Books

I question the sanity of anyone who picks up this 800 page monster and reads it just for fun (including myself).

Bertrand Russell wrote this book after losing a teaching post at SUNY because he was an atheist. It has since become the standard textbook for Intro to Philosophy classes everywhere.

I studied philosophy for two years in college (the years before and after my LDS mission) but ultimately found it unsatisfying. I think this book explains why. For most of its existence, philosophy has been a little playground for people who pick a fantasy of how the world works, then spend their lives arguing about the minute specifics of that fantasy. Like so many medieval monks debating how many angles can dance on the head of a pin.

who cares????

Within Mormonism there is a scholarly organization called FARMS in the lower echelons of which I briefly spent some time before I became disillusioned with philosophy (and later Mormonism itself). They embody the Mormon equivalent of those theologian-philosophers. Arguing over and over about this or that theological implication of this or that passage in this or that book.

Meanwhile, the leaders of the LDS church and 99% of the members just don't care. Religion is so much more than its philosophy but there will always be religious philosophers who don't understand why they aren't more popular because they know so much more than the lay-person. As if the philosophical proof of God is even possible.

From Russell, on the philosopher's attempts to prove the existence of God:

I do not myself believe that philosophy can either prove or disprove the truth of religious dogmas, but ever since Plato most philosophers have considered it part of their business to produce 'proofs' of immortality and the existence of God...In order to make their proofs seem valid, they have had to falsify logic, to make mathematics mystical, and to pretend that deep-seated prejudices were heaven-sent intuitions.

p. 786

Russell concludes that the only real value of philosophy was in laying the groundwork for science, which has moved the world forward much more than Plato ever could.

I Don't recommend reading it unless you want to know why you spent too long studying the dead ideas of dead people.

I'm finding myself drawn towards fiction a bit more this year, mostly because when its well written it can discuss issues of life that non-fiction just never bothers to address.

The Bad Girl ranks pretty high on my list for that reason: its an excellent insight into the way men can become obsessed with the fantasy that a pretty woman creates.

The story is one Peruvian boy's tale of a girl he fell in love with as a teenager. She turned out to have been fabricating her life at the time. They meet again and again as the boy grows into adulthood, each time the girl has a different lie she is living. Each time she leaves him and breaks his heart.

It must be very confusing to women why men create such elaborate fictions about who women are. And very frustrating when the women age and men stop creating those fantasies about them. Its at the heart of why men are idiots.

If you've ever been stalked by an obsessive person, this is a good peek into the madness that can consume the weak male mind.

This was on my "books to read this year" list and once I got started I couldn't put it down. When I started to lose weight and exercise I had various pains and minor injuries. I noticed that the doctors could never see past my weight. I couldn't possibly have anything else wrong with me.

I don't fault them, my weight was a very big issue.

But I noticed patterns in how they behaved and didn't like what I saw. This book is written by a doctor and is mostly a collection of case studies in doctors being wrong. But he explains *why* the doctors were wrong and what steps can be taken to lead the doctor down the correct path.

I'd like to think that all doctors are like Dr. House: excited by the chase of a difficult diagnosis. But mostly they are just normal people who want to fix the suffering immediately in front of them and never get much further because there is so much immediate suffering going on all around.

If you've ever been frustrated in getting a good diagnosis from a doctor, this is an excellent book to give you clues in how to deal with them.

I've been reading a bit more fiction these days, though I'm not much of a sci-fi/fantasy reader, so to come across such good reviews for Bad Monkeys was enough to pique my interest, barely.

I was pleasantly surprised with the writing style and the story. Its not so very sci-fi/techie that it is off-putting. More of a conspiracy thing with some techno-gadgetry thrown in.

The most fascinating thing is the way the narrative plays with your sense of reality: is the narrator lying to the interrogator? Herself? Or just us? Each chapter ends with some bit of a lie or incomplete truth revealed as such, leaving you wondering what's real.

The finale, set in the top of the Luxor Pyramid in Vegas, is intense. I could do without the oversimplification of good vs. evil, but its still a fun ride.

highly recommend

Richard Dawkins
The God Delusion

This book made quite a splash in 2006 when it was published. I picked it up in 2007 to see what all the fuss was about. Didn't bother to write about it until 2008.

Dawkins is a well-known atheist who loves the controversy surrounding his philosophy. He gets validated by people like the South Park guys who had a version of Dawkins create a religion of science, full of all the brainwashing stupidity he attacks in his books. I'm sure Dawkins has already written something about it, he loves the spotlight of controversy.

This book claims to be written for the non-Atheist as a kind of missionary tract. Instead it is more like the kind of apologetic literature I read as a Mormon. While it claims to be for the non-believer, it is really just an excuse to re-affirm the believers.

The reasoning is a bit convoluted, but the stories are hilarious. The most unsettling part is how much of it is accurate. If it were more coherent as an argument I might recommend it. As it is, the book is a great string of funny stories, clever observations, and mildly witty paragraphs but never quite seals the deal it starts out to make.

Of interest:

On Pascal's wager that one should hedge one's bets on the existence of God by believing "just in case" (no harm done if you believe and are right, plenty of harm done if you don't believe and are wrong):

Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy. At least, it is not something I can decide to do as an act of will. I can decide to go to church and I can decide to recite the Nicene Creed, and I can decide to swear on a stack of bibles that I believe every word inside them. But none of that can make me actually believe it if I don't. Pascal's wager could only ever be an argument for feigning belief in God. And the God that you claim to believe in had better not be of the omniscient kind or he'd see through the deception. The ludicrous idea that believing is something you can decide to do is deliciously mocked by Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, where we meet the robotic Electric Monk, a labour-saving device that you buy 'to do your believing for you'. The de luxe model is advertised as 'Capable of believing things they wouldn't believe in Salt Lake City'.

-104

He makes a fascinating argument on pages 186ff that we

1-look for some agent to cause every event (hating the computer when it doesn't work, for example)
2-have the same rush of mania and chemicals when we fall in love as when we fall for God

Item 2 has some serious differences, but the similarities are striking:

--A reverence for icons from the object of our affection
--Warm and comforting feelings of being loved and protected and valued
--Emotional support in difficult times
--Loss of fear of death

I've often read women particularly who view their conversion in very romantic terms. LDS Missionary boys I knew had the same kind of protective feeling about their Church that fathers have over their wives or children. Both are childish reactions to primal emotions.

On being tolerant of non-fanatic believers:

As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers...The teachings of 'moderate' religion, though not extremist in themselves, are an open invitation to extremism.

-306

John Krakauer's book is an exploration of this same facet in Mormonism: how the teachings of the pleasant, law-abiding, mainstream church can spin off such violence as the Lafferty brothers.

In all I can tepidly recommend Dawkin's book:

--For atheists because its funny and reaffirming (though that very fact makes it somewhat unsettling)
--For open-minded non-Atheists because it won't convert you, but will probably force your faith to deepen as you come to grips with some of the points he makes
--For close-minded theists? You haven't even read my review, so my recommendation doesn't matter anyway. Go back to not reading your own sacred books and complaining about how the rest of us are the cause of all suffering

Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows

by Will Bagley

A friend gave me this for Christmas last year and it's taken me 11 months now to get just over half way (I read at my own pace...). For those who don't know the story, in September, 1857 a group of immigrants from Arkansas, bound for California, were set upon and killed by Mormons outside Cedar City (in Southern Utah). Only a few children were spared. The incident is a tragic skeleton in the LDS closet about which few outside of the Western-US-Historians crowd know anything at all. The History Channel has done a good special on it and John Krakauer discusses it in his book "Under the Banner of Heaven," so the story has somewhat entered the mainstream but it is still mostly a niche.

During my undergraduate years at BYU I worked for a professor whose focus was LDS history from 1844 through 1890 (or so). He had me doing very intersting research on this period and it included some work on the Massacre. Because of him my interest in this period has never quite died, all these years later.

The subtitle is a reference to the most contested point of the story: how much did Brigham Young know and when did he know it. Ever since the event, Mormons have worked very hard to argue that it was the action of a few paranoid Mormons and Indians and had no ties with the official, inspired, leadership in Salt Lake City. Initially the LDS church tried to say that it was the action of Indians alone. But no one believed that except the fantasy people in the wishful thinking of the Mormons who said it. Eventually there was a trial and John D. Lee, a local LDS leader in Cedar City, was found guilty and executed for the murders. The U.S. Government tried to prove that the orders came from much higher, but the LDS members closed ranks and only Lee's testimony implicated others. 

I'm torn in my thoughts on Mr. Bagley's book. I don't think he quite worked out who his audience is and the book suffers for it. He doesn't tell the story in a way that the non-specialist can easily follow. Sometimes people are introduced in a haphazard way and then disappear without explanation. Others are given short coda's ("so-and-so went on to do such-and-such") that don't always seem relevant. Facts are well footnoted, but it is only in the footnote that you can find out how well he's using his evidence (and sometimes that's not very well). 

The Mormon apologist crowd gave the book their usual bashing. Attacking his use of evidence, nit-picking over trivialities in an effort to suggest that if he got the color of the scarf one guy was wearing that day wrong, then he must have gotten everything wrong. They offer their typically useless, self-serving, opinions about Mr. Bagley and his book and then go back to patting themselves on the back. 

On the upside, the book is well researched and if you can get through the disjointed narrative, he offers a treasure-trove of colorful information about these long-dead people and what they must have been like. He tries to get inside the head of the murderers, examine how they could have perceived their actions as justified. He discusses dissent among the killers and the guilt that many of them felt after the fact. More chilling is the lack of any guilty conscience evident in many of the murderers.

Particularly compelling is his description of the months leading up to the Massacre. When US troops were marching to Utah to put down an over-hyped "rebellion" of the Territory. While the army marched, the LDS leaders went on their usual preaching circuits to build morale. Mr. Bagley points out a central issue in LDS history: the skilled use of double-meanings. This is a well documented practice where leaders would say one thing but to the inner circle, the alternate meaning was quite another matter. As Mr. Bagely puts it:

If [LDS Apostle George Albert] Smith gave orders to kill the emigrants, they may have been no more explicit than to "use them up" or "give them a good drubbing." Mormon leaders often spoke in code words whose meaning was clear only to insiders. One of Young's favorite phrases, "A word to the wise is sufficient," meant, "Don't make me spell it out." This ambiguity had many advantages: it sheltered Mormon leaders from accountability and shifted responsibility from the top leaders to local authorities. But orders couched in such enigmatic terms were easily misinterpreted, a serous problem given the volatile atmosphere and the slow pace of communications in Utah Territory. (p. 87)

Mr. Bagely doesn't replace Juanita Brooks' seminal work on the massacre ("Mountain Meadows Massacre") but he's a good addition to it. It's not an easy read and I can't recommend it for everyone. But if you want a very human tale of group-delusions and peer-pressure, it's worth the effort.