Q&A on Mormon Priesthood (Part 1)

March 28, 2012 By Leah Libresco

As a follow-up to Michael Haycock’s clarification of what it means to be a Mormon priest or bishop, I did a two-part Q&A about Mormon theology, hierarchy, and culture. My questions are in bold, his answers follow, and he has no culpability for my choice of pictures.

Q: Why is the Melchizedek Priesthood reserved to men? Are there any roles reserved to women?

Hoo boy. The first question is a loaded one, because it cuts to the quick of the issue of Mormonism and gender, on which you might be able to adapt the Jewish adage to Mormons: two Mormons, three opinions. Some will say it’s a relic of 19th Century social normativity further reinforced by the post-WWII culture; some will say it’s divinely inspired and tailored to the inherent strengths and weaknesses of the respective sexes; some will say women are so spiritually inclined that they don’t need leadership positions to teach them how to be that way.

Me? I’d say I don’t know. Maybe it will change in the future, but I won’t pretend to have foreknowledge.

The official LDS Church response to the second question would be (and has been) “Of course!” While that is technically true, it needs some qualification.

Women can be called to many positions, from teaching to family history consultant to Cubmaster (Cub Scouts leader). However, there are many positions exclusively reserved for men (including some that are a little baffling) and those that are exclusively reserved for women are mostly either 1) overseeing fellow females or 2) seemingly based on stereotypical gender roles and perceptions. Included in these are positions in the Relief Society, the organization that incorporates the women of the LDS Church; Young Women, which serves girls ages 12-18 (and mirrored by its male counterpart organization, Young Men); and Primary, the organization that cares for children in the church. In the past, many of these organizations had a huge degree of autonomy: they had their own budgets and regional bulletins, and generally ran genuinely parallel to the male hierarchy.

However, as the LDS Church began to greatly expand outside of the American Mountain West in the 1950s and 60s, the patchwork organization of the Church, many times based on neighborliness and kinship, was deemed no longer robust enough to maintain international unity. In a long process known as Correlation, Church curricula were standardized, the ecclesiastical hierarchy clarified and streamlined, and the women’s organizations were brought under greater direct Priesthood (read: male) supervision and direction, among other sundry things, reducing ecclesiastical autonomy for women.

That said, oftentimes the woman-specific positions are incredibly influential, although your mileage may vary based on the degree of traditionalism in the local leadership that oversees these positions. In my home ward, for example, the Relief Society president is delegated most of the responsibility for administering welfare funds. So yes, there is some position for women to influence the Church. Many are satisfied with that. Many are not.

bar mitzvah boy — (best picture that turned up when I googled ‘bar mitzvah’)

Q: Why do you think the Mormon church labels the open-to-all-men category as a ‘priesthood?’ What makes it different from other growing-older-and-affirming-commitment transitions like confirmation in the Catholic Church and bar/bat mitzvahs?

Historians would probably say that it’s a radical outgrowth of the Protestant “priesthood of all believers” conception. However, having grown up Mormon, I don’t see why the category of “priesthood” would depend on it being an exclusionary group (and I would love to hear how you got that perception). One of the ideas is that God disperses His power so that it can be shared as widely as possible. And since all men are given that authority to be priests – to act, in some degree, in God’s place – the terminology comes with it. Another LDS conception is that God wanted to make ancient Israel a “nation of priests and kings” and could not; with the LDS Church, he’s preparing us to fulfill that postponed divine desire.

I also have to admit that I’m not sure exactly what significance confirmation and bar/bat mitzvahs have in their respective traditions. Perhaps the biggest difference is that such transitions in the LDS faith are not usually celebrated. They generally pass quietly; one Sunday, a 12-year-old boy is interviewed, and the next, he is ordained, ready to participate in the officiation of the Sacrament (LDS version of communion/Eucharist, basically). It’s supposed to be a time of added responsibility (that’s when boys and girls can first receive callings to preside over their peer age groups), but the sometimes the biggest shift is that they start going to the classroom of another age group.

In fact, I think LDS baptism would be the closest to those. For children, even if they’ve been raised LDS, the earliest they can get baptized is age eight. Since a baptism doesn’t fit into the regular Sunday meeting schedule (as do Priesthood ordinations, for example) and instead get its own service, there’s more attention given to them. And even though LDS children are listed in church records from birth, it’s when they’re baptized that they’re actually considered full members, accountable for their sins.

Infant baptism — (Mormons don’t do this)

Q: What determines whether an eight-year-old is ready to accept baptism? From discussions of posthumous baptism, I thought baptism in LDS is mainly a prerequisite to everything else not something that necessarily changes you in and of itself. Why not baptize infants?

An eight-year-old receives an interview with her bishop in which he ascertains that her beliefs, commitments, and understanding of baptism are appropriate; children are instructed to prepare for this time as much as they can. If the bishop deems the child unprepared, the baptism could be postponed. In some cases – especially in cases of severe mental disability – baptism is actually regarded as unnecessary because the person, not having a consciousness of right or wrong (and thus free of sin) or a comprehension of the significance of baptism, is regarded as not needing the forgiveness made possible by adherence to the covenants made at baptism.

The thought concerning baptism for the dead is a tad different in that respect from baptism for the living. Because of the impossibility of getting consent from the deceased, we cannot assume they’ve given it; it is thus seen as something that can been rejected (leaving it as if it had never been performed). There might be people, though, who would consent, and for them, it’s necessary that the ordinance be performed in the flesh, with a living body (hence, by living proxies – and here again we get the importance of the material body!). The idea of the baptism’s efficaciousness being contingent on consent is constant, but practicality rules out the possibility of ascertaining consent in the case of the dead (we don’t hold seances, after all). In fact, in the cases in which we know that the dead died under the age of eight, there are actually no baptisms performed or their behalf.

For other questions on infant baptism, I’d refer you to Moroni 8 in the Book of Mormon. On baptism for the dead, Joseph Smith’s words on the subject are in Doctrine and Covenants 128.

Part two of our Q&A is now up!

Won’t Someone Think of the Children?

March 14, 2012 By Leah Libresco

Remember you can vote once per day for the About.com Atheism Awards. I’m one of five nominees for Best Atheist Blog. More details here.

I was talking about posthumous Mormon baptism in an interfaith discussion group (I don’t object to it, see here: “The Mormons Try for a Mitzvah“), and someone asked why many of us have a strong, knee-jerk objection to proxy baptism of the dead, but don’t see anything odd about baptizing children.

In both cases, you’re inducting someone who cannot consent, and Christian baptism of the living (a sacrament of initiation that makes a seal that cannot be broken) is arguably a lot more intrusive than baptism of the dead (which is just supposed to allow them to convert in the afterlife, if they want to). At any rate, both involve trying to define someone’s identity.

For this reason, Richard Dawkins claims it’s abuse to raise children in a religion, or to talk about ‘Catholic children’ or ‘Jewish children.’ One should only say ‘children raised by Catholics’ until the kids are old enough to decide for themselves.

I don’t think this is a particularly useful framework. Parents can’t (and shouldn’t) raise children in a vacuum. Not just because they’d suffocate, but because it’s hard to teach anyone moral reasoning or epistemology totally in the abstract, divorced from its conclusions. You can’t teach a way of reasoning or questioning without giving some examples of right answers and explaining how you recognize them as correct.

The objection to baptism or religious education is just a particular case of the general objection to parents passing on false beliefs and biases to their children. And there’s not a perfect solution to this instantiation of problem any more than there’s a good way to make sure that parents don’t raise their children sexist. Telling them not to ever talk about gender would not be a solution.

You can put up some safeguards against blatant emotional abuse, but any restrictions (cultural or legal) strong enough to deter parents who are just miseducating their kids with the best of intentions are going to completely undermine the institution of the family. Parents should want their kids to grow up loving the Good and the True. It’s not worth waging war on that expectation just because many parents have a skewed idea of how to get there.

So my least-bad solution is still just public school. I can’t (and shouldn’t) stop parents from having wrong beliefs they genuinely want to pass on, but I can try and make it possible for the kids to know that some people disagree early on and get a chance to get pitched by the other side before they start thinking of those incorrect beliefs as essential parts of their identity. To do this properly, the public schools should do more problem-solving and critical thinking work and less NCLB-mandated testing drills, but now we’re reforming education, not families.

Fancy a spot of Sharia law?

February 21, 2012 By Leah Libresco

I’ve returned from AAAS (jet lag and all) and I’d like to take a crack at one of the questions you guys posted in the Marriage Q&A post (if you’ve thought of a new question, I’m still watching that thread). Gilbert asked:

As far as I get it covenant marriage rests on the state refusing covenant-violating divorces. Otherwise it would be exactly like ordinary civil marriage: a promise of life-long commitment that can easily be broken without repercussions. So I suppose you support a separate legal accommodation for your favorite kind of marriage.

Now for the question: Would you give the same kind of statutory accommodation to other ideas of marriage? Can Catholics, for example, have a special marriage that is divorcable only under the conditions that lead to nullity in canon law? You previously said we Christians shouldn’t care about civil marriage because we can’t have control over it. But by the logic that allows covenant marriage, couldn’t we also have control over a special version of civil marriage?

…If yes, should the law refuse divorce to an apostate spouse who originally contracted that kind of marriage for religious reasons? Can we exclude gay couples from our special version of marriage? Can private enterprises give advantages to only one version of marriage? Can a church refuse religious marriage to people whose civil marriage license is under a different code than the one it endorses?

This question is mostly phrased in terms of Christianity, but Gilbert has has gotten to the crux of the (non-psychotic parts) of the debate over Sharia law: When should the government respect or enforce commitments made outside conventional contract law (including promises to be bound by clerical rulings)? My knowledge of this kind of jurisprudence comes mostly from accommodations civil courts make to rabbinical law, so we’ve got all the Abrahamic faiths covered here.

There was a case a while ago where a Jewish woman had her civil divorce snarled up in a religious one. Her husband refused to give her a get (a divorce under Jewish law) after they got a legal divorce. Withholding a get prevented her from remarrying under Jewish law, and he was reportedly using the get to force her to alter the custody agreement. Under Jewish law, a man can unilaterally withhold a get from his wife, not vice versa.

As far as I know, no one has ever tried to place the structure of a get into civil law, though there have been proposals to take reluctance to give a get into civil divorce settlements. The gendered nature of a get means we can’t imagine integrating it into modern marriage law, with or without reference to the authority of a beit din.

So, we don’t want to add in legal statuses that contradict the tenets of our civil society or take advantage of protected classes. And we don’t really want judges to be in the position of ruling that the strictures of a certain religion are unamerican at heart, so any attempt to codify novel structures of marriage would need to be done the same way covenant marriage was integrated, in an entirely secular framework.

I’d love to see different marriage types grow and compete. If nothing else, it would force people to think harder about what kind of binds they meant to place on themselves, if they couldn’t slide easily into the default. And some of these legal recognition of relationships might go beyond marriage. Cohabitators might want an easy-to-revoke legal status that lets them see each other in the hospital, be medical proxies, etc but doesn’t give them the tax breaks. Heck, platonic roommates might want the same thing. Let a thousand signalling mechanisms bloom.

One other caveat on this issue: getting the state to enforce religious law, even at its most innocuous, should always be an opt-in procedure. Going through the religious motions should never be taken as tacit consent to have the State enforce that tie. (consider poor catechesis, annulments given because people didn’t properly understand what a Church marriage entails, and consider how little you want the State to be in charge of making the judgment of your commitment to your faith!).

Ultimately, I think it’s a bad strategic move for churches to try to get their strictures into the legal code, even as opt-in contracts. If civil penalties are a better cudgel than eternal perdition, your institution has a bigger problem than contract law on their hands. Civil restrictions serve the unchurched. If a religious group wants to make use of them, it could be as a signal that the couple is aware of the church teaching on marriage and has seriously decided to be bound by it.

Stoicism is a Helluva Drug

February 4, 2012 By Leah Libresco

While discussing Feser and First Mover problems with a college friend, he tried to pitch me on Deism (but mostly as a waystation to paganism). I asked what he had read that he found compelling, and he recommended Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. “Sorry,” I said, “I read Epictetus’s The Handbook back in Directed Studies, and I can’t touch the stuff. It’s bad for me.”

My professor in first term philosophy was great because, after we discussed the substance of our readings and he was sure we were all clear on the content, he would ask us: “Could you live this philosophy? Would you want to? Is it true?” And then we’d have an argument. The week we read Epictetus, I was the staunchest defender of stoicism in the room.

You see, and a young and impressionable age, I read Frank Herbert’s Dune, and I learned two things: never sit with my back to a door and the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear:

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

I heard a message of stoicism all over the place. I liked Dear Abby’s “No one can make you feel inferior without your own consent” for its brevity, but when you’re a weird, smart elementary schooler, there’s no shortage of opportunities to be reminded that you can’t control the actions or opinions of other people. Therefore, they must be as irrelevant to my character as a sleeting rainstorm. All I can control is my internal and external reactions to their actions.

It was another consequence of the bad Kantianism (not to be confused with Dark Kantianism) I was sticking with at the time, but that wasn’t what made me first twig I’d gone wrong. The trouble was that morality only applied to me. I felt contempt for my own weakness if I let other people move me, but I wasn’t angry when people I knew were sad about being treated badly. If I shared my stoical beliefs with them, I only pitched it as a pragmatic coping mechanism, not the moral imperative I considered it when applied to myself.

So what do you call someone who thinks she has a unique moral duty and that everyone else is exempted from mattering in the same way? Solipsist seems like a fair accusation.

Assenting to Sin

November 15, 2011 By Leah Libresco

If someone has made up their mind to do something evil, is there any benefit to them if someone else prevents them from carrying out their intended action? The hypothetical doesn’t need to be as extreme as the examples of the last few days, where someone else commits the evil act preemptively to prevent you from managing it. Imagine instead someone swapping out PZ Myers’s consecrated wafer with an unconsecrated wafer before he desecrated it, or just stealing it back from him altogether.

Virtue ethics (my usual framework) suggest that nothing much is achieved for the perpetrator. Once you’ve psyched yourself up to do a bad thing and overridden your qualms, the damage to your character has been done; carrying out the crime isn’t marginally worse for your soul. I think Catholic moral teaching might come to the same conclusion, since the moral actor has already given deliberate and complete consent to the act based on full knowledge of the gravity of the act.

But my philosophical intuitions don’t quite jibe with that conclusion. I suspect that a lot of the time, we end up surprised by the gravity of what we’ve done – that people rarely give manage deliberate and complete consent based on full knowledge. After all, how could you? If you could see your choice clearly, wouldn’t you be compelled to choose rightly? No one can correctly withhold assent from the belief that the Pythagorean theorem is a true; the only way you can end up opposing it is by being misinformed. Is understanding the gravity of evil and then consenting to it a similarly impossible act?

You can see the whole problem nicely summed up in two articles by Orson Scott Card, who apparently uses Socratic dialogues to settle fights between his children. Neither child really intends the harm they do, and once they’re given some space away from the fight, they can both see that the actions they took were badly out of sync with their goals. But during the fight, they couldn’t think clearly enough to stop.

This lack of full consent doesn’t give people a pass on culpability for their actions. If we stumble into grave evil through carelessness, thoughtlessness, impulsiveness, or ignorance, then there’s a pretty serious moral imperative to do due diligence and train up your will and moral sense. In this framework, it does seem possible that committing an immoral act has a pretty significant knock-on effect compared to just intending to commit the act. Once you’ve surprised yourself with sin, it’s easy to imagine sinking into despair or imagining yourself as unredeemable, or simply becoming even more careless with moral assessments because it’s become shameful to think about your choices.

That does being me all the way back around to sin-eating. The difference between to two people in the Harry Potter-spoiler example is that one seems more aware of the terrible cost and burden of what he is called to do. The professor is more likely to be approaching the immoral act with the appropriate levels of mournfulness and revulsion than his student. All things being equal, someone who can clearly see and abjure what s/he’s done seems closer to repentance than someone who goes into a protective shock, unable to acknowledge what happened.

Soup Nazi Approach to Sex

September 16, 2011 By Leah Libresco

An anonymous commenter asked:

This is a little off topic but as a pro-choicer do you believe a man should have the right to opt out of parental responsibilities? It seems that if a woman has the right to choose whether or not she is to become a parent then a man should have that same right as well. Not trying to be a jerk just wondering if any pro-choicers have thought about this. Why should a man be held responsible for a choice he didn’t make?

I’m pulling this out as its own post, because I don’t want an abortion discussion to start eclipsing the transhumanism/ethics discussion in the other thread. And frankly, I don’t really want this post to become open season on abortion arguments, so I’d really like it if commenters limited themselves to the scope of the question.

Ok, on to my answer. There’s a really easy way for men (and women) to opt out of parental responsibilities, and it’s called not having sex. If you choose to have intercourse, you can’t opt-out of responsibility any more than you can opt-out of an STI if your protection fails or you used it improperly. Wearing a seatbelt and taking appropriate precautions doesn’t let you opt-out of being injured in a car accident, it just improves your odds. If you have consensual sex with a woman and she gets pregnant, no matter how careful you were, you’re on the hook for child support or half the cost of the abortion, depending on her choice.

If you can’t tolerate a risk of either of those responsibilities, good news! No one ever died from not having sex. If you are willing to be on the hook for one of either child support or an abortion, but one of those strikes you as practically or ethically unconscionable, you’ve still got options: never have sex with someone if you disagree with them about how to handle an unexpected pregnancy.

This is also my solution to casual sex culture, by the way. Fine, go have sex with people whose names you don’t know, but only if you’ve already had a conversation about your respective feelings about abortion. Don’t feel comfortable enough to have that conversation with a stranger? Then no sex for you! Too tipsy to get through the chat? No sex for you! The other person brushes you off when you bring it up? No sex for you (and what a lucky miss)! Clear that hurdle, and we can get into discussions about consent and communication and not objectifying or disrespecting your partner (and I don’t buy into the ‘it’s ok if we’re both treating each other as sex objects’ argument). But if you don’t clear agreeing-on-abortion hurdle, tough beans.

Why Bother Genemodding?

September 15, 2011 By Leah Libresco

Flesh to fiber-optic interface from Battlestar Galactica

Alex Knapp likes to kick around transhumanist problems at Forbes, and he’s concluded genetic engineering will almost certainly result in “horrific moral atrocities.” Simply put:

The “failed prototypes” are people. People who have to grow up and live with the consequences of the inevitable mistakes that will be made in the process of experimenting. Assuming, of course, they can physically live with those consequences at all.

And there’s the problem. When you get right down to it, I do not see any way to perform experiments involving signficant genetic enhancements that don’t end in the suffering of a human being. A human being whose DNA was altered without consent, who is participating in a scientific experiment without consent, and is, basically, being born into slavery, with their sole purpose in life being a stepping stone to making other people “better.”

I’m mostly in agreement with Knapp, so let me quickly get to where we diverge. I think he’s selling short the extent to which many fetuses, children, and adults end up in experiments they didn’t consent to that are meant for their own good. No fetus signed a waiver to be in a study of folic acid supplements, but they were hardly ‘born into slavery’ or reduced to a mere means as a result. And after birth, you can end up in a poorly run experiment, with potential for long term harm every time your state overhauls its school curriculum or changes the food safety standards. Let’s not inflate the threat-to-personhood danger just because these environmental changes are more cutting edge.

That being said, I’m in agreement that DNA-tweaking is dead on arrival. Genetic engineering is pretty much guaranteed to wind up in the middle of the abortion debate, since it’s a lot easier to select embryos than alter them. That issue taboos the whole subject for a significant proportion of the population. And pro-choicers like me still have plenty of reasons to be leery of the whole endeavor. As Knapp points out, any pre-birth enhancements tend to run into some serious problems with consent. We make plenty of choices that alter a baby’s biology, but this isn’t exactly folic acid supplements. There’s no strong consensus about what kind of enhancements are desirable or necessary, so there’s no way to argue that the person-to-be tacitly consents. And, historically, this kind of consensus isn’t all too trustworthy, anyway (cf. the practice of neo-natal genital surgery for intersex infants).

Absent a profound shift in expectations for our physical hardware, these objections are enough to kibosh any plan for human genetic engineering. And that’s fine by me, since there’s no reason transhumanists should have picked that as a goal to begin with. Focusing the conversation there is a way to push transhumanist goals into a far-distant future. Definitionally, you’re taking all the pressure off our generation, since, absent some really clever virus engineering, there’s no way we can use this tool to modify ourselves.

But aspiring body hackers do have options right now. The two I’m most interested in assimilating are a constant awareness of compass directions, and, subsequently, better navigational instincts, and the ability to sense electromagnetic fields (though I’d be going the magnets-in-nail-polish route, and steering clear of the surgical implants).

If those aren’t the augmentations you want, then start trying to put together a different mechanical/biological kludge. Just try and do some thinking about what you actually want to be, not what kind of thing is cool at parties. Levitation or flight sound cool, but I’m better served by the exertion of walking on a day-to-day basis, and when I do need to fly, I have this wacky trick called buying plane tickets.

Does that not seem cool and futuristic enough? Tough beans. Transhumanism is more about problem-solving than aesthetics, and plenty of currently existing tech can solve my problems even if it doesn’t meld with my wetware. But most people think that physical tech somehow doesn’t count and gadgets like my iPhone or my laptop (both of which radically change how I access, store, and process information, and then go on to give me totally new kinds of ways to act in the world) have nothing to do with the transhumanist project.

The weird thing is that even when we want to do something as radical as genetic engineering, we still want it to feel natural, smoothly and inextricably bound to us. An inborn sense of direction seems more real than training with the Northstar anklet. Farther along the spectrum, a surgical implant must be more a part of us than a magnet that’s only glued on.

One of my transhumanism hobbyhorses is trying to blur the definition of the body and stop privileging the squishy bits that happen to be attached to us at birth. Another one is making war on any infatuation with the ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ generally. I’ll worry about the aesthetics of an interface after I’ve got something I can use.

Oh, and don’t forget that some of the best bang for your buck transhumanism around is policing cruft and biases in your own reasoning. Cognitive hacking is still hacking, even if it doesn’t get to incorporate any cool-looking LEDs.