letter to Scott Atran - regarding his debates with Sam Harris and his views on religious belief

Here's an email I have just sent to Scott Atran:

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Hi,

This week I've been listening to Sam Harris's new book The Moral Landscape. In his book I heard his reference to your work. I did a bit of digging and waded through some of what you've written about Sam.

Anyway, I've been working to absorb what you are claiming regarding religion, and why you are claiming it. However because I was a hard core true believer in Mormonism, I can readily see that some of what you have written does not accurately address the actual situation at hand.

For example, in your book In Gods We Trust on page 83 you state the following:
"Religious traditions do not consist of cultural worldviews, theories, systems, codes, grammars, or any such determinate structures. The beliefs current in religious doctrine and liturgy consist of logically unintegrated counterintuitions and anecdotal episodes that evoke a much richer substrate of everyday, commonsense beliefs. These commonsense beliefs, which are usually readily available to everyone, remain implicit and are rarely articulated. Transmission and survival of religious creed and ritual depends, for the most part, on the facility with which explicit religious beliefs and practices are able to elicit, and render relevant, underlying commonsense beliefs..."

"...Core religious beliefs minimally violate ordinary institutions about how the world is, with all its inescapable problems, thus enabling people to imaging minimally impossible worlds that appear to solve existential problems, including death and deception..."

My first impression of your work is that you are approaching the entirety of the subject as a person who never was a believer himself. A highly trained and intelligent observer to be sure, but one who is still approaching religion as a blind man approaches an elephant (or perhaps at the very least a near sighted man).

I have had debates with various people on the net since 1991 regarding Mormonism, and the value of speaking honestly in public regarding Mormonism (and the value of protesting publicly and so on). On a near universal basis, the people who either had a soft exit from Mormonism (people who never really believed), and the people who never believed (non-Mormons & those who have had an overall soft & light type of personal encounter with religion) tend to be against protesting for example. They tend to see little value in speaking the truth in an up front matter of fact type of way. They tent to jump to the conclusion that people are better off if they were just left alone, and so on.

But, those of us who had hard core intersections with Mormonism, usually we tend to recognize the greater value of speaking out in a more vociferous manner regarding the abuses of Mormonism.

Now, I would like to reply to sections of the paragraph I quoted.

You wrote: "Religious traditions do not consist of cultural worldviews, theories, systems, codes, grammars, or any such determinate structures..."

My response:

Mormonism does consist of a cultural worldview. It is very much a system, and it consists of a set of codes. There is a specific and unique grammar to Mormonism. There are definitely determinate structures within Mormonism.

As I was leaving Mormonism I realized that what had been instilled within me from a young age was "human brain software," and this concept came to me before I ever learned of the concept of memes or meme sets from Dawkins. At the time of my departure from Mormonism in 1993. I knew little of Dawkins and his work. My Mormon exit journal can be found at
http://corvus.freeshell.org/corvus_corax/two/life_path/Mortal-Mormonism-November-26-2005.pdf
And the exit journals of hundreds of other exmormons can be found at http://www.exmormon.org/stories.htm

You wrote: "...The beliefs current in religious doctrine and liturgy consist of logically unintegrated counterintuitions and anecdotal episodes that evoke a much richer substrate of everyday, commonsense beliefs..."

My response:

In my own direct experience, the concepts of a religion such as Mormonism are presented in a stepwise and layered approach. The layers become more complex as the child gets older. A young child in Mormonism simply learns that "Jesus loves him." Whereas a 19 year old Mormon at a college or university located Mormon institute of religion that, for example, the Mormon God had literal sex with Mary the mother of Jesus.

Do I think the views of Mormonism were presented in a non-logical way? No. It was brain software from one human to another. At the age of five, may I say that learning about a sky god seemed a big odd. But I did become a full & complete believer in most aspects of Mormonism.

The beliefs were integrated. They were not counterintuitive as such I don't think. They were taught as truth. And we were taught that one verifies the truth through feelings (as per the Mormon scripture in Book of Mormon Moroni 10:3-5).

Were the beliefs counterintuitive? I don't think so. Maybe to a non-believer such as yourself they may appear as such. But to be honest they didn't seem counterintuitive to me. I was taught them. I believed them. They became integrated into my world view, my belief system, my meme set. I believed them and they felt intuitive. But clearly non-Mormons view Mormon beliefs as absurd, while viewing their own beliefs as valid. Although the experience of Julia Sweeney (Pat from SNL) with her leaving Catholicism, she left in part after she encountered the wacky beliefs of Mormon, and was thereby able to take a step back from her own newly-viewed-as-wacky beliefs.

You wrote: "...Transmission and survival of religious creed and ritual depends, for the most part, on the facility with which explicit religious beliefs and practices are able to elicit, and render relevant, underlying commonsense beliefs..."

Within Mormonism there is constant belief maintenance, and severe penalties for expressed non-belief. Not as severe as in Islam, but still being kicked out of your family is a severe penalty. And suicides result even today from being kicked out (especially among Mormons who discover they are gay).

I don't think the main reason Mormons believe is because of their relevance to what you call "common sense beliefs." If you were to say to a Mormon, some of your beliefs are common sense and some are not, they would respond to you that all of their beliefs are common sense, and that your lack of ability to value their beliefs is your problem (which they would like to help you fix via praying to the Mormon God so that you can get a feeling which would then serve as evidence that you should believe in Mormonism).

You wrote: "...Core religious beliefs minimally violate ordinary institutions about how the world is..."

My response: I do not quite know what you mean by the word "core." But if you ask a Mormon what they mean by core beliefs, they would say the following:

1. The belief that Joseph Smith received a vision from God & Jesus stating that other churches were not true.

2. The belief that Joseph translated the Book of Mormon from gold plates given to him by an angel.

3. The belief that Mormonism is the one true Church of God restored to the Earth through God's latter-day prophet Joseph Smith.

4. The belief that the current Mormon Prophet is also a prophet ordained of God to be His representative here on Earth.

5. The belief that in order to return to God in Heaven one must be baptized a Mormon, and live according to the key doctrines of Mormonism, so that one can live eternally in the Celestial Kingdom.

There's more detail, but these are the key doctrines, the core doctrines of Mormonism. And by their own use of the word core, these are their core beliefs.

Are they counterintuitive to you? Maybe. But because they are taught, in the phraseology of Mormonism, line upon line, precept upon precept, Mormons do not view them as inconsistent, at least not while they are true believers.

You wrote "...enabling people to imaging minimally impossible worlds that appear to solve existential problems, including death and deception..."

My response:

There's a bit more depth to this whole situation.

If you examine Mormonism you'll find that Joseph Smith created a God and a religion which mirrored his own aspirations and life. He slept with the wives of other men and also a 14 year old. He created a god which validated his views. Robert Saplosky has spoken of pschizotypal, and Joseph Smith seems to fit that, if he actually believed his visions (which to my eye as someone who spent 25 years as a hard core Mormon & Mormon missionary & temple worker & Sunday School president likely that he did), Joseph probably was such a person. A charismatic charlatan.

In Mormonism one works to become a god, so that one can have literal sex in heaven with many wives, to create spirit babies for worlds without end. And that concept of heaven matches up with Joseph's own life.

So Mormonism fulfilled a utilitarian goal of Joseph to spread his seed around as much as possible (in a similar manner to other charlatans such as David Koresh), and fulfilled his need to control others through charismatic charlotanry. But he probably believed his own crap.

Anyway, yes there's probably some utility to Mormonism. But there's also a great deal of pain and abuse that comes along with the package.

At this point I'm largely in the camp of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Carl Sagan, Ayan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, and Tawfik Hamid regarding religion. I am wary of cultural and moral relativism. I do believe and have observed that Islam has a higher propensity of driving young men to suicide than other religions.

Regarding Islam, and as per page 156 of Harris's latest book, do you feel you're ignoring the widespread Muslim belief that martyrs go straight to paradise? Or what about the higher propensity for suicide bombers being from Sunni Islam, as per the video at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxfo11A7XuA&t=7m30s

On the page at
http://www.edge.org/discourse/templeton_index.html
you write "Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett seem to insist that faith in god is a weapon of war. But in cross-cultural study after study my colleagues, most notably Ara Norenzayan and Jeremy Ginges, find no evidence that belief in god, prayer frequency, or meditation is related to intolerance or violence once coalition variables are partialed out..."

My response:

Which god? Which religion? It's not the use of the god term or the religion term that is the issue. It's which religion. Which god. What exactly is the concept of god in a given religion. What exact does a religion teach. What exactly is the effect of religious concepts, codes, precepts, memes, on a given population within a religion. These are the key points. And Islam shows itself to be a religion that drives more of it's men to suicide.

It's not about prayer frequency. It's about WHAT they believe, and how their believes make them feel, interact, and thrive or not thrive.

On the page at
http://www.edge.org/discourse/bb.html#harris
Sam Harris writes about you: "Atran makes insupportable claims about religion as though they were self-evident: like 'religious beliefs are not false in the usual sense of failing to meet truth conditions'; they are, rather, like 'poetic metaphors' which are 'literally senseless.'"

My response:

Did you make these quoted statements? If so here's my response: The literal views within Mormonism are not poetic metaphors. They are concrete claims about the nature of existence. The claims of Mormonism are not senseless in the minds of Mormons.

On the same page you also reportedly are quoted as saying "...But neither I nor any intelligence officer I have personally worked with knows of a single such case (though I don't deny that their may be errant cases out there)..."

My response:

You have not been digging enough. Speak with Tawfik Hamid. Watch his video at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxfo11A7XuA&t=7m30s

I wonder if you're purposefully acting as an apologist for Islam and for abusive religion?

To tell you the truth it's a bit hard understand exactly where you are coming from or what your motivations are in all these cases, and especially with regard to Islam. Do you think that they and we (former Mormons) don't or didn't actually believe in the doctrines of our faiths? We do and we did. And since each religion has it's own set of beliefs, some of which may be comforting, and some of which may drive men to suicide, you have to examine what people actually believe from THEIR perspective - from the perspective of the actual believers themselves. Not so much from your perspective as someone who has a very hard time understanding how a person could believe in seemingly absurd propositions. To the believer they are not absurd. They are not non-intuitive. We actually believed what we claimed. And some of our beliefs were very damaging & abusive.

Sincerely,

Jonathan
25 years in the cult of Mormonism
former Mormon temple worker, missionary, Sunday School president, and long time attender of the exmormon conferences held in Salt Lake City for several years
http://corvus.freeshell.org

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Here's some more links with Harris & Atran:

Sam Harris Vs Scott Atran Enlightment 2.0:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IahLaDYjXWQ

Sam Harris at Beyond Belief 2:
http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/beyond-belief-enlightenment-2-0/sam-harris

Scott Atran at Beyond Belief 2:
http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/beyond-belief-enlightenment-2-0/scott-atran

Harris & Atran at Beyond Belief 2006:
1 of 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VWO6U6248c
2 of 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wu6qQDphSGU
3 of 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRKbBsl6KaQ

And Harris writes of Atran: "...[HARRIS’ NOTE: Almost without exception, whenever Atran attributes a position to me, he has distorted it, often beyond recognition. Many of these false charges go unrebutted in our exchange, as it was just too tedious to keep taking his words out of my mouth. I did not reply to his second essay posted on Edge, as it was a mad tangle of irrelevancy and pseudo-argument. Under no circumstances should anyone trust Scott Atran’s representation of my views in this essay, or in any other context.]..." - as from http://www.samharris.org/site/articles/