been getting an enormous amount of comment spam recently, so I have turned on "word verification" for the comments. You just have to type the word displayed there, so it knows you're not a spammer. Please email me (VivaNedFlanders -at- gmail.com) if you have any problems leaving comments. Thanks!

Snarkernackle!

2005-10-01T01:05:00.000-04:00

No one else seems to have mentioned it, but there is a great new site in the bloggernacle: Snarkernackle! Very amusing, even if it can't decide how to spell itself. Snark on that, Snarkernackle!

I've decided not to raise my children Mormon...

2005-09-30T09:01:00.000-04:00

...and I swear it's only partially because of this post on Times & Seasons. For those of you who don't want to read hundreds of comments (and who can blame you), I'll summarize. A T&S perma-blogger believes that, absent massive personal revelation, it is better to stay single forever than marry outside the temple. The rationale given is that mixed-religion marriages can "hamper... their children's spiritual growth" because kids will figure out that one of their parents don't believe. Even worse, they'll figure out that religion is not more important than marriage. I present the following quotation verbatim:

"The problem is that SOME [exposure to the gospel] may be worse than NONE. I've been around people from part-member families (and while I know not all are like this), ones that I have known have had no trouble taking the sacrament and then going out to lunch and ordering (gasp!) an iced tea. Not that that is evil incarnate, but it suggests that this person, at least, has fully learned the lesson of her youth: the church is nice, and it works for some, but it wasn't crucial to me (as your mother) that you be raised by someone who believes in it. She would have perhaps been better off raised without the gospel and then encountering it wholeheartedly instead of learning that 'the half-way covenant' is good enough."

I think this is the problem; this person believes the Church should trump all relationships, especially marriage. You shouldn't even consider marrying an outsider. Why would you? They aren't part of the Church, and the Church is the most important thing in life.

I don't want my kids exposed to these kinds of clannish, suffocating ideas, at least not until they are old enough to judge for themselves. I think it is a toxic mindset. And I don't think it's only Mormons that are afflicted with this; most churches (I'm looking at you Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Judaism, etc.) strongly discourage marrying outside of your religion. I whole-heartedly reject all this foolishness.

Which is more important, my wife or church? You shouldn't even have to think about it.
My wife will always take precedence over church. My family will always take precedence over church. Guess what? I hope my children do learn that the church is nice and okay for some people, but it's not the most important thing and it's not for everyone. It certainly shouldn't determine who you marry and it definitely shouldn't make you feel bad about yourself.

And that brings me to the second reason I won't raise my (theoretical) children Mormon: the church can't deal with sexuality. If I was scarred by the repressiveness of the church teachings growing up as a straight male, I can only imagine the hell it must be to grow up gay and Mormon. If my kids are gay, I don't want them them to be made miserable by constantly hearing about how bad of sinners they are, just for being themselves. There is a lot of ugly, unnecessary guilt imposed by the church that we could do without.

The number one lesson that will be taught in the Flanders' home is that being a good person and good to others are the only essential things. Everything else, including church, is fungible.

New online forum for believing spouses

2005-09-28T03:26:00.000-04:00

I came across this new site during my daily scouring of the internet: a forum for believing Mormon spouses of inactives or non-members called Faces East. This community is just getting started, so if you fit the profile, or know someone who does, check it out.

Rough Stone Rolling release party?

2005-09-26T23:49:00.000-04:00

With the release of the highly anticipated Rough Stone Rolling just minutes away, I have to ask, where is the excitement? To my knowledge, Deseret Book doesn't have any midnight release parties, and no members of the bloggernacle are headed off to the bookstore in their best Porter Rockwell costume. This is our Harry Potter, people! Supposedly, my copy left the warehouse today. We'll see if Amazon delivers it as timely as it did my wife's copy of the Half-Blood Prince.

I can't make any promises about staying up and reading all 768 pages straight through, though.

A delicate topic

2005-09-16T03:21:00.000-04:00

Mormonism and its relationship with homosexuality seems to be the hot topic. If Steve would ever bother to restart his Bloggernacle Zeitgeist column, it would certainly be this week's winner.

If you haven't checked out Silus Grok's guest stint over at Nine Moons, I highly recommend that you do. Frankly, it's tough to read about someone willing to sacrifice so much to stay Mormon; I have to admit I'm a little ambivalent about it. I think the Church is richer with people like Silus in it, and I think his openness can only help tolerance and understanding develop in Mormon culture. On the other hand, I can't help thinking that he might be happier in a church that didn't brand his most basic desires as irredeemably sinful.

For those of us not in Silus's situation, the question of the Church's policy towards homosexuality can be troubling. The way I look at it, there are a couple possibilities:

1. God approves of the way the Church is handling the "gay question" and...
(a) will never change.
(b) will eventually include all sexual orientations. The time is just not right now.

2. God disapproves of the Church's policy towards gay members, but...
(a) chooses not to intervene. He lets the prophets make their own decisions.
(b) not so much that it warrants a new revelation.
(c) he can't get anyone on the line.

3. God isn't Mormon/doesn't exist/doesn't involve himself in human affairs.

I don't know that any of these are really attractive options for me. This is a tough and sensitive subject. I truly believe that God wants all of us to be happy, or as close as possible; I guess whether this includes the Church or not depends on the individual.

Regular readers will know that I am a huge Morrissey fan. On his latest album, he had a song that seems very relevant to this discussion (especially considering Morrissey's ambiguous sexuality and proclaimed celibacy), called "I Have Forgiven Jesus." Some of the lyrics are as follows:

"I have forgiven Jesus
for all of the love
he placed in me
when there’s no one I can turn to with this love...
why did you give me
so much desire?
when there is nowhere I can go
to offload this desire?
and why did you give me so much love
in a loveless world?
when there is no one I can turn to
to unlock all this love
and why did you stick me in
self-deprecating bones and skin
Jesus-do you hate me?"

I can't really add anything to that.

BYU is the fittest school?

2005-09-09T12:30:00.000-04:00

The magazine Men's Fitness has apparently named BYU as the fittest college campus. I don't know if requiring a phys-ed class to graduate necessarily makes a campus fit, but I was surprised at the large percentage of students that participated in intramural sports. I wish my alma mater had more stuff like that.

Fondue with the Tanners

2005-09-08T16:23:00.000-04:00

It always depresses me when the bloggernacle stoops to petty (and seemingly interminable) back-and-forths like this recent M* thread. But at least Kaimi's links finally revealed to me the origin of the fondue story: this comment. I'm sure everyone already knew this, but I've been wondering about the origin for months. I finally get to be in on the joke!