Homosexuality

By Kjerish - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54180877

     I still remember the first time I met an openly gay person.

     I was 17 years old, riding a greyhound bus to Nashville to visit my best friend, who had just moved there. This was my first real venture into the world as a solo person, away from home and alone. It was an eventful journey, enough so that I remember more about the bus ride to Nashville than my time there. The bus left Salt Lake just ahead of a large snow storm that was moving eastward. In Rock Springs, Wyoming the bus driver broke their arm in attempting to put chains on the tires of the bus. Rock Springs isn't exactly a hub for greyhound and it was 8 hours until a replacement driver got us back on the road. This 8 hour delay extended a 1.5 day bus ride into a 2.5 day bus ride, as we were now in the thick of the storm as it rolled across the country. This gave large amounts of time to talk to fellow passengers. From Salt Lake to St Louis, I rode next to an older man who enjoyed conversation a bit more than I did. My memory is not particularly visual so I am unable to recall what he looked like, solely that I classified him as older. After more than a day of talking with this guy, I can still remember the moment when he revealed that he was gay. He was traveling from San Diego to Boston to visit someone, and I inquired as to how he was able to have that much free time. He replied that he was on disability (which given my privileged upbringing I had never really heard of) because he had AIDS, which he mentioned as being common among gay men like himself. I was mortified. I remember texting a friend, "He's Gay!!!" I did not even know how to process this information. In my mind I had just met someone who had casually admitted to being a step below a murderer. I was uncomfortable sitting near him moving forward, and looked for the first opportunity to put distance between us without seeming too incredibly rude.

     Flash forward to a time when I was a missionary in South Africa, which at the time probably had even less openly gay people than Utah. I remember the disgust I felt learning that someone I was teaching was gay. We burned all the records we had of teaching them in our desire to distance ourselves from the horror. Contrast this with the patience that I was able to put into working with a person who had admitted to repeatedly raping his daughter and then hiding the results with multiple abortions. At the time I was willing to give this person a chance to change their life, yet was insulted and disgusted that another had the audacity to sit and talk to me while being gay. Intellectually I know that I was a product of my culture in my horror, and in regularly using "gay" as the most insulting term I could think of, but it is hard to not feel ashamed of myself for not having the human decency to know better. Overcoming this visceral disgust and hate was a long and arduous journey. There are only a few things in my life that I have ever felt so strongly enough about.

     As much as I hate to admit it, this is one of the things I have changed my mind about that I don't feel like I can really take that much credit for. In things I have written about up to this point, my change of heart came after much effort to try to reevaluate my view. This is one that just pulled me along. I think I had felt too deeply about it that it had gone past all reason. In that way it was beyond my ability to critically examine, but took help from the outside to reach in and break down the hardness of my heart. There are  a few sources that I credit with softening my heart, so that when I did actually look at how I felt about this issue, I found that my mind had already changed on its own.

     First of all was the writing of Orson Scott Card. This may come as a surprise as age seems to have turned his views far more conservative than they once were, but the first gay character I ever read about was in his novel Songmaster. Ender's Game and the trilogy that follow it were the first real exploration of the importance of tolerance that I really understood. There could have been many others trying to reach me, but these novels really opened my mind to the importance of  recognizing when you are unable to understand an other's perspective and practicing patience and love in those instances, rather than lashing out. I learned about tolerance from the mistakes of Ender, and the way he spent the rest of his life trying to spread tolerance and understanding among humanity. I do not know of any other character from any other story who put as much effort into teaching people how little we may know about those around us, and how unable we are to judge them properly based on the little we do know. 

     Second is punk rock, and the music scene surrounding punk and ska in my area at the time. There are of course hateful elements of the punk genre, but Salt Lake at the time had a strong community built around unity. It wasn't necessarily that people at shows were talking about homosexuality specifically, but the emphasis on ending hate in all forms showed me what how to put tolerance into practice. I feel like I owe a great deal to examples of good people I met, and the art that they made. Music has been one of the few things that was been able to reach past the walls I put up against critical thinking and make me willing to consider points of view that were beyond my reach.

     Though changing my mind about the way LGBT people should be treated was something I fought anytime it came up consciously, the rising prominence in popular culture of the movement for equal rights brought plenty of time for my internal conflict between the ideals of equality and tolerance and my homophobia and belief that gay marriage should be illegal to be apparent. Not being the most self aware person at the time I lament that I am unable to point to the exact process of how I came to change my mind about these things I felt so strongly about. I do not think that it all hinged on one moment, but rather was a swelling up of conflict that had been suppressed for an extended period. However, if it was something that happened all at once, I certainly know what that moment was. It is one of the more clear memories of my life. May of 2013. At the time I was going to school at Utah State University and on the weekends I was delivering pizzas in Salt Lake 100 miles away. As such my wife, son Ezra, and I would stay with family on the weekends and one Sunday morning after a long night taking care of the nearly 1 year old Ezra, I put on some Stephen Colbert. The musical guest was Macklemore, and he performed his song "Same Love," and talked about the way that homophobia and misogyny were glorified in hip hop and the culture at large.

The moment from Macklemore that brought me to the realization of the need for change on my view

     I wish I knew why this was the moment that it finally clicked how much hate I held in my heart and how poorly it was justified. My son, Ezra, was so incredibly important to me that I built my whole life around him, and I remember the important thing in my mind being something along the lines of "Ezra can't grow up feeling this way, I can't be an example of discrimination and intolerance for something I do not understand." I knew I was in the wrong, and I realized I had to change my actions and opinions to match my actual values. I was not living up to my own ideals, and if I wasn't careful I would be leading my son down that same path of professing ones values as one thing, and then actively working against them. I needed to bring my word and my behavior together and live more authentically, even if it meant swimming against the current of culture.



     So in lieu of being able fully describe how I was able to change my mind on this topic, I will offer instead an apology. For all those who were unable to feel comfortable being themselves in a culture of repression that I contributed to, I am sorry. I know you were around me and unable to feel safe being out, and a part of that was due to the judgement I passed on you, and the hate that I propagated. Its far too little too late, but I am sorry for my part, for going with the flow and actively contributing to the flow. May we all work for a world for our children that doesn't make them feel ostracized for being who they are, gay or straight, black or white, religious or not. All I know how to do is move forward away from the pain I have caused, towards a place where all feel welcome and supported in their own skin. We can actually make a better world, and we can actually build our community to match our ideals and our values. I guess I just want to say, lets actually do it.

Unexplainable Occurrences

My Daughter, Florence, at the Ringing Rocks. This is a very unusual pile of rocks, which when struck ring in a metallic manner. The mechanism for which is currently unknown.

     One of the things I have changed my mind about that has had the biggest impact on my life is the way that I think about the unexplained strange things that happen in life. Some of these things might be more mundane, some cause people to structure their whole life around them. There are many such experiences in my life that I attributed to an all powerful being intervening on my behalf. There are many others that I ignored, or refused to admit even happened. The things I perceived as interventions from higher, intelligent powers, ranged from moments of inspiration in decision making, to unexplained healings and exorcisms. I could fill a page with just the things that I have sorted into this unexplained category from my life. I further sorted them into faith constructive and faith destructive miracles and then tried to minimize in my head the importance of the faith destructive while maximizing the importance of the faith constructive, but this is not the part I want to discuss today. This is about how my view of the whole category of supernatural phenomena.

     In my time as a religionist, I held the view that there were things that happened naturally, which were the realm of science, and things then that were unexplainable by science and thus supernatural. This sorting left a realm of mundane occurrences, explainable by mundane techniques, and a realm of mysterious occurrences that could not be explained by mundane techniques. Science could explain how a doctor could heal the sick, but when a faith healer did the healing it was beyond natural, and therefore out of the realm of what science could explain. These miracles or whatever term you like to use for anomalous events, then required some other system to reach explanations. They were, thereby, seen as support for religion in my life. Since science was unable to fathom their depths, religion and spirituality was required to tap into the world beyond. Here was a system that allowed for unusual occurrences. If the sun stopped rising and setting as science required it to, I could attribute the unusual phenomenon to the power of God and his willing the earth to cease its rotation. I was very grateful for the the freedom to kill my curiosity with this all encompassing explanation. This was a great system, I could avoid any questioning of my main religion which encompassed the realm of the unexplainable. The trouble came when I started examining my religion which ruled the realm of the explainable.

     After getting tired of my engineering major, I decided to give physics a try. This turned out to be an intimate examination of my understanding science. I started with essentially two curiosity stopping belief systems, which I used to prevent myself from ever having to be unsure. On the one had science was a black box mystery which provided answers about everyday sort of things, and on the other my religious system was a black box mystery that provided answers about unusual experiences. Since I had carefully protected the second system, throwing out any doubt that might try to assault it, and also spent a lot of time trying to understand it, it seemed like an appropriate time to get a better understanding of the first mystery answer box.

     Before spending time on understanding my "regular occurrence" religion, science felt like a list of answers to questions that other people had answered. It was merely a lookup table that could be checked to find answers to any question I might have about things that happen with some regular frequency. I have already written about how understanding the math and theory behind changed my mind about the age of the earth, but my education became a series of similar events. Slowly the magic fell away. It was a process that required many walks home from class with my head spinning as I wrapped my head around the implications. I felt like a child seeing the world for the first time. Having been warned, as I described before, against the power of science in creating apostasy I was prepared for a list of answers that might disagree with my other religion. Howsoever, what I was not prepared for, was the humility of science.

     When I started my education in physics, I saw no difference essentially between my two religions. I had spent years in deep study of my "religion of the unexplainable." When I searched for explanations from this answer box about the mysteries of these phenomena, I received answers. I received answer through both methods as mundane as reading and as mysterious as revelation. The answers were equally mysterious, and I wondered and worshiped at the mystery. When I searched from answers from my "religion of the explainable," it was a very similar experience. While I didn't realize I was treating these two things the same way, looking back it is pretty clear to me. The biggest shock of my examination of my "natural religion" was its admission of error. A magic answer box should never admit error if it is to be trusted! It took me a long long time and a lot of mental anguish to wrestle with this admission of guilt. Even worse than admitting error, it admitted uncertainty! This is an element of empirical research that had somehow been omitted in my understanding of science to this point in my life. I had held on to, and required certainty from both of my religions.

     Uncertainty is incredibly uncomfortable for me. I have become more comfortable with it over time, but I want there to be a well defined answer to any given question. I think this is a common view, and as a culture we have in our minds that if something is uncertain it is less valuable. My mistake was in assuming certainty was possible. In ignoring the super unlikely events that would make my whole world view nonsensical. An example from my religion of the explainable is the refutation of the Ptolemaic earth centered universe. All the regularly occurring phenomena were consistent with an earth centered view of the universe, and experiment regularly confirmed that sun and stars orbited the earth. This is of course a simplistic view of the history, but for a detailed consideration of this particular scenario I recommend Paul Feyerabends book, Against Method It took occurrences that were considered uncommon and perhaps even miraculous being incorporated into the theory to realize a shift was necessary.

     These unusual occurrences are often ignored for ease of communication, and this can make them appear nonexistent. For example, if you asked me how tall my office door is I would promptly get my tape measure to begin answering your question. I believe strongly in the old adage "measure twice, cut once" so I decide to make several measurements of the doorway. Say I measure it 10 times, writing down the measurement each time. I come up with a list of 10 numbers. The whole point of measuring 10 times is that I have assumed I may make some error, and I need further evidence in order to give you an answer. Say of my measurements, 9 of them are between 7 feet and 7 feet 1 inch but the one of them was 11 feet 6 inches. How do I answer your question? I collected data on the doorway, and it is not exactly straightforward. I have 9 answers that more or less agree, and 1 that does not. While there can be a number of ways to explain the 1 measurement, and why it might be ignored for the sake of our conversation about the doorway, the fact is that it still exists. I may tell you that the door is between 7 feet and 7 feet 1 inch, or I may tell you that 90% of the time it is so, while 10% of the time it appears to be much larger. I can chalk it up a mistake in writing down the measurement, or maybe I didnt notice I had 4 feet of tape laying on the floor. I could also assume that a supernatural occurrence where God, who is obviously at least 10 feet tall, needed to expand the doorway while he walked through, right at the time I measured. Whichever of these actions I take following the measurement change the real issue. Even if I through out the outlying measurement, the ones that more or less agree, still have a bit of uncertainty. The point of this example is that certainty is not something that is possible in considering phenomena, regularly occurring or unusual.

https://xkcd.com/1725/

     This realization, and the admittance in the answers given by the science, changed my mind about the requirement of another system, one to explain the unexplainable. The religion of the mundane was not running from these weird data points, but embraced them and used them to move forward. It did not want to hide them, but to put a big red flag on them so that they could be studied harder. This took it from the realm of a religion, to an honest endeavor to understand. This was the humility of science that I came to love. The honesty to say, this answer is uncertain, but when you try to check it out for yourself, this is how I got the answer I gave you. No matter how much I pushed into answers given by my religion of the unexplainable, it never became a technology. It never turned into a tool for creating new answers and verifying old ones, and once I found out that my religion of the explainable was doing everything in its power to not be a magic answer box I lost most of my interest in the unexplainable. My Scientism destroyed itself by the study of science giving tools for checking and verifying the answers given, while owning up to that which was unknown and uncertain. Meanwhile my religious answers remained as confusing and uncheckable, all while doubling down on the what I now view as absurd insistence on absolute certainty. Not only is that not an empowering tool for finding answers, its kind of boring. I lost my faith, not because I didn't believe its claims, but because I found that uncertainty is a part of the human understanding, and that science is far more messy than it might appear. If no one had told me beforehand that God sometimes walks through doorways, and he stretches them taller when he does, I would never have jumped to that conclusion on the one outlying data point. It may be true, but it seems a lot less likely than other more mundane explanations. I would be lying if I said that I believed it, and an extension of that simple example to various other phenomena such as faith healings or other miracles is the story of how I changed my mind about their importance.

     I found that removing both of my religions took away my ability to easily stop curiosity from forming in my mind. Curiosity is the great driver, which pushes inquiry forward both on a personal and societal scale, and I have removed two great obstacles to curiosity. I was grateful to them when I knew not of the drive curiosity can create, and the pleasure that can be derived from pursuing its leads. I loved the one for fear of damnation in an after life, and the other for fear of ridicule. However replacing the religion of science with the pursuit of curiosity in a scientific manner, I have avoided the damnation in mortality that I had clung on to so tightly for most of my life.

P.S. 

 Here is a bit of art relevant to today's subject. Song and video are both excellent. One of my favorites. 

Rationalization of Poor Justification

Taken in the Bridger Mountains, near Fairy Lake

 

I had doubts long before I left religion. I think everyone does, and I think doubting is a healthy reminder to double check that we are heading down the right path. This idea of doubt is something I have changed my mind about. 

     

People who know me, if asked about my personality, would have to at least somewhere in that description include my huge tendency toward stubbornness. I am a person whose default belief is that I am right. When new information or evidence comes my way, my natural response is to give it WAY less weight than that which I have already processed. It is less of a confirmation bias than an anti-refutation bias and it is strong. Though this is my own personal weakness, it is a weakness that is embraced within the religious community which masked it from my own scrutiny for a long period of time.

     I am a pretty skeptical person, but this bias makes it difficult for me to change my mind. It is part of the reason I write this blog and why I have been so active in changing my mind. I have to be. If I do not make a conscious decision to examine something honestly, I will naturally dismiss any suggestion that I might be wrong out of hand. Because of this nearsightedness, I have missed a great many places where I have had weakness. 

     One of these places of nearsighted stubbornness was in religion. I told myself I believed, and from there it was a done deal. There was no amount of evidence that I couldn't question into non-existence. I used this bias as a tool to rationalize away the poor justification for my religious beliefs, in attempt to avoid feared cultural ostracization. In reality these had long since left the realm of beliefs and become self-enforced dogma. I refused to question these beliefs and spent large amounts of mental energy trying to avoid seeing any contradictions or error in them. This is a practice that is commonly encouraged within Christianity [1], including the sect of my youth [2]. It is simultaneously encouraged to give no weight to arguments which are counter to the beliefs laid out by the church while also accepting their claims without consideration of their rationality.

     However, I realized that this encouragement to rationalize was not intended to have blanket application. I felt it was right to put effort into making belief in religion rational, but then avoid making that same effort in any other situation. It was a self-generated "ends justify the means" situation, where I felt using an irrational tool was acceptable in the pursuit of this one thing I really wanted. It was OK to rationalize, but just in this case, just to avoid being an odd person in a community of believers.

     Eventually this imbalance became so heavy it grew uncomfortable. I began to realize that I was not being honest with myself in saying that I believed in things I did not actually believe in. This became clearly evident in regular meetings with clergy members when I was asked to affirm my belief. I realized I was not fully telling the truth in doing so, which contradicted other affirmations I was asked to make, including that I was honest. Here was a conflict:  Do I accept honesty as a value above cultural or religious acceptance? For years I did not. Not through any personal indication, but because it was a somewhat common experience within the community, I feared that honesty would mean an end to my marriage and severely hamper my relationship with my son. This was not a decision that could be made lightly, and I chose to eschew honesty for comfort. I know from conversations with friends that this is a decision that other people currently face. I would not fault someone for choosing either side, but it grew weary for me.

     A tipping point in my decision to stop rationalizing my acceptance (though for a long time it was less acceptance and more lack of open disagreement) with beliefs that were self-inconsistent and disagreed with more consistent evidence, was an idea I learned from Dave Ramsey. I found a piece of advice he gives on financial matters to be really freeing in ideas as well. Essentially, he repeats something to the effect of (speaking about some item that a person already owns),"Instead of thinking about selling [Some item], think about buying it. If you wouldn't buy it, you should sell it. Not selling it is the same thing as buying it again every day."

     When I considered my religious beliefs under this lens, the "anti-refutation" bias was no longer present. If I had all the evidence I do today, and no predetermined decision to pursue religion, would I choose to do so? In this light, it was much easier to see that my self-deception and "sell" these ideas. I did not need to continue believe the earth was 6000 years old, just because I had already decided to. Continuing to claim that belief in the face of strong evidence to the contrary was choosing to accept it anew, which it was clear to me I would not do. If I would not accept these claims coming to me fresh, why would I keep them around when I had many refutations of them? This new mindset was revolutionary to my life. I have applied this tool to change many things about my world view, and it has allowed me to be more true to myself, removing external pressure and focusing on weighing the evidence. It gave me the freedom to accept my lack of beliefs in the claims of religion and not pretend that I wanted them.

     I am still weak and prone to judging incorrectly, but I have gained the flexibility to make my own judgments and refrain from rationalizing belief in unjustified claims.

[1] Christ the Healer

[2] D. F Uchtdorf, Come Join With Us (2013)

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