Alright, maybe I should ahve been more bloggy and said fuck off. But I think “Go to Hell” is literalistly more correct. The New York Times publishes a long apologia by Noah Feldman which contains a string of lies and implicit assertions about fact which are verifiably untrue. These assertions, were a blogger or Democratic nominee for President make them would get a stern warning from teh serious people and the Village Idiots about sticking more closely to truthiness.

For example:

Like Mormon ritual, much of Mormon theology remains relatively inaccessible to outsiders. The text of the Book of Mormon has always been spread to a broad audience, but the text is not a sufficient guide to understanding the details of Mormon teaching. Joseph Smith received extensive further revelation in the nature of sacred secrets to be shared with only a handful of close associates and initiates within the newly forming church.

Note what my grammarian 9th grade teacher would have called the use of the past indicative, and not some form of subjunctive: Joseph Smith received extensive further revelation. Not, for example, Scientists believe that global warming is caused by human emissions of carbon dioxide. Jospeh Smith’s revelation, to the New York Times is established and irrefutable fact, while Global Warming is just something a few strange people in universities believe.

The heart of an apologia is always a very old pair of logical fallacies. One is the fallacy of the excluded middle, sweeping under the carpet other possibilities, particularly implicit assumptions of the apologist. The second is a long, false, accusation of an attack against the man. The apologist over and over again asserts there is something wrong with the people who will not agree to the apologists implicit assumptions.

For example:

Still, even among those who respect Mormons personally, it is still common to hear Mormonism’s tenets dismissed as ridiculous. This attitude is logically indefensible insofar as Mormonism is being compared with other world religions. There is nothing inherently less plausible about God’s revealing himself to an upstate New York farmer in the early years of the Republic than to the pharaoh’s changeling grandson in ancient Egypt. But what is driving the tendency to discount Joseph Smith’s revelations is not that they seem less reasonable than those of Moses; it is that the book containing them is so new.

Logically indefensible goes this rambling apologia. That’s incorrect. Of course, if, as Feldman keeps pointing out, rich business people want something to be acceptable, then the New York Times must publish, unedited, whatever it is. For example the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq prior to the invasion of said country.

The implicit assumption in the piece, and which the New York Times demands we accept, is literalism. Literalism is the belief that the texts of some sacred work are literally physically true, in the same way that cancer is a physical fact, and not merely a manifestation of a spiritual ill. The difference between Christian Science literalists, who regularly want to deny care to their children because of the demands of their religion on health, and Mormonism, is that there are fewer near billionaire Christian Scientists running for the Republican nomination. And fewer near billionaire Christian Scientists.

It is the implicit literalism which differentiates Mormonism from other religious beliefs. For example, in Feldman’s article, he asserts the factuality of John Smith’s revelation’s being received. He did not say something factually neutral such as “Mormonism rests on John Smith’s pronouncements which are taken as revelation.” It is not a fact that can be proven or dis-proven that John Smith received wisdom from God. It is a fact that he said things and said they were revelation from God.

This implicit literalism is then used to focus on a detail, rather than on a whole. He, for example, argues that Moses is no less implausible than John Smith. However, the Book of Mormon, taken as a whole, is a great deal less plausible as a record. Feldman ridicules and denies a crucial difference between older religions and Mormonism, that is that whatever else they are, they are the authentic record of a people at a time. The Book of Mormon is less historically accurate than Homer’s Iliad. Feldman is, in essence arguing, that because there probably was not single person named Agamemnon who had dreams for Zeus, that Monroni is as historically plausible as the city of Troy. A city, at the site described by Homer, existed, and it was indeed the scene of a war which ended in the destruction of that inhabitation of the site. The cities he mentions as being extant at that time, were. Homer’s poetry is false to the details, but it is grounded in the oral tradition of actual events.

Literalism raises its ugly head again, and in a crucial way.

If this account is accurate, then Mormonism’s theological secrets actually have more than a little in common with religious mysteries that can be found in medieval Islamic esotericism, kabbalistic mysticism and ancient Christian Gnosticism. Successive generations have rediscovered these secrets and reasserted their antiquity in ways very similar to Smith’s discovery of ancient tablets.

It is important again to note Successive generations have rediscovered these secrets and reasserted their antiquity. When I first read this apologia, I stopped in my tracks. It is a profoundly dishonest thing to say. There are no esoteric secrets which are similar to scientific laws, as the statement implies. There is no esoteric equivalent to human anatomy, which was also secret knowledge, which is waiting to be discovered by anyone willing to dissect enough bodies, and note the results. Instead esoteric secrets are unique expressions of spiritual beliefs which lie in contradiction to public norms. Feldman even gives us a perfect example: Smith’s assertion of the physical humanity of God in a physical heaven. That’s not a secret, since it is not a fact, but instead is an expression of a rejection of something which was, and is, commonly believed at the time of its statement.

It is also a statement of the literalism which is inherent in Mormonism. To be a Jew, or to be a Christian one does not need to believe in the physical existence of any of the people in the sacred texts, nor in the physical reality of God. But to be a Mormon one must.

Feldman’s apologia then is an apologia for precisely the element of religious extremism which is corrosive and poisonous to Democracy: the literal physical truth of any collection of made up statements, and for the principle which is antithetical to Secularism: that this collection must be admitted as true a priori of any investigation, discussion, or examination. At least, true if enough people who have power and money want them to be admitted. Since Democracy is compromise, the way to destroy it is to demand compromise with things that are factually false. Such as for example, “Torture is a useful policy of state.”

The greatest difference between the esoteric tradition and Smith’s version of it is that Smith’s faith has grown into an organized religion rather than remaining the preserve of a select few.

No, because Feldman isn’t writing a defense of Wicca, which has adherents who believe in its esoteric assertions as literally true, but of Mormonism. The difference between esoteric tradition and Mormonism is that esoteric traditions see the statements as merely a means to enlightenment. Esoteric tradition is deeply akin to the Taoist: the esoteric secret opt into words is false, the Tao which can be named is not the Tao.

So while Feldman says that it is logically indefensible to differentiate between the books of Moses and the Book of Monroni, the reality is first that the people writing in Moses’ name are a good deal more reliable as witnesses than John Smith is, and second, even to be an evangelical Christian does not require the same belief in contra-factual statements. There was a wandering semitic group of tribes, they did engage in wars and conflict with their neighbors and found kingdoms in the Levant, absorbing, often brutally, the pre-existing people’s and beliefs. They did engage in a recording and redaction of these events from oral to written form, and the records we have are the end product of them. Nothing like the events in the book of Mormon took place, but to be a Mormon, one must believe this.

But Feldman needs to make the false comparison between allegorical texts, which assert no physical history, and religious myths which assert physical stories. He needs to pick an unverifiable fact which is anecdotal to make equal the Book of Monroni with the Books of Moses, ignoring that there is at least some material in the records of the Torah and associated works which ties to physical facts. The physical reality of Mormonism begins after John Smith’s story about the tablets. hen then needs to cut across to apocrypha, and say that statements about spiritual quantities having false provenance are the same as statements about the archeology of Meso-America which have false provenance.

Shorter Feldman: “Lots of people believe things crazier than the Book of Mormon, ok well not really believe, and only a very few people.” After denying that Mormonism is a secret society, and is instead a major world religion, he then falls back on the defense that Mormonism is a secret society. This makes Mormonism troubling, or rather makes Mormonism in a troubling phase of its evolution, as Scientology. Scientology is in the earlier phase where what was secret belief has just become public. But Feldman did not write, and did not wish to draw the parallel with other contemporary literalist groups, precisely because they all have the same bad reputation with the public.

Feldman then lies about a basic and important fact of archeology and comparative religious studies. He says that age confers authenticity. No, authenticity confers authenticity. The Book of Mormon is not an authentic record of anything except what Smith wanted to base his religion on. When looking at the archeology of a religion, the authenticity is what allows the search for the physical places and physical records of events. We found Troy from the Iliad, no one will find anything by reading the Book of Mormon. One can be a defender of the Western Canon without believing that Athena whispered into the ear of her favorite hero. One cannot be a Mormon and deny the physical past.

As I alluded to earlier, no one is writing such a apologia for Wicca in the New York Times. This is because there aren’t a large number of rich people who think that a Wiccan near billionaire is the person most likely to cut their taxes and declare war on which ever country will generate the most extractable flow of money.

The New York Times, by publishing bald assertions about religious revelation as facts, by blessing these as being from a senior editor, shows that the rules don’t apply to them.

What is it that we are supposed to say now? Oh yes: “Time for a Blogger Ethics Panel.”

Literalism is a cancer. It is the hold over from a pre-scientific past, or a reaction against a scientific present, which is used to justify radical destruction of pluralistic and cosmopolitan societies. Plato wrote about the dangers of the Guardian class in The Republic, and they with us today. It is ironic that the New York Times had a partisan from the American Enterprise Institute defend a polemical attack on all of Islam, and then turns around and publishes an apologia for the same root theocratic beliefs when they come from someone whose skin color is different.

Feldman argues that because evangelical literalism and fundamentalist literalism are acceptable, then Mormon literalism should be as well. If you have two cancers, a third won’t hurt, he says.