Plur1bus: Apple TV+'s indictment of Mormonism

[Whiskey]

Wow. Cool snark, IHAQ. You are way good at that. Thanks.

Call me old. Call me whatever the hell you want. Sopranos started with the 12-13 episode season. So did Breaking Bad and Mad Men and the early legends. This lazy ass 8 episode intro season is lame. 9 though, wow. That is the Spinal Tap Amp of premier seasons.

Your personal preferences have been duly noted. By someone. Presumably.

Thanks. Appreciated.

[drumdude]

The last episode dropped early tonight as a Christmas gift!

[Whiskey]

The last episode dropped early tonight as a Christmas gift!

Wanger thinks that's nice.

[Gadianton]

The last episode dropped early tonight as a Christmas gift!

Thanks for the heads up, I would have missed it. I may watch it today as a tip of the hat to one of the Mormon traditions it contemplates. But it does have competition. I noticed yesterday that Season 2 of Fallout is here.

[Gadianton]

I was able to catch both episode 1 of Fallout and episode 9 of Pluribus. Both were very good. I very much enjoyed episode 9.

Moderate spoilers.

Episode 9 is a harsh condemnation of Mormonism and delivered right before Christmas, that has to hurt. In the opening scene, the village girl goes through with joining the unity. What happens is predictable, but still striking to watch. So here's this village with its little customs and cute scenery, and as soon as the deed is done, nothing about the place or culture fulfills a purpose any longer, and so everyone simply leaves. This is incredibly problematic for Mormonism. The rituals and community are all for engagement, once people "get it" and are fully inducted, the facade is pointless. I think the revelation here is that the unity isn't "happy" they just claim to be in order to lure people who value happiness still. The social Trinity, likewise, isn't happy. The people at the core dutifully fulfill their role -- the brethren, the "main families" of the ward, they are prisoners as it were, tasked with creating an illusion for those who aren't core yet. There is no culture, there is no friendship, love, or anything for the inner circle. It's pure instinctual duty. Eternal progression collapses into gray goo. The social trinity Dan prizes so much equates to nihilism.

The much longer portion of the show featuring Carol and Zosia and Manousos was quite engaging and fun to watch. I don't feel I need to say much about it, because if you watch closely, I think you'll see that it's essentially a repeat of the opening scene but in a slow boil, with the details slowly exposed. You really get just how nihilistic the doctrine of the social trinity is along with the doctrine what we can become one with Christ also. Oh, a gratuitous bonus point here: Carol reveals to Manousos that when she was abandoned by the unity, it was for forty days. ah...

[I Have Questions]

I haven’t been watching the series, but your post interested me—I ended up asking myself: If you can ask anything from God as long as it is within his will what is the point of asking? If God only gives what is already His will, asking seems pointless.

Most everyday religious people believe something like a hybrid that accepts that God’s will is broadly fixed but has some flexibility, some things change only if asked but others won’t change no matter what, and the asking has value itself because it conforms the asker to God’s will.

I think there is some interesting things about Mormonism to unpack here. In Mormonism, you can pray for stuff and he will answer you based on what he thinks, not in what you think. Supposedly. Which leads to the question “If you need something, but don’t ask, will God still grant it you?” However, we know that some people who really need something (let’s say a child praying for the abuse to stop) pray for help and don’t receive it. This is where Pluribus and Mormonism take separate roads. The “We” in Pluribus will grant you whatever it is you ask of them, with the caveat that they won’t deliberately kill, cause harm, or lie. However Mormon God does not grant you whatever you ask of Him, he will deliberately kill, cause harm, and is prepared to lie to you (Holland’s ‘wrong road’ for example).

[Limnor]

I haven’t been watching the series, but your post interested me—I ended up asking myself: If you can ask anything from God as long as it is within his will what is the point of asking? If God only gives what is already His will, asking seems pointless.

Most everyday religious people believe something like a hybrid that accepts that God’s will is broadly fixed but has some flexibility, some things change only if asked but others won’t change no matter what, and the asking has value itself because it conforms the asker to God’s will.

I think there is some interesting things about Mormonism to unpack here. In Mormonism, you can pray for stuff and he will answer you based on what he thinks, not in what you think. Supposedly. Which leads to the question “If you need something, but don’t ask, will God still grant it you?” However, we know that some people who really need something (let’s say a child praying for the abuse to stop) pray for help and don’t receive it. This is where Pluribus and Mormonism take separate roads. The “We” in Pluribus will grant you whatever it is you ask of them, with the caveat that they won’t deliberately kill, cause harm, or lie. However Mormon God does not grant you whatever you ask of Him, he will deliberately kill, cause harm, and is prepared to lie to you (Holland’s ‘wrong road’ for example).

I honestly don’t understand how trust survives if God is understood as lying to you.

[I Have Questions]

I think there is some interesting things about Mormonism to unpack here. In Mormonism, you can pray for stuff and he will answer you based on what he thinks, not in what you think. Supposedly. Which leads to the question “If you need something, but don’t ask, will God still grant it you?” However, we know that some people who really need something (let’s say a child praying for the abuse to stop) pray for help and don’t receive it. This is where Pluribus and Mormonism take separate roads. The “We” in Pluribus will grant you whatever it is you ask of them, with the caveat that they won’t deliberately kill, cause harm, or lie. However Mormon God does not grant you whatever you ask of Him, he will deliberately kill, cause harm, and is prepared to lie to you (Holland’s ‘wrong road’ for example).

I honestly don’t understand how trust survives if God is understood as lying to you.

Well the key to it is being a willing dupe retrospectively. Here, let the Hollands show you how...

It was dusk, and we had only gone a bumpy mile or two when we came to a fork in the road. We stopped. Dad was not certain which trail we had come in on. He knew he had to make the right decision. There wasn’t much light left, light he desperately needed to ensure he could make the correct turns the rest of the way home.

Wasting time on a wrong road now meant we would face the difficult task of making our way home in the dark.

As we did whenever we had a family problem or concern, we prayed. After we both said amen, Dad turned and asked me what I thought we should do. I answered and said, “All during the prayer, I just kept feeling, ‘Go to the left.’”

Dad responded, “I had the exact same impression.”

This was my first experience receiving and recognizing revelation.

So, left turn = revelation, both felt the exact same spirit of revelation.

We started down the dirt road to the left. We had traveled only about 10 minutes when our road came to a sudden dead-end. My father promptly whipped the truck around, roared back to that fork in the path, and started down the road to the right. Fortunately, there was still just enough light to help us navigate the web of dirt roads that would take us home.

We were almost back to St. George, now on roads my father knew well, and the thick darkness of the night was lit by pinholes of thousands of stars.

I was troubled. With my head resting on my dad’s leg and my legs stretched across the seat, I asked, “Dad, why did we both feel like Heavenly Father told us to go down the road to the left when it was the wrong road?”

My dad said, “Matty, I’ve been thinking and silently praying about that same thing all the way home, because I really did feel a very distinct impression to take the road to the left.”

I was relieved that my first experience with revelation had a “second witness.”

He continued, “The Lord has taught us an important lesson today. Because we were prompted to take the road to the left, we quickly discovered which one was the right one. When we turned around and got on the right road, I was able to travel along its many unfamiliar twists and turnoffs perfectly confident I was headed in the right direction.

“If we had started on the right road, we might have driven for 30 minutes or so, become uneasy with the unfamiliar surroundings, and been tempted to turn back. If we had done that, we would have discovered the dead-end so late that it would have been too dark to find our way back in totally unfamiliar territory.”

Do you see how they managed to gaslight themselves in order to protect what they wanted to believe? They convinced themselves that the wrong road was the right road to take, and taking the right road initially would have been the wrong road, so they really did experience revelation and God's lie wasn't really lying. Get it?

[Limnor]

Do you see how they managed to gaslight themselves in order to protect what they wanted to believe? They convinced themselves that the wrong road was the right road to take, and taking the right road initially would have been the wrong road, so they really did experience revelation and God's lie wasn't really lying. Get it?

Yeah I think I get it. Trust is maintained because revelation is always correct after you get where you didn’t know you were going. It’s the hoppy taw hopscotch game.

I’ve been thinking about who bears the burden—or fault if you want to look at it that way. Joseph seems to bear responsibility for introducing the idea that revelation can be wrong but still right in purpose. But the believer bears responsibility for consent, for accepting that trust no longer requires truthfulness, only getting where they want to go. And sometimes getting where they didn’t want to go, until it is explained that the believer really did want to go there.

[I Have Questions]

Do you see how they managed to gaslight themselves in order to protect what they wanted to believe? They convinced themselves that the wrong road was the right road to take, and taking the right road initially would have been the wrong road, so they really did experience revelation and God's lie wasn't really lying. Get it?

Yeah I think I get it. Trust is maintained because revelation is always correct after you get where you didn’t know you were going. It’s the hoppy taw hopscotch game.

I’ve been thinking about who bears the burden—or fault if you want to look at it that way. Joseph seems to bear responsibility for introducing the idea that revelation can be wrong but still right in purpose. But the believer bears responsibility for consent, for accepting that trust no longer requires truthfulness, only getting where they want to go. And sometimes getting where they didn’t want to go, until it is explained that the believer really did want to go there.

There's an example in book (I think it's Black Box Thinking by Syed) where he references a UFO Doomsday cult (The Seekers). The cult was lead by a charismatic leader (actually a female in this case) who prophesied that the world would be destroyed by a flood on a specific date. Her followers committed to the prophesy, they gave up jobs, relationships, money etc because they believed that a UFO would arrive and rescue them before the apocalypse. The specific date for the doomsday event came and went. Nothing happened. Instead of turning on the leader whose prophesy had failed, and instead of abandoning the now demonstrably incorrect belief, the core followers simply reframed the failure. They claimed that their faith had saved the world from disaster. The world had been spared because of their devotion. The failed prophesy became "proof" of their importance and of the correctness of their beliefs. In other words, the failure strengthened their belief, and they doubled down on it, rather than weakening it. Core Mormons are on the same spectrum as the The Seekers.

Syed quotes Leon Festinger (the guy who studied The Seekers) saying something like "The more someone has sacrificed for a belief, the harder it becomes to abandon it — even when that belief is shown to be false."