(5) BrJones – People overlook all sorts of things in communities and cultures be they Mormon, Catholic, Nazi German, or 21st Century China. The masses, the emotional manipulation, and the zeal is the correlating factor, not a belief or non-belief in God. You do bring up a good point that some very thoughtful and measured persons could perpetuate a bad thing based upon the idea of it being “God’s will.” But could we not say the same thing about it being the “Fuhrer’s will” or the “Comrade’s will” or the “people’s will” or even what is perceived existentially correct in principle (ends justifying the means?) People have a tendency to defer difficult choices to authority. It’s authority that correlates, not the divinity of that authority.

Remind me to nominate that one for a 2009 Niblet when it comes time.

“they have to be ‘tried’ with riches”. – It’s sort of like “Job” in reverse. And no laughing matter.

sxark…kinda overextending yourself with quotes you don’t have a citation on, eh?

what you’re looking for is this:

“The worst fear that I have about this people is that they will get rich in this
country, forget God and his people, wax fat, and kick themselves out of the Church and go to hell. This people will stand mobbing, robbing, poverty, and all manner of persecution, and be true. But my greater fear for them is that they cannot stand wealth; and yet they have to be tried with riches, for they will become the richest people on this earth” (Brigham Young, as quoted by Gordon B. Hinckley in his address, “These Noble Pioneers.” See also Salt Lake City, George Q. Cannon & Sons, 1900; New York: AMS Press, 1971, pp. 11923, cited by Preston Nibley in Brigham Young: The Man and His Work, Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1936, pp. 12628).

I heard Pres. Marion G. Romney state that when he went to law school, that he “had” to read the Book of Mormon every day.
We all knew what he ment.
There are those that find themselves in a blessed stuation and they also feel that they must read scriptures, or something like unto it, every day – so they do not loose their true prospective while in the world.

Likewise, some are poor and will remain so, but feel they are “blessed” by just being alive and they remain strong in their faith.

Carol: “Sometimes personal tragedy has brought me to my knee in despair; others times it has brought me to my knees in prayer.” But (again agreeing with Andrew S) that’s your choice. You respond to tragedy by falling to your knees either in despair or prayer. There are plenty of potential responses to tragedy. It is certainly also common to respond by rejecting faith in one’s dark moments. That must mean it’s more about your personal disposition than anything else.

When Jesus said he came to bring a sword, I think he meant that in the sense that you need to have some lower-level suffering and sacrifice to reach higher-level achievement. A treatment for a disease may be painful, make you nauseated and make you lose your hair, but if it works, that would have been worth it.

I think persecution complexes work insofar as they are back with something real. I’m not saying that Satan is necessarily a real entity (like Carol has said), but rather, our persecution complex is a spiritual model around the physical and intellectual persecution we actually do face. The complex is a theological justification that finds purpose out of chaos and allows us to feel that we suffer for our benefit. Imaginary persecution complexes will be stumblingblocks down the road (e.g., when you find out that things you thought were sins don’t appear to be as “bad” as you learned about in the past…things aren’t as black and white, etc.,)

Relating to your last two questions, I think that if you don’t, for whatever reason, have the inclination (or god programming) or if you do, for whatever reason, have such inclination, then while your brain is plastic and can change, we do *not* have a reliable, repeatable method to get an inclination or lose it. So, I like how you put it, in that it may require a major dysfunctional event (and even this can go either way…you see people who experience similar stories — like the freak death of a relative, but you can easily see them going either way…either them coming to doubt there could be a god based on that happening…or those who gain new faith in a god as a result of that happening. While people say, “There are no atheists in foxholes,” the other popular stereotype is that wartorn soldiers and survivors come back cynical, with faith shredded to pieces moreso than anyone physically may have been shredded.

While it’s true that the Lord h imself said that it is easier for someone to go through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to get to heaven, the rich think differently.

For example, if you were to go to a poor person and tell them that you intend to start a business, a poor person will typically say What for? You need money. It’s too hard.
The rich will typically say “You go for it. You can do it.”
I don’t know why we try to glorify poverty.

1 – Should religions stop trying to solve dysfunction and society’s problems? I think this is where some get off-point. The purpose of altruism is to create servant leadership, not to eliminate poverty. Charity creates love and attachment; it doesn’t cure all the world’s ills any more than parenting creates perfect children.
2 – Do imaginary dysfunctions work long-term to kick in the God programming? I think they can lead to later disillusionment because they are somewhat infantile. For children to have such a simplistic view is one thing, but for adults, at some point it seems silly.
3 – I think once the God programming kicks in, there’s always a God subroutine, regardless of the change within. But only if the programming really did kick in, not just cultural or social indoctrination.
4 – Personally, I think this notion explains a lot of conversion stories.

“I see my experience as just as scientific as he sees his non-experience.”

While your experiences may be proof to you, it’s not “scientific”. Personal experience has never been proof in the scientific world. I’m not saying your wrong, or that science is the only way to find truth (Again, our minds can distort our reality). If that’s the way you find truth, more power to you,just don’t call it science.

To elaborate, I can be zealous for my cause and be a non-believer in God. My zeal would cause me sign on and send 20 million to the gulags in the name of the righteousness of my cause. This is nothing more than an update to the medieval purges or the Crusades. In both cases you have politics hijacking zeal for a prevailing belief structure, in this case, Catholicism. The belief in God is not the correlating factor. Zeal can also upset the spiritual balance of a believer because there is no room for error. I believe, for example that the TBM becomes the EXMO as a result of the zeal gene than any other factor. They are both polar absolutes. A non zealous believer has more room for error, correction, suspension of judgment, compassion, tolerance,and displays almost non of the criticism leveled by those that see a God gene.

The question of having a belief gene, should therefor be separated from a zeal gene. Both are relevant to this discussion.

The question of belief is rather fascinating. I have a friend-he and I are on the opposite belief spectrum–both of us LDS–although he has grown more tepid over the years. Where I see the earth, Occam’s Razor tells me that the physical structures of matter exists, ergo, something must have created it. He seems Occam’s Razor as–there is no evidence that it was created, ergo, it must have come into existence spontaneously. Try as he might, and he has tried, he cannot suspend disbelief enough to allow the frontal lobe to wander into God’s arms. It comes easy to me, very easy. It is my gift that allows me to suspend my issues with the perceived historical and doctrinal fallacies with the Church and just believe anyway–the experience is that powerful for me. I see my experience as just as scientific as he sees his non-experience. I tap into a feeling–I call it truth harmonics–and I hypothesize that I am harmonically converging with dark matter, which I believe is spirit. He sees my experience as a brain chemical, my God gene, turning on an emotional response because I have the gift and ability to do so. In other words, I am my own God. Because he thinks that this is my experience, he doesn’t want to experience it because he can’t trust it. I on the other hand, believe that your eyes and ears can deceive you as much as your heart, and therefor, they can’t be trusted. The harmonic convergence is the only thing I do trust, mostly because it elicits feelings of wellbeing and joy, whereas there usually no such emotional approval from eyes and ears.

For us, although we do give credence to genetic predisposition as to how one sees the world, we do agree that ultimately it’s a matter of choice as to how one believes because the logic works in either fashion, and that there is just as much uncertainty for one system as the other. The only reason we can admit this is because we both aren’t very zealous.