Mormonism is a cult

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Gadianton
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Re: Mormonism is a cult

Post by Gadianton »

Physics Guy wrote:Sometimes people have habits and beliefs that are based on a different set of background assumptions than most people's, and maybe also on a different selection of which issues to ignore or to highlight. When it seems that this is true to a significant degree for some people, and that it must be the main reason why they think and behave as they do, that's when I think one starts to reach for the "cult" label
I sorta agree with this. But it's getting close to what apologists who read Kuhn say. I criticize Mormonism based on my own paradigm, and since nobody can escape their paradigm, it's all relative and Mormonism is just as valid as anything else.

That we tend to reach for the "cult" label if people are too different is the knee-jerk version we should be critical of. We don't want to just slap the label "cult" on somebody because they are so different. If that's all it means, then the word is only about prejudice, and surely it can be used by the oddball with just as much validity to describe everyone else who to them, are the odd ones.

There would have to be a way to determine levels of resistance to outsiders and difficulty in re-wiring fundamental ways of looking at the world. For the term to be valid, there has to be appreciable magnitude of hostility towards others not simplistically reflected by the others towards them, and much deeper barriers to re-orient that hostility than is found generally in people.

It would be like, okay, to a schizophrenic, the psychiatrist is the crazy one. Their world is real to them as much as the doctor's world is real to the doctor. And so in this analogy, the word "cult" could only be meaningful if there is likewise a way to say, notwithstanding the doctor and the patient being confined to their own minds, we can still realistically say that the patient is the one who is ill.
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Re: Mormonism is a cult

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Kishkumen wrote:
Thu Apr 20, 2023 2:31 am
Gadianton wrote:
Thu Apr 20, 2023 2:12 am
And yet, I find myself not agreed with among my fellow skeptics on this board, although it's been some years since it's been discussed. The typical view I've seen from skeptics agrees that Mormons have spiritual experiences, but that it's emotional manipulation. I think deep spiritual experiences are few and far between, and it's mostly fabrication to fit the community narrative. I've never really found myself agreed with by anyone on this topic, to be honest.
Maybe many skeptics do say that they grant people the mistaken belief that they are having spiritual experiences, but I have seen numerous skeptics say, in the case of Mormonism, that there is a culture of testifying until the witness is received, which could be called a form of lying. So, I am surprised that you say you have received so much pushback from fellow skeptics.
I don't think that the members who are faking it till they make it think of themselves as lying: more like exercising faith and attempting to suspend unbelief.
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Gadianton
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Re: Mormonism is a cult

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but I have seen numerous skeptics say, in the case of Mormonism, that there is a culture of testifying until the witness is received, which could be called a form of lying
True, the BKP method can be said to be based on lying. I guess that is a different context than the discussions I am thinking of from the board. Sure, people would agree with me in that case.

I'm kind of laughing here, thinking about fish stories being like a testimony, and the BKP method would be to instruct people to consciously embellish fish stories in order to really make the fish bigger.

My bishop gave me that lecture before I sailed off. Yeah, it's a good point. How much of that is really absorbed into members? I guess I don't think about it much because yeah, it's totally dishonest, but I don't think people really follow it. I think people think it's a great idea when they hear it, I kind of thought it made sense. But you're right, if critics think that members are doing this, then they would broadly agree with me about fabricating, although I'm talking about fabricating after the fact, not before the fact.
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Re: Mormonism is a cult

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Gadianton wrote:
Thu Apr 20, 2023 2:39 am
I criticize Mormonism based on my own paradigm, and since nobody can escape their paradigm, it's all relative and Mormonism is just as valid as anything else.
Yeah, I don't really think it should just be a stalemate between incommensurable world views. There's something about cultish thinking that is objectively wrong, in my view. This judgement that cults are wrong can't just be a verdict on the conclusions that are upheld, though, because that is just my-word-against-yours. If Mormons are deluded cultists just because of what they end up believing, then they could just as well say the same thing in reverse about me. So I'm looking for some kind of methodological critique that identifies something wrong in the process by which cultish conclusions are reached.

I don't think it's as simple as a principle like it always being wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence. That one seems like nice high moral ground from which to condemn other people, but I think it's only practicable if you treat your own approved beliefs with kid gloves; if you use fair standards for everything I don't think anything survives and you just have an unusable counsel of perfection that tells no-one to believe anything ever, but then you have to get out of bed.

And I don't think I'm looking for a logical fallacy. Mormon apologists may commit lots of logical fallacies, but so does everyone. Trying to have a logically rigorous view is like trying to have bug-free software, I think. It should be possible in principle but in practice it's so difficult that you adopt something that seems good enough and hope to be able to patch flaws as needed. If Mormons or anyone else are really working with a fundamentally flawed architecture, somehow, then the problem has got to be deeper than any one line of logic.

I'm trying to identify something like a pre-logical fallacy: a departure from best-practice thinking that happens at the pre-logical stage of deciding what kinds of issues to address, what questions to ignore, and what assumptions to take for granted. It seems to me that we have subliminal machinery in our minds that does a lot of this pre-logical work without us consciously noticing. Cultish thinking, I think, must be a kind of glitch in how this machinery works—something like cancerous growth, where a lot of the same stuff goes on that also goes on in healthy metabolism, but important limits are missing.

If cults are analogous to tumours, then probably the analog of growth is resiliency—the resistance of a world view to change. We all need a certain amount of resiliency; we can't be experiencing traumatic conversions every few minutes because every funny crinkle in a Corn Flake opens up whole new worlds and makes us reassess all our implicit assumptions. This resiliency is overgrown, in a cult, though.

I don't know whether I should be looking for cultishness as some particular basic mechanism that specifically enhances the rigidity of our pre-logical frameworks, or whether there are a lot of independent things that can go wrong which all have enhanced resiliency as one symptom.
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Re: Mormonism is a cult

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malkie wrote:
Thu Apr 20, 2023 2:56 am
I don't think that the members who are faking it till they make it think of themselves as lying: more like exercising faith and attempting to suspend unbelief.
I agree. But skeptics may see it as lying.
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Re: Mormonism is a cult

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Gadianton wrote:
Thu Apr 20, 2023 3:21 am
True, the BKP method can be said to be based on lying. I guess that is a different context than the discussions I am thinking of from the board. Sure, people would agree with me in that case.

I'm kind of laughing here, thinking about fish stories being like a testimony, and the BKP method would be to instruct people to consciously embellish fish stories in order to really make the fish bigger.

My bishop gave me that lecture before I sailed off. Yeah, it's a good point. How much of that is really absorbed into members? I guess I don't think about it much because yeah, it's totally dishonest, but I don't think people really follow it. I think people think it's a great idea when they hear it, I kind of thought it made sense. But you're right, if critics think that members are doing this, then they would broadly agree with me about fabricating, although I'm talking about fabricating after the fact, not before the fact.
Whether fellow skeptics agree with you now or not, I think what you say is much more attractive to a skeptical perspective. It certainly isn't acceptable from the perspective of Mormons. My disagreement with it comes from my attempt to get behind the binary options of truth or lie to understand the sociological nature of the phenomenon of testimony. My view is that the idea of spiritual confirmation is broad to the point of accepting almost any positive feeling as spiritual confirmation that the LDS Church is true. And, as long as people accept that position as viable, they can say they know the LDS Church is true with a straight face and clean conscience.

And, really, I don't see why they shouldn't be able to do so. I really don't see the harm in it. I get that a lot of people here see the LDS Church as a harmful "cult." Most conversations of this kind are subtly motivated by the desire to paint a religion as being a dangerous bogeyman to be avoided and to rescue others from. I don't think that is at all true. I just see it as kind of a boring waste of time that asks too much from members for what it gives in return. I don't think it is necessary for it to be that way, but that is my subjective view of what it is. Certainly it is that to me.

I don't really feel that way about Mormonism in general. What is fascinating to me about the LDS Church is the fact that it takes something as weird and wacky as Joseph Smith and Mormonism and turns it into dry toast and tepid herbal tea. That is practically a miracle in itself. How can that even be possible? But it is. The Church operates on the fiction that if Joseph Smith is exciting, you should shovel all of your time and resources into a bland corporate retreat on Sundays that just teaches you the same basics ad nauseam.

Eventually you will get tired of it. And people do. And they get pissed off. And they leave. And who can blame them?

How could anyone possibly blame them? Well, on the other side, people say to themselves, "How could I have done this for so long?"

It must be a cult. That is a viable explanation to them.

But, hold on, maybe it is just the case that you fell for the bait-and-switch, the same kind that exists all over the place. The same one that has people shoveling out lots of money to be siloed in Apple products and the like. Is it a cult?

Nah.

It is only a cult because people have to manage their retrospective embarrassment and regret for having, for so many years, put so much into something that took more than it gave back.
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Re: Mormonism is a cult

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It is only a cult because people have to manage their retrospective embarrassment and regret for having, for so many years, put so much into something that took more than it gave back.
Wow. That is really the least logical explanation I have ever read for why people would define something as a cult. It is an excellent example of the ad hom logical fallacy, though. : D
Ad Hominem

(Attacking the person): This fallacy occurs when, instead of addressing someone's argument or position, you irrelevantly attack the person or some aspect of the person who is making the argument. The fallacious attack can also be direct to membership in a group or institution.

https://www.txst.edu/philosophy/resourc ... minem.html
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Re: Mormonism is a cult

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Physics Guy wrote:
Thu Apr 20, 2023 7:22 am
I don't know whether I should be looking for cultishness as some particular basic mechanism that specifically enhances the rigidity of our pre-logical frameworks, or whether there are a lot of independent things that can go wrong which all have enhanced resiliency as one symptom.
In my view the place where Mormonism today still crosses the line is in regards to how it teaches moral thinking. Despite placing an intense amount of focus on moral behaviors, the underlying ethics being taught are based on following what one is told to do by church authorities rather than encouraging the development of moral reasoning. I think that problem holds true in just about any situation where one questions if an organization is getting into cultish territory.
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Re: Mormonism is a cult

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I don't think testimony bearers are lying when they repeat the mantra about knowing that the 'Church is true,' or that they've had a transcendent experience. When they say it, and others believe it, in their minds the utterance becomes true.

This programming starts at an early age. When the five-year-old is asked, "Why did you pinch your brother?" she'll invariably reply, "I don't know." She's not lying, but the parent will be insistent that she is. "Yes, you do! Why did you pinch your baby brother? Tell me!" We're taught from a young age that we have a narrative duty to justify what we're doing. Rather than say that the fleshy baby bum was just too tempting for a five-year-old to resist, the girl comes up with a story that Mom will accept. And since she didn't know her own motivation in the first place, whatever explanation her mother accepts must, to the girl, be true.

This conversation about transcendent spiritual experience is all undergirded with the unvoiced assumption that humans are aware of their own motivations. We aren't. In reality, we almost invariably mindlessly act, and then when we have to, we create a narrative to explain and justify our actions. After the fact.

Let me give a example. A man finds himself slathering huge canvases with oil paint, creating enormous landscapes of Baltic Birch forests. For years, that's really all the man paints, with everything in his prodigious output a variation on the same theme: Baltic Birch forests. The motivation for why he does this is something he gives it little thought to.

It remains that way until, one day, his wife asks him, "Why do you do spend so much time doing this, Bertrand?" then "And why did you, here at the end of your life, decide to become a painter?"

Hearing these questions, Dr Russell is, at first, flummoxed. He has given almost no time to contemplating to his own motivations. He's really only been focused on the process that's involved in the production of his art. Now he finds he has to create a narrative to justify his actions--because humans, by nature, must always turn things into a story. Bertrand pours himself a cup from his teapot. Then, without really even thinking, he answers--parroting what he's heard other artists say--something about having always wanting to be a painter; about how art is in his soul (indeed it is his soul!); and about how the creative impulse is in all of us, and that he has finally given his artistic heart free rein.

His wife then asks him, "But why do you always paint these damned Birch trees?"

This is another thing Bertrand has never given a moment of thought to. However, without missing a beat, he comes up with the only thing he can think of. Since Bertrand grew up in the shadows of Freud, Jung, and Marx, he explains about his proclivity to notice that everything is deeply mysterious, that all is shadowed by a racial memory of primordial woods, and that every individual tree he paints is basically caught up in a struggle against the domineering mother forest. And also, each copse of trees that he paints also represents the struggle of the proletariat against, um, something or other.

To do anything less than create a narrative for his actions would brand Bertram as an idiot. And no man wants to be thought of as an idiot by either his wife or the rest of the world. It's also true that once Bertrand gives his reason, that reason becomes true to him, in part because he can't think of anything better that will fulfill the need that humans have for stories that explain things.
Last edited by Morley on Thu Apr 20, 2023 3:05 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Mormonism is a cult

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malkie wrote:
Thu Apr 20, 2023 2:56 am
I don't think that the members who are faking it till they make it think of themselves as lying: more like exercising faith and attempting to suspend unbelief.
So faking isn't lying? If I start hawking an investment that I hope will return 20% per year and tell potential buyers that but I don't (yet) believe it, I'm just exercising faith? I'm not a fraud?
Apologists try to shill an explanation to questioning members as though science and reason really explain and buttress their professed faith. It [sic] does not. By definition, faith is the antithesis of science and reason. Apologetics is a further deception by faith peddlers to keep power and influence.
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