The Blood is The Life 03-06-2012

[miss_s_b]

• But I’m a good Mormon wife - Salon.com
  Beautiful, heartfelt post about losing one's religion, and yet my biggest take-away from it is... SACRED UNDERWEAR? WTF?
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• “let’s pretend social interactions happen without social context”
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• sex is not the enemy
  Definitely not safe for work; but utterly awesome.
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Comments

[missdiane]

I hope that formerly Mormon woman doesn't get too much hell from her family and I admire her courage to take her story out in the open.

I had a Mormon friend back in Ohio and her and her husband were the nicest people you'd ever want to meet. But I just did NOT understand that religion of theirs. It seemed so weird and cult-ish and yeah, that magical underwear is real. I went to LA with the friend to visit her (non-Mormon) mother and while there she wanted to visit the huge temple there. As a non-Mormon, I couldn't go inside, but I could go inside the nearby shop with her as she bought some new magical undies.

Then there's their bizarre stance on drinks. Their Word of Wisdom restricts them from drinking "hot drinks" which they define as coffee or tea, but they keep the rules loosey goosey about drinking things like Coke. That and evidently hot chocolate and herbal tea are ok. So if it's caffeine, why isn't their a hard and fast rule about caffeine in general? It's just stupid.

I used to send her Christmas cards after I moved here but when it seemed she was only sending ones back out of a pathetic sense of obligation to do so, I stopped.

[andrewhickey.info]

I was surprised Jennie hadn't heard of the magic underwear already.
But as for the caffeine thing, it's no weirder than the Muslim prohibition against alcohol, which actually bans fermented grape and grain, making vodka and mead both OK...

[missdiane]

Seems like in most organized religions, someone's always trying to find ways around "the rules" which makes me wonder why they bother practicing at all.

[innerbrat]

It's no different for secular laws or ethical codes, though. People adopt guidelines to follow, and spend energy figuring out how to interpret those rules.

[missdiane]

Yes but there's a difference between "interpreting rules" and "skirting rules" and it seems that people will try to twist a religious rule to suit what they want to do as opposed to what the rule is trying to get across. Some of them even know what they're doing is not following the letter of the religious law but do it anyway because they purposely sought out a semantic loophole.

It also depends on whether your faith allows for freedom in interpreting those laws. For example, Catholics get their "get out of hell free" card option by breaking their rules and then getting forgiveness (which I personally think is ridiculous) whereas many other religions don't allow for that. You break the religious law, you should pay in the afterlife whether or not you're caught and/or punished by your fellow man. If you're trying to be a good practicing person in that type of religion, what's the point of deep down knowing you're cheating since if you were truly intending to be faithful to that religion?

[innerbrat]

People twist all sorts of rules all the time, is what I'm trying to say. Observe children in a classroom, drivers on a road, politicians in a Government. Whether the rules come from a god or from any other outside authority, human nature is one of constantly seeking justifications for ones actions. Because in many cases, reasons come AFTER the decision to do something.

The "get out of Hell free" thing is a moniker applied from outside to a theme throughout Christianity of forgiveness and redemption. It's not a way to sin and get away with it, but a way to atone for past sins. I've never met a single person, Catholic or other wise, who justified actions by saying "I can always repent later."

I don't know what other religions you're talking about in the second half of that paragraph (genuinely don't), but humans of all (and no) religions are constantly justifying their choices by twisting rules and codes.

See: vegetarians who eat fish because "they're not real animals" or feminists who turn tools like body-shaming on people they don't like because "it's OK to do it to THEM" or Liberals who support tighter government controls in certain special circumstances. (Poor, simplified examples).

People - all people - are all the time choosing actions that wouldn't stand up to their individual moral code, and then twisting the code to suit them. Religion is just an example.

[missdiane]

I do agree with a good deal of what you're saying but what I'm trying to make the point of whether you're gambling with a human law and being punished and then released (unless you're foolish or unlucky enough to commit an infraction so bad that you're incarcerated for life or executed) or whether you're gambling with your eternal soul.

Old school Methodists - as opposed to modern less hard-line ones - point toward your relationship directly with God. If you know you've done wrong or even if you don't know in advance but find out later, there's nothing you can do to undo the sin. I'm guessing there aren't a lot of those sorts of followers left out there.

However, as opposed to your experiences, I have met plenty of religious people that know full well that they're not following the letter of their religious law but do it anyway. For example, I tried to "honor" some of my Jewish friends at Passover by following the Kosher for Passover laws as faithfully as I could find information about. However, my friends, right from the get-go, would make excuses about why something or other "didn't count" even though it states pretty outright that they shoudn't eat it and would laugh it off when I would question them on it. I won't be doing that experiment again.

I have an aunt that became a Catholic and yes, she would actually know she was doing something sinful and justify that she'll be forgiven later (I don't have squat to do with this aunt, but that's less about her faulty religious followings and more that she's a raving nutball).

In one HUGE personal example of people knowing they're not following the letter of their beliefs, when I worked for the phone company, I actually got a call to install phone service for Amish people. They couldn't put the phone in the house, but they justified that it was ok to use this technology that they're not supposed to use at all by their beliefs since they requested it be installed in a shed out by the road. They're still going to use that phone so how is that not knowing in advance that they're doing wrong by the rules of their religion?

I agree with your examples about the other moral laws being skirted (vegetarians eating fish and feminists shaming) as well. I don't understand why people will come out and "preach" about their moral beliefs and then go counter to the letter of them either.

Yes, religion is just an example, but I see it as an example of a higher level of hypocritical action.

[andrewhickey.info]

"I don't understand why people will come out and "preach" about their moral beliefs and then go counter to the letter of them either. "

Because people's beliefs -- moral or otherwise -- are usually impossible to sum up in words, and because abstract principles often seem different when put into practice? I could say "I will absolutely never kill anyone ever, under any circumstances", and believe that to be absolutely true. Then tomorrow I could see someone about to unleash a virus that will destroy all humanity, and the only way I could stop her would be to kill her. I would have believed the statement to be true at the time (because my normal experience doesn't cover supervillain encounters) but I would break the letter of it in that unusual circumstance.

Fundamentally, moral rules are attempts to sum up the whole complexity of a human brain's reactions to all possible events in a handful of simple sentences. *Of course* there are going to be edge cases where they fail.

That's even more the case when those rules are created by someone else. I'm not a member of any religious group, but I *am* a Liberal Democrat, which means I signed up to support a huge body of policy, some of which I disagree with, some of which I don't understand, and some of which I don't care about. Nonetheless, I think that most of the time the Lib Dems have got things about right. I can easily see someone thinking "Well, I agree with the Mormons about the doctrine of continuing revelation, and about their nontrinitarian view of the role of Jesus, and I don't drink alcohol anyway... but giving up coffee? That makes no sense."

And that's presuming that people see religion primarily as a source of ethical truth, rather than as, say, a social group. I identify with lots of groups which behave socially very much like religions, but disagree with their 'dogma' -- I'm a Beach Boys fan but think the new album isn't very good, I'm a Doctor Who fan who has no time for anything Russel Davies ever did. I can imagine a similar mentality thinking "I'm a Catholic but I think the current Pope is utterly wrong."

[innerbrat]

Every Muslim I've ever known has interpreted that rule as "stay away from all alcohol," though. I feel it's a case of 'spirit of the law, not the letter of the law.'

[davegodfrey]

None of the Muslims I know who drink make any distinction about what's been fermented & distilled to make their preferred tipple.

[innerbrat]

That too.