Archive for category Atheism

Paul,

I’ll tell you a bit about myself qua LDS person. I was born and raised in the church, served a mission to Germany, got married in the temple, paid my tithing, did all of the right things. Then one night as I was reading the Book of Mormon in preparation for teaching a Sunday school class, a realization hit me like a bolt out of the blue: “This is a modern book.” I described this experience years later (anyone interested can see the article at http://signaturebooks.com/apocrypha.htm) as a deconversion because it had all of the inscrutable suddenness of conversions TO Mormonism that I had seen on occasion in the mission field. That night my life changed forever. There was no arguing with this experience. It wasn’t the end of a years-long struggle with faith. I had no such struggle. The realization came unsought, and unwanted. But it happened, and it overwhelmed me. Sometime later, I was coming back from an evening in San Francisco (my wife and I were living in Berkeley at the time), and as I drove over the Bay Bridge and peered into the darkness, I felt like I was staring into the abyss. EVERYTHING about my life was up for grabs. My most cherished beliefs were shattered like Humpty Dumpty beyond any chance of repair. No sane person seeks such loneliness and emptiness, or such terror.

Now, if it makes this experience palatable to you, you can dismiss me as someone who simply gave into temptation. But I’ve had temptation, Paul, and sometimes I’ve yielded and sometimes I haven’t. This wasn’t temptation. This was being run over by a truck that you never saw coming.

Does this make me an apostate? Perhaps, in the sense that I’m no longer active in the church. But apostate to me means someone who CHOOSES to leave, who deliberately turns his back on the church, someone who therefore by way of self-justification seeks to harm the church. I never did that. In fact, it may surprise you to learn that I’m still on the books as a member. So is my dad. I have never and will never ask to have my name removed. The church may choose to excommunicate me, but that will be their act not mine. I make this choice out of respect for my past. I did not EVER repudiate my church or my past. My world changed and I found myself removed as if by transporter to another place from which I could never return to meaningful fellowship based on shared belief.

But I owe my past something. I owe Brigham Young, my great-great-great grandfather something. On any number of points of doctrine, Brigham and I would probably be at odds. There is, for example, the question of the existence of God, which he affirmed and which I doubt. But on any number of other issues, he and I would have a lot in common. Brigham, for example, devoted his entire life to the notion of building the kingdom of God here in Utah. Not a doctrinal kingdom but a real-life, down-to-earth, practical kingdom. Strange as it may sound, I share that vision. My kingdom isn’t a religious one in the conventional sense, unless for you as for me religion is ALL about how we relate to each other and to the earth. I don’t give a rat’s ass about whether heaven is one kingdom or three or whether the three Nephites walk the earth or not. What matters is what effect our belief has on how we live in the here and now. Belief, it seems to me now in retrospect, is more often than not a distraction from the real business of life, which is what we make of it.

It’s for this reason that I still care about what the LDS church does. I happen to be in love with Utah. I love this place passionately, and it hurts me to see the mess of it that we are now making, with the church’s connivance or unawareness. Some time ago, I saw a documentary entitled The Power of Community  http://www.powerofcommunity.org/cm/index…), which tells the story of what happened to Cuba after the fall of the Soviet Union. We here in the U.S. have heard and seen some of the bad things, but few of us have heard about Cuba’s amazing transformation in positive ways. One of these was the refashioning of Havana into one of the greenest cities on earth. Because they had no oil with which to make artificial fertilizers and pesticides and because they had no oil to power industrial farm equipment and processing plants, Havanans had to reinvent how they grow and process food. Today, half of the food consumed in Havana is raised inside the city limits, and 80% of that food is organic. No city in America can touch these figures. All around Havana, every square inch of available space, from rooftops to patios to yards to empty lots has been converted into garden. People raise, process, market, and buy their own food, neighborhood by neighborhood. Similar transformations have occurred in education and health care. Despite their many problems, Cubans have a life expectancy equal to our own and a child mortality rate better than ours. Cuba is in fact an exporter of well-trained physicians and other knowledge workers. It is a pioneer in the development of phage technology, an alternative approach to antibiotics. And Cubans are reexperiencing what real community is about.

As I watched this documentary, I thought, why is this happening in Havana and not Salt Lake? Must we too go through disaster before we are willing to change, or can we muster again the sort of energy that enabled the early Mormon saints to build a viable, self-sustaining community here in the unlikeliest of places? Can we build such a community anew here?

We face problems greater than any the pioneers did. What’s at stake, although it isn’t yet our immediate survival, is nothing less than the survival of our civilization. I see an opportunity for the LDS church to play an undreamed-of role in remaking our society on sustainable grounds. Salt Lake is uniquely positioned because of its built-in social matrix and its history, however dusty and forgotten, in communal living. I absolutely believe that the LDS church can in deed change the world, by working to change Salt Lake City, along the lines now being pioneered by our communist rivals in Cuba.

When, therefore, I see the church squandering its real and political capital chasing gays when it should be building solar power installations, replanting ward gardens and farms, and urging the saints with all possible urgency to embrace conservation, I DO get angry. It’s not because I can’t leave the church alone. For twenty years after my deconversion, I wrote nothing and essentially did nothing in connection with the church. As far as I was concerned, the church was a non-issue. I have never attacked the church on doctrinal grounds, and I discussed my own story strictly as a personal memoir, not an agenda for apostates to gang-bang the church.

My isolation came to a self-imposed end when I began to realize how much my own life had to change in order to become sustainable. And I realized that however much I did on my own, it would probably come to nothing without a similar transformation throughout Utah, and indeed the world. Change must START with me, but it can’t end with me. That’s where Who Watches the Watchers and I part company. He’s a survivalist, I’m not.

So, I began my own underground, but now increasingly public, campaign to get the church off its ass and into the frontline, where it should be as an institution that claims prophetic leadership. If the church does not act now and we end up where climate scientists predict we’ll be, the membership of the church and the world at large will have reason to point the finger at the men downtown and say, “You frauds! How dare you talk to us about prophecy when you failed to act ten or twenty years ago on problems evident to anyone!”

So, Paul, that’s my story. If it helps you to sleep at night, call me an apostate. But our dialog is more than a debating contest. We face life and death problems to whose scope and nature the church has yet to awaken. Forget about me. Consider what YOUR role could be toward the church. If you, as a faithful member, think that things here in SLC are just fine, that the air we breathe is OK, that the fate of our snowpack and of our rivers is in good hands, fine. If not, what are YOU doing about it? Why aren’t YOU demanding action from the church? For let’s not kid ourselves, you and I and Who Watches the Watchers can build as nice a little survivalist kingdom as we want behind our domestic barricades but without the church’s cooperation Salt Lake City as a whole will remain untransformed. And untransformed, it is a bomb waiting to go off.