anyway.

It's kind of you to say so, Porter!

(For the record, when I say that not one of them was my friend, I'm talking about the guys in the ward in New York State. I didn't make any LDS friends after we moved out of Utah. Porter was my friend in junior high and early high school, in Provo.)

Also, I don't think this post quite counts as my penance.

Reading, and probably will be rereading a couple of times today, with interest. One quick note about this:

"When I turned 18, God's representatives anointed me with consecrated oil, lay their hands on my head, and ordained me an Elder of the Melchizedek Priesthood."

Ordinations aren't done with oil, and to my knowledge haven't been. I'm not trying to be a prick or anything, but there's genuine curiosity: Are you _sure_ you were anointed when you were ordained? This distinction probably matters to nobody but me - just curious.

Also, you lose your 10 to 1, and from everything you've written about your father, I'd have liked him a lot.

You know, no, I'm not at all sure that I was anointed when I was ordained. In fact, now that you say it, all my distinct memories of being anointed were at home. I'm sure you're right.

And for Brand's sake I should point out that all the Mormon churches I've ever attended have been in Utah or in the area around Palmyra NY - so I've never seen the church outside its hardcore. That may be why they all seemed the same to me.

I find the secrets here fascinating.

How many beers will I have to buy you to hear about the baptism by fire and the secret training?

yrs—
—Ben

P.S.  Yes, I have an ulterior motive.  I want to stack it up against my secret training.

The best world ever is when you have a Priesthood relationship with someone.

Divine authority is indicated by earthly authority. Now that is a runaway feedback loop waiting to happen.

But even without stewardship, like say if you're going away to college at 18, where you don't have any kind of Priesthood relationship with your classmates and dormmates at all - even without it, you're still an exorcist and you can still be of enormous service to them. Devils are at work in their lives making them miserable; your service can give their consciences strength and protection. You're limited, but you still have the authority of God in Christ's name to cast demons out, and that's sure not nothing.

The Protestant reformation was powerful stuff. No need for a priest: dyi exorcisms. It underlies a lot of neopagan practice too (you are your own priest/ess) which can lead to similar mindfrakks and excesses.

But man, that line about listening to your heart when talking to your friends is seductive.  It is tempting to think that you've got a way to help others be good and be happy.  Removing the hierachical basis of being saved vs. not, you get something like co-counseling. Though, the whole concept of needing to be exorcised of bad thoughts gives it a completely different spin.

The line may be, for both LDS, pagan or whatever type of monkeying is that if you are deciding for someone else what is a bad thought or feeling, you are crossing a line.

Ben, the "secret" training was just words to say, with some underlying cosmology, and a learned sense for situation that I'd describe now as aesthetic. Nothing secret, just technical and strange. Probably fully half of it appears (sometimes thinly disguised) in Dogs in the Vineyard.

Baptism by fire's just the same as born again.

The secrets start with a person's endowment in the temple. I never received my endowment, so I don't know firsthand.

Emily, yeah.

Sometime I'll sit down and think about what being a pagan was like.

I always wanted something verifiable out of paganism - no surprise, given where I was. Also no surprise I didn't get it. The way I approached paganism in those days strikes me this morning as funnily wrongheaded.

Hey Vincent, did you watch Big Love? We did, and had lots of thoughtful discussions because of it (general concensus: poygamy would be way too hard to do in a way that gives everybody what everybody needs out of a relationship). Just thinking about that while i read about some of the wives from that site you linked.  If you want to keep this thread from becoming this thread redux we can talk about this another time.

"Probably fully half of it appears (sometimes thinly disguised) in Dogs in the Vineyard." Only half? The first time I read DitV I was all "wow... how does anybody who didn't grow up in the church get any of what Vincent's talking about here..."

The way I figure it, polygamy

amory can give everybody what they need out of relationships if it's a big web, but not if it's a hub with spokes. Mormon polygamy supports the latter more strongly than the former.

In blood relationships and friendships, we're super comfy with big webs where everybody gets what they need. In sexual relationships, we aren't. So it goes, I guess.

I watched most of the first episode of Big Love. The sensation was like, it was like they kept presenting things to me for me to be shocked by, and I wasn't. They were like "shocking! And ... more shocking!" and I was like, "ho hum." Kind of like Brokeback Mountain.

(I should learn not to reject shows based on half the first episode. First time I watched Firefly I turned it off right before the good stuff.)

Confirmed: purchased beer = useful monologue and Q&A session, about the "goofy sexy sought-after" thing. Ben Lehman can stand there as my visual aid, or if he can't make it, I'll just have his photo stuck on a stick, to wave once in a while and talk in a Ben-voice.

Best, Ron

P.S. Yes, this is relevant to Vincent's points. It's easy to be distracted by all the gaudy demon-talk and thus miss them.

Vincent,

I did, as a matter of fact, know about the baptism by fire—and the constant debate as to if it is an event or a process. It's one of those amusing things that I watched with the same sort of smile on my face that I reserved for the questions of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, even at my most faithful. Like the Adam/God issue or the "Adam as God's best friend from God's mortal life being given a second chance in this world" issue, I just couldn't take it seriously either way.

The Heavenly Mother thing is one that I find most unfortunate. My mother, when she converted to the church at 16 (the only missionary baptism in the Bismark North Dakota mission in 2 years, and she walked herself in after reading the Book of Mormon to prove it was false and discovering that she believed it) was told that Heavenly Mother was watching over her and had a special relationship with her. Girls don't get told that anymore. Instead they get to see the boys get the authority of God, while they get prepared to have children and be good mothers and wives.

My mother also always used to teach her Behives that there are, of course, multiple Heavenly Mothers and that its only logical that we know it. After all there would have to be a Heavenly Mother for God to become God (no 3rd Celestial level without temple marriage, yo) and that he would also have been bound to Mary mother of Jesus (no impregnating women you aren't married to, yo) and so has at least two wives that we know of through simple logical deduction. The girls always reacted to that with a bit of shock, but eventually thought it was kinda funny. Notably, many of them told their parents this and their parents had the same shock—as they'd never thought about it. Most born in the faith grandparents, otoh, didn't have that shock as they'd been taught that stuff when they were kids.

And no, my mother never got into trouble for it. Or even had anyone in the stake tell her she was wrong. In general my family didn't have that problem.

As for the "angel on one should, devil on the other" I was brought up to believe that was specifically false, or at best metaphorical. See, I never even heard about the whole "devil companion" until I got told it by a weird Utah Mormon that had just moved to the ward when I was 11 or so. When I asked my dad about it he rolled his eyes and said, "Yes, priesthood holders and the baptized get tempted a lot. We're targets for it—but we don't have a constant devil on our backs. The Holy Ghost is our companion, devils are just trials that come and go."

Its funny, because my father is a very devote and faithful man, but he's not a superstitious one. Much of the time he talks about devils more in terms of metaphor than actuality. There were a couple times where that was different, though he never told me the full story I think he did actually do a full out really real LDS exorcism once upon a time, and because of that was never able to take the lesser "get rid of a bad mood" exorcism seriously. When once upon a time I asked him how I would know if something was a devil or just a trial or a bad mood he told me something to the effect of "if you aren't in mortal terror for your soul or your life, it probably isn't a literal devil."

Also,

I never used my priesthood status to get sex. I was to constantly surrounded by other Mormons for it to matter one way or the other.

I did, however, use my smarty-brains and ability to argue the gospel inside and out to get dates all over the place. Because being smart, passionate, and speaking directly to a girl about something she cares about is amazingly effective at getting them to overlook the fact that you're a raging dork.

Man, this is interesting stuff.

And I challenge you to drink a whole beer in the time it takes to tell a story!

I was gonna say. Buy me one beer and you get all my stories, plus half a beer.

Ron—

I'm an even better model now, as I'm getting my jewfro on and thus look extra goofy.

yrs—
—Ben

On the subject of fourteen year old wives and people not being aware of them, I am sometimes fond of pointing out to my (Mormon) father that my great-great-grandfather, his great-grandfather, gave away his fourteen year old daughter to Joseph Smith as a wife, particularly when he plays the old "we can't judge early Mormon polygamy by our modern standards" card.  He will be taken aback, and ask for a reference, and say, "Where did you read that?  On the Internet?"

And I'm like, "The internets wouldn't lie to me, would they?"  But, of course, it's just conversation fodder, so I don't run to the nearest reference library to provide him a proper citation.

Brand: "Adam as God's best friend from God's mortal life being given a second chance in this world"

I never heard that one! That's great!

About Heavenly Mother: one person I recall shifted uncomfortably and said that he bet that every world was peopled with the children of just a single Heavenly Mother. So just like even though God has all these brothers and cousins and uncles and fathers and grandfathers, we have only one Heavenly Father, we have only one Heavenly Mother.

I shrugged and granted him the wiggle room.

Also, I'm from VERY superstitious people. They'd say "literal," of course, and I'd grant them that too.

Matt, I got your order and I was like "holy CRAP, I just sold my game to a KIMBALL in SALT LAKE CITY." You probably remember.

I had a wicked crush on one of your cousins my freshman year in high school. Or wait, maybe she was a Benson. Can't recall.

Yep, Vincent, I remember that reaction well.  Here's a story kind-of related, and maybe even on topic.

I'm eleven years old, and I'm a little geek-boy, who is also a little Mormon boy living in Salt Lake City.  I like collecting board games, and I like reading the rules to board games, and I think the Atari 2600 is the coolest thing around, but I don't have one.  As a boy with these interests, I see red box D&D in the K.B. Toy and Hobby in the Fashion Place Mall in Salt Lake, and think I need to add it to my board game collection, even though I kind of understand it isn't a board-game fully, but something a little different.

So, I save up my allowance, which was five dollars a week, and I don't remember how many weeks it took me to get there, but eventually I do.  Now this was probably around the same time Ted Bundy was in law school at the University of Utah, and around the same time he was picking up nice young blond girls from that same Fashion Place Mall, so it seems slightly strange that I was allowed to walk to the mall by myself as an eleven year old boy, but I was.  So, I walk to the mall by myself, and I spend my saved up allowance on Red Box D&D.

I bring my first D&D set home, and my mother is like, "Oh no you don't!  I've heard about that game, and that box is full of demons!  It will take you away from the church!  You can't play it—take that back to the store and get a refund!"  I probably cry, but I don't remember really.

So, my dad takes me back to the store, and I try to explain to the teenage girl behind the counter that I have to take the game back and get a refund because my mom says it is evil.  The teenage girl is kind of like, "What?" but somehow she agrees since I have my receipt and I bought it the same day.

My memory of this experience is that it planted a seed in my brain that said, "Well, since boxed D&D is clearly not full of real demons, that is kind of stupid that the Bishop or whoever said it was.  I mean, boxed D&D taking me away from the church?  C'mon.  That's not going to happen."

But, you know what?  If you look at it the right way, my Mom was kind of right.  Specifically, right in the sense that this whole experience planted a seed which helped shape my teenage and adult outlook on the Church.

Matt,

That is awesome.

My equivalent experience, in South Texas, was of the girl at the store telling me I was a devil worshiper for buying D&D, and then my dad reading the book and telling me that the word "Demihuman" was stupid because elves were not "less than humans."

He did end up playing with me years later. I then moved to Cali and had friends who moved from Utah whose parents wouldn't let them play D&D because of the evil. I think that is when my Utah-Mormon hate started. Funny that such things come out of the reactions to a game.

Ah poor me, only Nietzsche understands my pain.

When you see me, ask me what it's like to be a kid when your dad can know the thoughts and intents of your heart, and can exorcise bad feelings out of you with a gesture and some words. Ask me and buy me a beer; you're in for some long talking.

I will hold you to that.  I can't imagine, no, strike that, I can imagine just enough to go, damn that's scary.

Actually, when I was very little, I did think that my parents could know my thoughts, but that they did nothing about them.

When I was a kid, just after my Bar Mitzvah, probably, one of my father's co-workers told him to watch out for my D&D playing.

"Those games are satanic."

To which my dad responded, "We're Jewish, I don't think Satan messes with us."

Your stories about getting nookie off of your exorcism training reminds me of Hebrew school and, for that matter, taking Hebrew as a class in college, both of which were less about learning anything and more about hooking up with fellow Jews.

By the time nookie was much of a consideration in my life, I wasn't interested in Mormon girls anyway. I'm a sucker for punks and earth mothers, neither of which were there any of at church. Really I'm talking about my emotional-perception and emotional-manipulation skills - I didn't figure out what those tricks were good for until I was IN relationships.

(Some of this stuff, friends, man it's HARD to just post in public like this. Don't comment on this; I take it as a discipline of my own.)

My first year at college I knew a Mormon goth chick. (I was a bit of a goth boy myself then still, just beginning my slide into hippie.) We related extremely warily; we had one short conversation, once, and then kept out of each others' orbits.

Funny.

One of the things about you coming to college as an exorcist, from my perspective, was that it threw you into contact with other people who also wrestled with their spiritual sides, demons included. I remember you thought I was a witch, because I alluded to 'doing similar stuff' to priesthood stuff. I'd run *plenty* of rituals by then, including a hand-fasting or two, so it made me mark you as a person to talk to about such stuff. I doubt you had ever had as dense a population of people with beliefs that were both different from yours and that they were willing to honestly discuss.

Vincent, the link to "Ask Culture vs Guess Culture" was way awesome. Like, um, maybe thanks or something, even.

"When I was little, I was taught in Sunday School that we should never mention our Heavenly Mother, because She was so precious to our Heavenly Father that He didn't want to risk Her suffering human blasphemy."

I was taught the same thing, and that's kind of a fun doctrine. Kind of shows the very tender tough guy side of a perfect God. I like that one, though I think the reason we don't talk about Her is, sadly, more human in motive.

"When I was older, I figured out that speaking of Heavenly Mother in the singular was a polite lie. A polite abstraction, let's say; I suppose there's some wiggle room."

Heh. This part is funny to read, partly because you hit the nail on the head as far as the original doctrine is concerned (I was taught it like Brand's mother teaches it). The other part is the tone - as though you kind of mildly begrudge the fact that the church doesn't come right out and preach a doctrine of a polygamous God.

"I once overheard someone's parent, in such circumstances, maybe my own parent, speculating that the Holy Ghost is, in fact, Heavenly Mother."

Biggest problem with that is the whole 'no body' thing. I remember somewhere some speculation about whether the HG was always the same being or not, though. Like, specifically, whether the Prophet Joseph could have been serving as the HG for a time before birth or something. Never subscribed myself to the idea.

"You're their servant, and God's servant, and God's arm -

And how about I could shut up any time now?"

Hey! No! As many times as I've read this post today, that's EXACTLY the part I want to hear more at. I guess I'll just have to ('risk my soul' and) buy you a beer, too.

That "ask/guess culture" thing kind of raises my hackles. What the fuck is wrong with this dude? He expects telepathy from someone he doesn't know? He's not willing to either a) say no to this potential guest or b) have a fucking guest over for two nights? What's she gonna do, give you cooties? That's an opportunity to make a friend. That's being a bad host, pre??mptively.*

Guess which culture I come from.

*I bet that diaeresis doesn't make it past submission.

Vincent,

Mo read this post before I did. She turned to me as I came to sit down at the computer and said, "Do you tell what I'm thinking by how I breathe?"

I paused a moment, the moment got longer. She narrowed her eyes.

I say, "Um, how do you mean?" She says, "Do you listen to people's breathing to tell what they're thinking."

I smile and say, "No." Then after a pause I add, "I do it to tell what they're feeling."

Then she hit me.

And yea, you're right—it isn't easy to admit. Mo's asked me about empathic skills in the past, and I never told her about that one. Don't know why, I just didn't.

Did you guys know that the CIA has historically employed a disproportionately high number of LDS members?

Recruiting and handling assets (jargon for seeking gossips and manipulating them into being traitors) means creating the illusion to the spy that it's all about them, when it reality they are the most expendable feature of espionage. It also means convincing the spy that he or she is valued personally and hence must deceive family, friends, employer, and nation, but constantly maintaining such control that the spy will be truthful to the handler.

Blackmail is the favored reference point for such control in official agency presentations, but historically it tends to blow up quickly. Every spy handler who's written about the process stresses instead the manipulative, one-step-ahead emotional tactics between handler and spy, as the favored approach.

The kind of training you're describing would seem to be a precious commodity from the agency's point of view.

Best, Ron

Ron,

When I was in the Army and in military intelligence, there was a disproportionate amount of LDS members serving with me. They were great guys, and I counted them among my best friends.

I asked them why there were so many Mormons in MI, and they said that they joined the Army because they were patriotic and that they got recruited into MI because of their language school. Apparently, the LDS language school for overseas missionaries can teach you any language in about 2 months. It's renowned in the MI community. That would explain all the CIA guys - it's a common career path, from MI linguist to CIA.

- Clinton

Every time, a couple of months after we'd moved in, my parents would have some other family over. This'd be after the official visits and the assigned friends; this'd be my folks finding their own. Another family, young, educated, not super active in the ward, more politically left than most Mormons, more critical in their thinking, interested in the history of the church and the nuances of its theology.

I always enjoyed talking to your dad, Vincent—though I admit he never took me particularly seriously (if you think you were naive, wowza, what was/am I?!). There are, in fact, still points of Mormon doctrine my understanding of which I trace back to your father (Satan is unnecessary to God's plan because how could an omnipotent God come up with a plan where 1/3 of his children suffered in hell for eternity? Could He let it happen? I guess. Could He make it happen? No way, not and still be God).

I think you capture the naivete of being an 18 year old Mormon boy beautifully. In most adolescents (so my experience tells me) there is a sense of trying to be "grown up." I recall desperately wanting to be taken seriously (by Vince's dad and others). If I made a pretense to knowing anything either before of after my mission it was a product of the naivete Vince describes and the common (universal?) need for an adolescent to present his or herself as a full adult. I believe these two factors are directly responsible for down right odd ethos of BYU.

BTW, Vincent. Mormon boys use their priesthood to get Mormon girls into bed all the time... though the bedding is generally preceded by a trip down the aisle (generally, but not always of course).

Clinton,

You're spot on, except (having been through the language training when I was starting my mission [Spanish, in Los Angeles]) the language training gets you started fast, but sure leaves a lot to be desired when you actually go out and try to use the language. I suspect it was the other 22 months those guys spent speaking their languages while serving that really counted as language training.

Ron,

Yes, the empathic stuff, and particularly anyone who has served as a missionary whose goal is getting people to do something they otherwise wouldn't picks up good skills for discovering what peoples concerns are and 'resolving' them. Now, there's a spiritual element and a priesthood stewardship thing at work with missionaries and potential converts, but that doesn't mean the same techniques don't work on somebody considering betraying their country's secrets for money. Also, we tend to make it through the clearance process relatively easier compared to the national average.

Dave,

Especially when you consider how much many members of the Church saw the Cold War. "The USA may not be perfect, but unlike them we aren't a boot kicking in the teeth of the human spirit forever."

Be it true or false, that kind of belief in the moral agency of the side you fight for gives powerful incentive and is the kind of thing many of us with priesthood backgrounds are drawn towards.

I've known a few of them, and my experience is that Mormons in the CIA have a bit of the Knight Templar complex.

The low point of my whole brief experience at BYU was the Book of Mormon class I took with Reed Benson (son of Ezra Taft). This was 1996, well after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Bro. Benson (good John Birch society member that he was) spent most of the class periods railing against the Satanic conspiracy that was Communism. Eventually I just stopped going - it was at best irrelevant, and at worst troublingly paranoid.

As for Knight Templar complex, my experience has been that its not especially more common among Mormons in those positions than anybody else who volunteers for that line of work. Which is to say, relatively common.

Dave,

Was Benson's argument that Soviet communism was Satan's infernal parody of the United Order, which is the way I sometimes heard it, or was the United Order ignored?

Matt,

I didn't think I had paid enough attention in there to answer your question, but now that you mention it, yes, that's exactly what the argument was.

Rather than jack this topic for my nefarious purposes ...

If anyone would like to discuss how the Cold War values and LDS-training interacted, and how that affected your own life or interactions with others, with or without direct reference to intelligence agencies, please get in touch with me by email. I need you.

I mean, not to say "don't do it here," but rather, it *is* for *my* nefarious purposes, so I don't want to distract from all the other neat sharing & insights going on.

This is the most interesting LDS thread I have read in ages.

I played the $10 basic set in Sandy in the early eighties.  We corrupted all of our friends.

Vincent, let's talk about some of this stuff in an off-list kind of way, if you're interested.  You've spurred some of the most direct thinking about my childhood in a while.

yrs—
—Ben

Ben: sure.

My friend Julia just sent me an email. It's private, but it leads me to ask myself this:

What if I did a find and replace on these posts, and for every "I was an anxious, joyless little prig" I put in "I was depressed"?

Ron Edwards: I would love to read something about LDS training and the cold war, but I have little to contribute—I think.

What if I did a find and replace on these posts, and for every "I was an anxious, joyless little prig" I put in "I was depressed"?
So, just like the rest of us? ;)

To quote Bart Simpson:
"Eh, making teenagers depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel."

A couple loose ends:

The Mormon-CIA talk is more or less welcome here, but do get in touch with Ron by email.

Roleplaying and religion! I'm not really replying to the good stories in this thread because my response is a whole post.

It's interesting for me to see all this debate about the Holy Ghost and its nature.  I had it very clearly explained to me by Epsicopalians and Catholics that the Holy Ghost is the Church (not the hierarchy, but the sum of all Christians), manifested on Earth by God's will and doing His work.  This was said like it was no big deal—duh, everyone knows that.  At what point along the route from Catholicism to Mormonism is this doctrine rejected?

yrs—
—Ben

I have no idea. As I understand it, the biggest (pre-Freemasonry) influence on Mormonism was the Methodism of the day, so that's where I'd look first, if I were trying to track it down.

Ben,
I don't know, but equating the Holy Ghost with the Church was definitly not part of my religious upbringing as a Presbyterian.  The Holy Ghost was described more like what Vincent describes above but not nearly as active.  I recall struggling during my confimation with the idea of the Holy Ghost, and tried to equate it with an individual's conscience.  I was told that this is incorrect because one's conscience is not divine and can be wrong.  It was also one of my early memories of an adult struggling to explain an abstract concept to me.

Ben: Hunh, wow.  That's not Catholic doctrine (at least not the Roman variety; can't speak to Eastern Orthodox).  It's not even common belief that I'm aware of, though I'll conceed that while doctrine stays (kinda) constant across the church, common belief fluctuates wildly.

The Holy Ghost in RC doctrine is the Spirit of God; equal share in the Divine Trinity with God the Father and Christ the Son.  The church on earth (in the sense you use) is the body of Christ (which is absolutely an intended metaphor with no literal interpretation implied).

Actually, to be totally technical, the Holy Spirit in RC doctrine is the spirit of God.  The Holy Ghost is a slightly out-dated vernacular reference.  (I haven't heard anyone use it seriously that wasn't either my parents generation, or Irish.)

Wikipedia link

Catholic Encyclopedia link

James

Huh.  I guess it is, indeed, not true.

yrs—
—Ben

If you were to replace "anxious, joyless prig" with "depressed" it would imply that there was something wrong with you beyond just the normal anxious joyless existential stuff that comes with adolescence and early adulthood. If you give your unhappy existence the name of a bona fide problem with symptoms and a course of treatment defined in the DSM-IV, like say "Dysthymic Disorder" you might have had more options to help with the suffering. Maybe all you really needed was some wacky fun times where you had to take yourself out of your comfort zone, live a little, etc. If you had a diagnosed mood disorder, then someone would feel that his or her profession ethics or code compelled him to help you in the way he was academically trained to do, or with a prescription for some mood elevating drugs.

My Psych Nursing instructor once reminded us that one person's crazy is another person's beatified.

Also worth noting that several aspects of Mormon theology are, in terms of comparative and historical religion, throw backs rather than linear progressive developments.

Ben, you may have misunderstood only slightly.

My understanding is that the Holy Spirit is considered to be at work through the Church (= the company of all faithful), inasmuch as the Church is faithfully carrying out the work of God in the world. I think Paul says in one of his letters to churches that "you" (collectively) are the temple of the Holy Spirit.

It's a little bit like the Jewish concept of the Shekinah (NinJ will probably correct me here), but instead of being in all creation it's just in the Church.

Having said which, there's an undercurrent in obscure parts of contemporary theology that in fact the Holy Spirit is God at work in all creation and every situation generally - that wherever you go, there he/she is already. The Church doesn't need to carry him/her into the situation, he/she is already there just waiting to be revealed.

I personally like that.

Yah, what Mike said is my recollection of how it was explained to me by the Jesuits. The Holy Spirit is God indwelling within every created thing in order to glorify God. It's a very Teilhardian sort of notion. (Which I guess actually makes it quasi-heretical).

I'm totally a Teilhardian.  Phenomenon of Man was transformative, for me.  Also very difficult to read.  Teilhard was much smarter than I am.

James

(apologies if this posts twice)

Mike:

My understanding is that the Holy Spirit is considered to be at work through the Church (= the company of all faithful), inasmuch as the Church is faithfully carrying out the work of God in the world. I think Paul says in one of his letters to churches that "you" (collectively) are the temple of the Holy Spirit.

I'm not arguing with your description or anything, but that seems to skirt pretty close to the Communion of Saints. (Long story short: Catholics form a community of faith that persists even after death.) Not that this has anything to do with Vincent's Mormon awesomeness. I'm just making an observation.

Any LDSers who care to comment

So, I'm curious here. The SOURCE of the Holy Ghost/Spirit is a huge argument in Catholicism. Hell, the Roman and Orthodox Catholic churches excommunicated each other because they couldn't agree on the genesis of the Holy Ghost/Spirit. (Romans: The HG/S is the love that flows between the father and the son. God = triangle!  Orthodox: The HG/S proceeds from the Son, who proceeds from the Father. God = line!)

Are there the same sorts of arguments among Mormons about where the Holy Ghost/Spirit comes from? Or is that a Catholic thing? Or, and this is possible, am I misreading this Holy Ghost thing to mean something mildly analagous to the Catholic Holy Ghost/Spirit when in fact it is actually different? Correct me if I'm wrong here, I don't have a clue.

~Anna

Mike, I'm not really going to object to the simile because I don't understand it, but I'll say this: Shechinah is "creation" in terms of the process, not the product. That's what the Sephirot are (according to my extremely limited understanding). They're the ways that God does things in the Universe, though when God so much as sneezes, the sneeze is self-aware. Angels like the Sephirot are verbs.

Anna,
In Mormon theology, God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost/Spirit are three distinct beings, two of which posess physical bodies, and one of which does not. The Holy Ghost is understood to be a personage distinct from God and Christ, but who is 'one' with them in the same way Christ prays that we should be 'one' with them, that is, in purpose. The Holy Ghost fulfills the will of God and has a role as Comforter, Confirmer, and so forth, distinct, for example, from Christ's roles as Savior, Judge, and so forth. There's more to it, but that should outline the distinction from most other Christian denominations.

So spill: what's the breath trick?

People's breathing changes when they are concentrating on something. If you know them even a little well, you can tell through observation (even unconscious observation) how their breathing shifts when they are troubled, puzzled, delighted, aroused, etc.

It's not just a Mormon mind-reading trick; lots of parents have this as 'eyes in the back of the head', to know from the minute difference in sound when the child is doing something questionable in the next room.

It's also, on a lesser, more hit-and-miss basis, part of the tools used by palm readers and tarot card readers and the like to know what's going on with you when you sit down at my table. We chat for a bit, I case your body langauge and your breathing changes as I ask you a few questions, then I go with that info. It's going to be much easier and more reliable/accurate if I actually know you well.

"It's not just a Mormon mind-reading trick"

Yea. That's the part where we know how much of the Book of Mormon you've read when we first meet you.

"These are not the Mormons you're looking for..."

The trouble I had with religion was never that I couldn't get into it, that it didn't make sense to me, but that they *all* made sense to me.  I talk to sincere, thoughtful believers for very long and I can appreciate their faith.

For that very reason, I had a hard time investing in any one faith.  I had more than one encounter with someone who mistook understanding and appreciation for me being a potential convert—at least one person was literally scared of me once they understood how I actually worked.  I think most sort of walked away mildly baffled but usually kindly disposed.

I stumbled on the 700 club not too long ago, listened for like 5 minutes, and was nodding along with the woman who found Jesus after having an abortion and now opposes it in all its forms...I understand, even appreciate, how that works even if I don't agree. It's weird. The way in which emotion, intellect, cosmology, community intersect...it's pretty darn complicated.  I really feel like most of it goes awry not in the content of belief but in its execution in a community, in the emergence of an overly rigid hierarchy which turns counsel into command.

For a while, I thought I could get along with some Joseph Campbell / Carl Jung Ur-mythos, but that really doesn't get you very far.  Most of the comparisons end up pretty bland and reductive not very far in—usually one side coming away enriched, the other reduced.  Which is fine, really, as long as the side you are interested is the one coming away enriched.

On the tricks:

Most empathic tricks are more than 'tricks.'  You can surely use it like one, something nifty you can do at parties, what have you.  But people like missionaries get taught those tricks as part of an enormous practice of care and attention (why, too, I think parents and partners tend to develop some of these tricks 'unconsciously').

It sort of sounds to me, Vincent, like you may have retained the form of that practice even though you have radically altered the content of it, stripping away most all of its cosmological and otherwise overtly religious baggage.  (And with that 'sort of sounds to me' language, we can clearly see where my family was in the ask/guess camp—talk about old habits;)

I wonder if that breathing trick works on me, seeing that I am one of those people who, when awake, always think about something.

Also—are there any North Americans who do not form a sizable chunk of their identity through religion, including its rejection?  It seems to be a much bigger identity factor over here than at home.  (We Germans have a different obsession, regarding our past.)

- Christian

The very first rule written in the Bill of rights:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof

It's written there because it was a challenge from the getgo.

In 1620, the Mayflower landed with religious refugees - we'd call them a cult today - in Massachusetts.

By 1639, there were already religious refugees from Massachusetts, founding Rhode Island, which was the first Colony to officially adopt a freedom of religion clause. There, the first community of Jews started in North America. The town was predominantly Quaker. Eventually, it became largely Catholic and Anglican with a Baptist undercurrent.

I'm one of the Jews who grew up in Rhode Island (though none of my ancestors were there in the 17th century). You can bet that a Jew growing up in an old Quaker stronghold, now predominantly Catholic, Anglican, and Baptist, was keenly aware of his religious difference from his neighbors. We all are. We're surrounded by people who have a different view of the universe from us; where to experience a different culture, you go next door.

I've rarely - though not never - known an American who doesn't align themselves with either a particular religion, or a relationship to religion as a whole (which is usually a relationship with a particular practice of a particular religion, but is expanded to include all religions out of frustration). Many don't know much about their religion because of the transparency of cultural institutions, but they still baptize or circumsize their babies or whatever. They have their weddings in churches. They argue about God.

Do they baptize their babies in Germany? I bet they do. I bet that religious practice in Europe is pretty common, but it's transparent because it's part of the larger culture.

Christmas is religious practice. Easter egg hunts are religious practice. Halloween is religious practice. May Day is religious practice.

What gets celebrated in Germany?

I have understood that people in Europe attend church far less often than here in the US, though people are often still affiliated with a church. As one data point, my Unitarian Universalist church here in Portland OR has a sister church relationship with a Unitarian congregation in Budapest. Both churches have similar numbers of members, however, the sanctuary of the Budapest church is barely larger than one of the side galleries of our sanctuary.

Here's a picture of their sanctuary, taken from near the back.

And here's the most encompassing picture I have of our church's sanctuary. Which shows perhaps 20% of the seating, and what is shown probably is more seating than the whole Budapest sanctuary.

The extent to which religious identity is prevalent does change regionally though. Growing up in Massachusetts, I was not that aware of my friends religions, other than a few. On the other hand, in Raleigh NC, you get asked about religion in the supermarket checkout line.

Frank

Local history tends to have a lot to do with how important this is, all right.

In most of Europe, for a given region the religion was decided by the ruler, so everyone was pretty much the same (or one of a couple of different options, usually Catholic and Protestant and maybe Jewish) and the issue dropped largely into the background (as long as you went along with the ruler). America was founded in part by people who couldn't live with that, and that's one of the reasons it came into the foreground. The whole "Congress shall make no law..." thing was an attempt to make sure that the government just kept out of the whole mess. Sadly, it didn't work.

I live in New Zealand, where there's no established church in the sense of a state church (as there is in most of Europe), but more people are Anglican than anything else. (Although I think that may finally have been overtaken by "no religion" in last year's census.) The early settlers here were not, in the majority of cases, religiously motivated and so there's always been a lot of diversity, the Government for the most part does keep out of the whole mess, and most people don't have a big issue. In fact, if you work for the Government you are likely to experience a lot of prayer in the workplace, because it's part of Maori custom to begin anything important with a prayer and the Government is very culturally sensitive. Which floors my American wife completely - both that it happens, and that people of all religions and none generally seem unbothered by it.

In Northern Germany, we're all Protestants, but rarely ever go to church. People who take the bible literally are considered cultists.

I was baptized as a baby, then confirmed as Evangelical Lutheran at age 14. It was by choice, but to be honest, it was just something everyone did, plus the money gifts were nice. I did believe some of the things, but none of us really took it that seriously.  That said, refer back to my experience with clapping in church to see that I did have some reverence for the place.

At my confirmation, the pastor gave me a necklace with a cross. When I came home, I thought it looked kind of neat and wanted to wear it.  My mother, who had supported me getting confirmed, had a little freaking-out moment because she thought I might actually turn religious.

Moral of the story is: where I come from, religion is 90% cultural tradition and understanding your people's history, and only 10% current faith, if that. We go through the motions, but that's because they still provide a bonding and learning experience, not because we believe in the literal text of the bible.

I'd make a case that as a culture, being responsible for the most callous attempt at genocide in the history of mankind, with the church standing by watching, has done something to Germany's faith that won't ever be restored. You can talk all you want about necessary evil and all that shit, but when your grandparents' generation murdered millions of innocent children the arguments all fall flat.

Christian, it's that phrase there: "we're all Protestants," that makes it not something that requires explanation, something that just "is".

I think we're saying the same thing: religion is a cultural phenomenon. The more the people around you don't share the details of that culture, the more they're thrown into relief with each other, and the more the members of those cultures will define themselves through action (including statements of belief. I don't have any idea if people truly believe the crazy things they stand up and say they believe.)

I buy that. :)  Religion overall is not really the big issue, though. I've known Catholics, Jews, Pagans, etc., but for none of them was it as big a deal as rejecting the Christian God seems to be for US Americans.

In Germany, you can totally get away with never thinking much about Christianity, but you cannot get away with never confronting Hitler's shadow.  It's quite the opposite here.  And I find it fascinating that what we call Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung (dealing with the past) is not really done here, whereas Germans are completely obsessed with it.

Vincent,

On Tuesday night, we gave a lady we home teach a blessing. She has diabetes, and is starting a new diet that she's having trouble with - can't keep her sugar where she wants it and feels horrible. So, I anointed her, and then my HT companion and I blessed her together. Sometime during the blessing, I thought back on this whole thread, and I wondered, 'Do you miss this?'. I mean, there's this feeling I get when my hands are on someone's head thats totally distinct - not the same as 'feeling the spirit' in other contexts. Maybe its all psychological, I'll admit that up front, but I would seriously miss it. Don't you miss that? Stop me if you don't want to discuss this, for whatever reason.

Religion overall is not really the big issue, though. I've known Catholics, Jews, Pagans, etc., but for none of them was it as big a deal as rejecting the Christian God seems to be for US Americans.

Well, good; that means that the crackpots have let them be. But just because you never think about something doesn't mean it doesn't affect your life; in fact, I think the opposite is the case.

I don't know about Americans never "dealing with the past". Around these parts, there's a keen awareness of slavery and Indian-killing, Japanese internment camps, and the falsehoods of the Cold War. You may mean something I don't understand, though; Can you explain?

Dave: Well, it's not like I left the church because I hated that part. It's like, if you had a terrible relationship, and you left the guy, but sometimes you miss how he used to whistle around the house.

I was pagan for a while after I left the church. I was looking for the things I missed, without the things I hated. It didn't work out, but like I said to Emily above, that calls for a whole nother session of thinking and writing.

That makes sense to me.

Mike: The whole "Congress shall make no law..." thing was an attempt to make sure that the government just kept out of the whole mess. Sadly, it didn't work.

It didn't? Could you elaborate? Because I'm honestly not seeing the problem you appear to be, and I'd rather understand your opinion than just shrug and move on.

Yes, in the US we do have horrible wrangling debates about whether City Hall can put up a creche on the lawn or not, or whether judges can have the 10 Commandments on their courtroom wall, or whether Air Force Academy faculty can proselytize the cadets. But I'm not aware of any systemic failure of the U.S. Constitution to protect the right of individuals to practice the religion of their choice.

Mike, are you implying that Maori weren't converted to Christianity? Because the history I know is different.

Writing down "no religion" on your census form doesn't mean too much in my book; people write down "Jedi Knight" too. Just because everyone practices the same religion doesn't mean they don't have one.

Standing up and saying that you believe in some tenet of a religion is only one form of religious practice. And while it's particularly obvious, it's not particularly deep. Practicing the cultural aspects of a religion, though, that's deep. That's hard to shake from generation to generation, even if it's a good idea. Religion is the most insidious family of meme because they carry all sorts of subtle things with them: moral and ethical codes, the relationship between 'us' and 'them', food, sexual hangups, all sorts of stuff. You don't get away from that stuff by rejecting God, and you don't get away from it by not caring about it. If it's something that's to be gotten away from - and it isn't necessarily - then careful personal analysis, probably with someone to help you spot the bullshit, is the route.

Note that a Jew is telling you that the answer is psychological counseling. Insidious, eh? So your own cultural/religious bias may dictate a different direction.

Religion in the US occupies a very different cultural space compared to religion in (for sure) the UK and Germany. Canada falls somewhere in between the two.

I know, I've lived in all four.

Here's a gaming metaphor - USAians approach religion like an empowered Forge game whereas Europeans approach religion as a GM-controlled wank-fantasy RIFTS game, with the state as the GM.

The USAians are still engaged with the game whereas the Europeans have got bored with that so they are talking about sex instead.

Why is it different? A bunch of reasons, I think. Heres some:

First, in Europe we fought big, bloody, brutal wars that were nominally about religion for centuries (about 20% of Germans died in the 30 Years War alone (equivalent to 18 million today). But when it came right down to it, the wars were about political authority. After a while, religion becomes associated with war, famine, plague & death - and who wants that?

Second, throughout Europe, a regions religion was defined by the ruler - if you didn't like it you either put up, became a martyr or ran away. Most political leaders wanted religions that respected their authority so while mainstream Protestants and Catholics could run to a nearby country, the more extreme cults had to run the *fuck* away -and most of them went to America. So, in part Europe dumped most of it's religious fanaticism onto America.

In England, on top of that, the Catholic church was replaced with the nominally protestant Church of England because the King wanted a divorce. Think about that - the fundamental reason for the existence of the Anglican (Episcopalian in the USA) Churches was so that a guy could dump one woman and marry another. It doesn't make for a compelling religious base.

J, I'm sure you and your immediate environment and maybe even subculture are addressing those issues.  But you're in the minority. Talking about it in small groups is one thing, internalizing its lessons as cultural growth is another.

The American culture as a whole? Sorry, they've still not confronted slavery, Native American genocide, WW2 internments, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or Vietnam to the degree these issues are calling for. Black History Month alone isn't gonna cut it.

It's very, very different from a country where everybody studies the Holocaust in detail several times during your public education time, pay reparations, respect and a lot of attention to the Zentralrat Deutscher Juden, and have an appropriately torn relationship to patriotism, the use of military force, immigration, and so on.

I'm Anglican (Episcopalian) myself. I confess it's rather relaxing to be part of the only major denomination I know of which splintered off from Rome as part of a complex (occasionally cynical) compromise, rather than out of an eruption of uncompromising fervor.

Remember that Henry VIII, cynical bastard that he was, didn't found the Church of England as we know it. As I understand it, he simply tried to exploit rising Protestant-leaning discontent in England to defy the Pope over his remarriage—and over monastic property—and put himself at the head of a national church independent from Rome but otherwise organized on Roman lines. (The French monarchy succeeded at doing something very similar, without taking the step of a formal break with Rome—Cardinal Richeliu of Three Musketeers fame being the best-known example of the successful marriage between the French monarchy and the French Catholic hierarchy).

But Henry VIII couldn't control what he had helped to unleash. His son Edward died young, there was a bitter pro-Roman backlash under his daughter Mary, a pro-Protestant counterbacklash under his other daughter Elizabeth, and finally the extinction of his dynasty (and, with it, of English's move towards royal absolutism on French lines) and the succession of James (James VI of Scotland, James I of England), who seems to be have fairly cynically areligious himself but who had plenty of hardline Protestants of various types in both England and Scotland to deal with, and who commissioned what's now called the King James Bible.

The Anglican Church was created out not only out of compromise, but out of the failure of any religious faction in Britain—Lutherans, Calvinists (e.g. Puritans), Scottish Presbyterians, crypto-Catholics and outright pro-Romans—to prevail and impose its will on the population. The result was, and still is, a church which has deep and troubling internal divisions precisely because it tries to keep its dissenters in the communion rather than expelling them or letting them schism off. (Witness "High Church" vs. "Low Church" in England, or the gay rights controversy in the US Episcopal Church today). There's a tradition of compromise, agreeing to disagree, and (relatively) rational argument—trying to give due weight to all three of "Scripture, Tradition, and Reason"—that is distinctly messy but, in my mind, profoundly healthy.

The Anglican Church was created out not only out of compromise, but out of the failure of any religious faction in Britain to prevail and impose its will on the population.

Right. And I think that there was a self-reinforcing loop there - the process made it increasingly apparent to the public - especially the more educated public - that religion is a political battleground; not a search for higher truth, meaning or salvation. Thus we became increasingly disinterested in it.

The close association between political parties & religious factions (The Church of England is commonly referred to as "The Tory Party at Prayer") just heightens that.

If you haven't read Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle (and you should, everybody should), it highlights the connections between religious factions and political ones at the beginning of the Enlightenment beautifully.

> religion is a political battleground; not a search for higher truth, meaning or salvation.

Well, I'm going to have to disagree with you there, since I'm religious myself, but I see what you're getting at.

Sydney said:
Mike: The whole "Congress shall make no law..." thing was an attempt to make sure that the government just kept out of the whole mess. Sadly, it didn't work.

Yes, in the US we do have horrible wrangling debates about whether City Hall can put up a creche on the lawn or not, or whether judges can have the 10 Commandments on their courtroom wall, or whether Air Force Academy faculty can proselytize the cadets. But I'm not aware of any systemic failure of the U.S. Constitution to protect the right of individuals to practice the religion of their choice.

My point is that "Congress shall make no law" was originally intended to say, the state has no part in anything to do with religion, pro or anti. It doesn't promote, it doesn't forbid. It stays right out of the whole issue entirely. This is not what the US state, in its various manifestations (usually not, in fact, Congress, but the judiciary), is doing. The spirit of the text is not "prayer is not permitted in state schools" but "if students in state schools want to organize themselves a prayer group, we have nothing to say about that." Your other examples, by the way, to me, from this distance, look like breaches too. I'm not on one side or the other (or even necessarily saying that it was a good thing to shoot for in the first instance).

The thing is, civil religion is all over the place in the US, so the reality doesn't match the original ideal. But there's also a very strong, indeed fanatical, lobby which appears - again, from this distance - to be misusing the original ideal in a different way, to say "any public expression of religion should be illegal". Part of the sad dividedness of the USA as a whole.

What I meant by "it didn't work" was pretty much that the original ideal - a state which took no part and no position, leaving a citizenry alone to get on with whatever religious activity they wanted - is not what has actually occurred. A lot of this has to do with the fact that you can't really separate politics, which is a form of collective endeavour, from things which are important to the collective which is endeavouring, i.e. the population as a whole. Even trying to separate religion from public life is, historically speaking, a very strange thing to do, and only the Enlightenment would even have attempted it.

Where does this leave a modernist society with powerful secularizing tendencies, but a strong religious heritage and an increasing presence of religious pluralism?

I don't know. I wish I did, or that someone did, anyway.

NinJ:

Mike, are you implying that Maori weren't converted to Christianity? Because the history I know is different.

No such implication intended. (Though some Maori now are returning to the pagan beliefs of their ancestors, or at least a version thereof.) The prayers in a Maori context are usually Christian. My point was that this is considered part of Maori culture and thus acceptable, indeed important, even in a government context. The original pre-European Maori culture opened all important events with prayer; the conversion to Christianity changed the content of the prayer, but not the practice (is my understanding).

Writing down "no religion" on your census form doesn't mean too much in my book; people write down "Jedi Knight" too. Just because everyone practices the same religion doesn't mean they don't have one.

I think what "no religion" means to most of those who write it is that they don't have any conscious connection to any organized form of religious practice or belief. Just as, for many people, writing down "Anglican" means that if you were going to go to a church, for example to be married or have a funeral, that's the one you'd probably go to. Unless another one was more convenient. (Though over 60% of marriages and a very high percentage of funerals, I forget how many but a lot, are now taken by civil celebrants in NZ. That doesn't necessarily mean there's no religious or spiritual aspect to them, although that may be the case for some, but it does mean that no organized religion is even peripherally involved. And also, that the cultural aspects of religion, at least the Christian religion, are falling out of people's lives too.)

It's interesting looking at the way in which someone's religious background influences their assumptions about what "religion" means. I read an article by a Jewish scholar of religion in NZ a while back, and he explicitly assumed that an irreducable aspect of the practice of religion is in forming and reinforcing a community - which is not most people's experience in NZ, but is very understandable from his Jewish background. Judaism, from what I've read, puts a lot more weight on practice and community and a lot less on doctrine and individual faith than most Christian groups (something we could stand to learn from, IMO).

My own background: My parents were C&E C of E (Christmas and Easter Church of England); they took me along when they went twice a year, I got nothing from it, became consciously an atheist by age 10. At 18, through the influence of friends, I converted to evangelical Christianity and became the same kind of narrow pious zealot that Vincent depicts himself as having been. After university I trained to become a campus worker for a large American evangelical and evangelistic organization; it was a complete train wreck for various reasons, and I was much disillusioned, but kept a vestige of faith. I then spent 7 years in a very conservative non-denominational church, I think to shore my faith up with the certainties they were so good at, before realizing that there was a lot more to faith than they were presenting and following some friends to my present home, a quirky post-evangelical/alt.worship/Emerging Church congregation that does doubt, art, liturgy and mysticism a lot more than it does doctrine. After 10 years there I'm finally starting to feel like I'm getting a bit of a handle on things again.

Sorry, I'm taking up far too much airspace here, I'll shut up now.

MikeRM: The spirit of the text is not "prayer is not permitted in state schools" but "if students in state schools want to organize themselves a prayer group, we have nothing to say about that."

Mike, are you claiming that American public school students are legally prohibited from voluntarily organizing prayer groups? 'Cause I'm pretty darn sure that there's no such prohibition. (The Supreme Court has said that student-led prayer at school-sponsored events like football games is establishment of religion, but not voluntary prayer groups held before or after classes, or prayer during free time or lunch.)

Yeah, Mike, no one has ever said that public prayer should be forbidden; it's the state sponsorship of it that gets peoples' knickers in a twist.

E.g., last winter, there was an airport - Newark, I think? - that had Christmas decorations up. Airports are state-sponsored, but a rabbi asked why there couldn't also be Chanukah decorations. The airport responded by taking down all the Christmas decorations, which got the poor Rav a lot of hate mail. Real, anti-semitic, war-on-Christmas stuff.

This is because the Rabbi, as a self-appointed representative of his people, didn't like being made to celebrate someone else's religious rituals, preferring to remind the other members of his society that Christianity is not, in fact, the law of the land. Some people think it is, and anyone on the outside can see how that's critically dangerous.

To me, this episode highlights a couple of things:

1: When a rabbi asks you a question, the proper thing to do is to ask an insightful question in response.

2: When speaking with a bureaucrat, assume that they've done the least amount of work possible to get the minimally acceptable result. If you require them to do something else, they will once again do the minimum amount of work to satisfy those requirements.

3: Winter is depressing here in the Northeast. We put up sparkly lights because they're beautiful and they remind us both of the stars in the long nights and the light that will return. Jesus and Saint Nicholas aren't really central to that issue. To say otherwise as a state is to take a stance on religion contrary to the First Amendment. That gets people upset.

The funny thing about "Congress shall make no law..." is that the Founders had a fairly specific idea of what was permissible religiousity in public life and what wasn't—it just doesn't track easily to our conceptions 200 years later.

Enlightenment Anglicans like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, for example, routinely talked about "Divine Providence" and assumed the world was ordered according to a fundamental logic of which political freedom (for white male landowners, at least) was a part: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights...." We have "In God We Trust" on our currency; we swear on the Bible in court. Christmas is a public holiday, Rosh Hashannah and Ramadan aren't.

But the Founders were not fervently Christian, as a rule: They tended to believe in a fairly impersonal and distant Deity who set the clockwork of the universe in motion and then stood back. They tended towards a rationalist Deism, a kind of crypto-Unitarianism, in which religion was a matter of public ethics and personal philosophy.

But modern American religion is intensely personal and emotional—especially Evangelical Christianity, with its powerful feeling of connection to Jesus the Savior. We Americans in general have developed a tendency to share our passionate personal feelings with everyone in range(ideally via reality television or talk radio) in a way that would have made George Washington grind his wooden teeth in acute embarassment. We have developed a converse tendency to not want to have to hear anyone else's personal stuff if it bothers us. I think it's this conflict that makes people so bitterly combative about prayer at highschool football games or Christmas creches: It's not the Founder's civic Deism, it's more like bad couples therapy or Jerry Springer:

"Let me tell you about Jesus! He is my personal Friend! He cured my groin boils! He can be your Friend, too!"

"No! I do not wish to hear about your boiling groin, or your Jesus. Other people's ideas annoy me."

"Jesus is sad you do not wish to be His friend. You made Him cry!"

"You are bothering me with your strong personal feelings about stuff. This is a form of genocide!"

"No, your unwillingness to listen to me is a form of repression!"

"Help, help, I'm being repressed!"

"No, I am being repressed! Me! How dare you equate your repression to my repression? This, also, is a form of repression!"

"I will sue you with many lawyers!"

"Ha! I will sue you also! For money! Because of my feelings!"

Sydney, you left something out of that "dialogue":

You apparently have never heard this Jesus thing, so I'll keep telling you until you believe me! And then get mad when the implicit murderous threat that goes with proselytism is brought up!

OK, my mistake on the prayer thing, I had seemingly received the wrong impression.

Thinking about all this some more:

Should the church (in the institutional sense) be separated from the state (in the institutional sense)? My radical Anabaptist response is, Of course it should. Constantine's establishment of Christianity as the Roman state religion was one of the worst things that ever happened to Christianity, and led to most of the other bad things.

However, should spirituality be kept out of public life? Very different question, and my answer here is, not only should it not, it cannot be, since people are spiritual beings* and public life inevitably expresses what is important to people.

So in a pluralist society, I think the only thing that will work even most of the time is to say, Yes, we recognize that spiritual expression of many kinds is important to people and that attempts to keep it out of public life are both quixotic and repressive. However, as a society we, including our government, will not collectively endorse or promote any particular spiritual content. This is just, in a way, switching tightropes, but that's the tightrope I'd rather be on. As a Christian I am personally committed to particular spiritual content, but given that I believe that God is at work in all people, I'm also committed to not imposing that content on others.

Of course other people's content specifically includes imposing their content on others, so what do you do?

I don't know.

*You can interpret "people are spiritual beings" as "people have a natural tendency towards religious expression" if that makes you more comfortable.

NinJ, that was Seattle-Tacoma airport, not Newark. Hey, Washington state gets gloom all year round!

Ah, good. I'm happier to be further from that kind of asshattery.

Sydney, I have to call you on your implication that "In God We Trust" on money proves something about the Founding Fathers. "In God We Trust" was not printed on US coins until the Civil War, and not on on paper money until the Cold War.

Now, I won't begrudge you that this phrase is within the spirit of the important concept in American law that natural rights are granted by the Creator—which to my secular view, is simply a way of asserting that those rights are explicitly not granted by the say-so of any man or government. But the way you have invoked it as evidence to support the rest of your argument is basically stating something that is untrue.

Point very much taken. "Under God" doesn't get added to "one nation, indivisible" in the pledge of allegiance until the 20th century, either, as I recall.