FairMormon Speaker: What Difference Does Religious Faith Make?

Last updated on: August 17, 2017 at 9:05 am by Dan Peterson

FairMormon Speaker: What Difference Does Religious Faith Make? 2017-08-17T09:05:01-06:00 Dan Peterson

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R. Scott Lloyd, of the Deseret News, provides a good article on my remarks as the closing speaker of the 2017 FairMormon conference, which took place last Thursday and Friday in Provo’s Utah Valley Convention Center:

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865686266/FairMormon-speaker-What-difference-does-religious-faith-make.html

***

There are two predominantly atheist ex-Mormon message boards that I look in on from time to time, as a way of staying current with the issues agitating the hive. It’s always . . . er, interesting to see how they react to items like that above.

In less than hour, it’s been suggested by one anonymous poster who hasn’t read the exchange — couldn’t have read the exchange — that my conversation with a young disaffected Latter-day Saint surely could never have been helpful, and in fact, given my mean-spirited character, was probably harmful. (I’m not quite clear, but it may even be that this fellow is hinting that my presumably vicious notes to the young man contributed to his taking his own life.)

That same poster then proceeds to fundamentally misunderstand my point, implicitly accusing me of laying guilt on depressed people by saying that their depression reflects their lack of faith — something that I’ve never believed and have never said. (My point was that loss of a once-strong life-orienting faith can easily and understandably lead to depression.)

Then, that poster suggests that I’m so obsessed with publicity that I’ll do absolutely anything — in this case, talk “obnoxiously” and “insensitively” about someone who tragically took his own life, “capitalizing on some tortured soul’s suicide” — just to generate some attention.

However, he says, there’s a preferable way of looking at it: Given my “obsessive sense of importance,” perhaps I’m just imagining a suicide in order to make myself look important. (Another suggests that the Deseret News should “fact-check” my FairMormon remarks.)

There hasn’t been much discussion yet, but another implacable anonymous critic claims that, in my remarks, my intent was to “find fault” with the young man who killed himself.

These responses, in my judgment, offer a really interesting glimpse into behavior online and perhaps into human behavior more generally: Once it’s been determined that a person — in this case, me — is evil, some will allow absolutely no evidence to count as anything other than further proof of that person’s evil and depraved nature.

In this case — and I invite anybody out there who cares to hear the actual talk to do so, here — I was expressing compassion and empathy not only for the young man mentioned in my opening remarks (whose earthly story, sadly, is now done) but for others who have suffered anguish because of a loss of faith. But a monster such as I am apparently has no human feelings, feels no compassion, knows no empathy.

Without any evidence whatever, allegations fly that I taunted the young man into killing himself, blame him for his depression, and now seek to exploit his death for personal aggrandizement. Unless, of course, I’m just flatly lying. Which would be the more charitable way of viewing me.

This is the kind of total war — the unshakable refusal to grant even minimal decency in those with whom one disagrees — that is ruining our civil discourse, wrecking our politics, and tearing our society apart. Opponents don’t simply see things differently. They’re depraved and evil, and their reputations, at the very least, must be destroyed.

It’s more than a little discouraging.

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