Money and Power

What two words describe politics better than money and power?

As Americans are coming closer to government program budget sequesters and higher tax rates for 2013, there is a lot of worry in the air. And anger. And fear. And spin. I hate spin.

I understand the need for this to be covered in the news. I am happy to hear about things that may happen in the future, but please keep your pants on.

Speaking of pants, merciful Noodley One, save us from the craziness that is happening in the Mormon blogosphere.  Wilt Thou decree, "Let them wear pants!" and lead us to equity and congeniality in the Mormon ranks.  But I digress...

I recently read on a friend's Facebook page that he is happy that our Congress is so glacially slow at change because it keeps them from screwing things up too quickly. A small part of me agrees because if Congress rewrote all the laws of the land every two, four or six years, depending on what group is in power, we would be in for even more of a mess.  So yes, thanks for being such a loser Congress. :)

Now if we could put a low-pass filter on the media...

Religion Is a Funny Thing

Religion is a funny thing. So is English, but that is an entirely different story. I find it really strange that at the same time I am leaving the Mormon church and religion in general, my gay dad is trying to find his way back into the Mormon community (while completely open about his husband and his prior excommunication). It's not that he believes the correlated doctrine of the Mormon church is true, but that he craves the unity and community that was forcibly taken away so many years ago when he was excommunicated.

It just struck me as a strange pair of unrelated events.

Makings of a Cult

Religion, cult, there's no real definition of which is which. It's more like, "if the shoe fits". I personally define a "cult" as any religion with fewer followers than Snooki has on Twitter.

--Bill Maher

The difference between a cult and an established religion is sometimes about one generation.

--Scott McLemee, "Rethinking Jonestown", salon.com

Many people have made claims that Mormonism is a cult. Having been on the inside, I can certainly see some of the reasons that people might say this. What I find funny, after hearing about the Russia's Young Guard recently protesting against Mormonism in Russian as a US cult/CIA conspiracy/totalitarian organization, is that all of this is just the pot calling the kettle black. Cult has a very strong negative connotation, to the point that some people argue that we shouldn't even use it.

As a kid, I can remember hearing from other kids in school that Mormonism was not a Christian religion, but a cult. It hurt a little, but I didn't really see any harm in my family's beliefs at that time. But what I am starting to see now, as I start to step further away from religion altogether is that ALL religion is a bit cult-ish. Before I get out the skewers and start roasting on this front, let us pull up some examples of what religion is doing for us today.

Religion has many faces. Some are pretty, others are downright ugly. Take, for example, the idea that all mankind is born in such an awful state that God himself (or his Son) had to come down and be killed in a most brutal manner to save us from original sin. If that is not ugly enough, how about the idea that if you don't accept Jesus as your personal savior, after you die, you will spend the rest of eternity roasting in hell. The Christians are safe, but what about the Muslims, who only believe that Jesus was a prophet? Historically, both religions are willing to die (or kill) to enforce and prove their beliefs, yet both cannot be right. The same goes as we move on to other world religions. Some nice beliefs might be love thy neighbor as thyself. Or the giant relief organizations sponsored by churches around the world. A sinister face that all religions (as well as political views and other cultural memes) have is that children are indoctrinated from an early age to believe that they belong to the only true religion.

Sure, you can call Mormonism a cult, but you have to accept that every other religion in the world has many of the same terrible cult behaviors. The only difference is that for other well-established world religions, the internal biases that people carry from their infancy convince them that their religion is not a cult. I think it is pretty clear that most sane adults would steer clear of a cult if they were approached by it in adulthood. Very few Christians convert to Hindi, and very few Muslims convert to Christianity (and some don't live to tell the tale or live in fear for their lives.) The reason is that those childhood indoctrinations have such a strong hold on the mind as to make all other beliefs seem preposterous.

This is not to say that all religion is bad. Religion has given us many wonderful things: art, music, community, etc. I just wish that we could somehow strain out the ugly parts and keep the good. I think the part of religion that makes it so cult-ish is that when you have a set of [religious] beliefs, you can see and believe nothing that does not fit within that paradigm. This makes it very difficult to see that there even exists grass on the other side of the fence, let alone that it might be greener. And if it is not greener, there is no point in leaving the comfort of your own pasture to seek the unknown. This is why every religion is somewhat cult-ish; very few can escape the fences in their own minds.