Thursday, January 24, 2013

Into the Abyss

Last Saturday, my husband Adam and I flew to Utah to watch our nephew be baptized.  In Mormonism we consider age 8 to be a hard and fast age of accountability.  Before that, you are pure and innocent and afterwards, you are ready enough to choose between right and wrong.  So that is when you are old enough to really acknowledge your belief in the church and become a baptized member.  

I tried to think back to my baptism, but I actually don't remember it very well.  I did not really know how to question my beliefs or my testimony at the time.  After all, if I challenged them and I came to the conclusion that the church was not true, it would just add unnecessary conflict to my life.  As a very young child (I think I was three or four), I had an experience with prayer and comfort that built up my belief in God.  Alongside this strong belief, I like the atmosphere at church.  I feel good after going and experience a great deal of comfort while I am there.  Those two aspects of church were enough for me to be comfortable getting baptized.

In junior high and high school I started to believe more in the other principles of the church, especially Jesus Christ and Joseph Smith, while ignoring the hardest questions to ask.  Now I am 24 years-old and I have finally started asking the hard questions and tentatively getting answers.  All in all, I have been able to become a stronger believer and worse member of the church.  By that I mean, I am more comfortable and firm in what I believe while also disregarding a lot of non religious aspects of Mormonism I don't like.  For example, I had a lot of blanket teachers that thought it better to say things like "if a guy has tattoos, you should not be dating him."  Okay, so the teacher was trying to say that you should be careful with who you are dating and that most good Mormon boys don't have tattoos (young Mormon girls should always marry Mormon boys and they should be sealed for eternity in the Temple).  At the time, all I could think was how Jesus Christ talked about forgiveness and acceptance. I had been taught to accept everyone.  Except, it always felt like my own salvation was at stake and by accepting and associating with people who had lived different lives I was risking my future.  I hated those blanket statements that gave no exception.  What if the guy was great?  What if he regretted the tattoos?  What if???  So, I am a worse member of the church because I refuse to see the world like that.  Now I know those statements are wrong.  I know they provoke mindless following and that is not who I am.

Up until now I have only been looking over the edge to see if perhaps an answer or two is available to my hard questions.  But now, I'm jumping into the abyss.

I wish I could say it was courage that got me here, but in fact, it was a couple of books.  I have read and heard plenty of stories about people who have struggled with their lives as Mormons.  But two weeks ago I read Mormon Diaries by Sophia L. Stone.  She started as a girl not like me.  She grew up in a very strict household that took Mormonism at its word (as I've said before, my parents were not orthodox).  She was forced throughout her life on a path that unfortunately led her to leave the Mormon church.  I say unfortunately not because I think she should have stayed but rather because she had to experience Mormonism that way.  In and of itself, this book did not really disturb me much.  I acknowledge that women's roles in the church are undervalued and stereotyped.  But then I read a book called Stolen Innocence by Elissa Wall.  Stolen Innocence is about an FLDS polygamous woman who was married to her first cousin at age 14 and eventually left the FLDS.  These two books together sort of rocked my relatively frail balance I've created within myself.

The second book is about the FLDS.  I've read plenty of books about the FLDS before, I actually find them fascinating.  There are a lot of common root beliefs so its amazing to see where the FLDS have taken them.  Also, their life style and some of their beliefs feel crazy to me.  But when I read it this time, I was able to see Mormonism from regular people's perspectives and how they must think we're crazy.  I by no means want to imply that the FLDS and LDS religions are the same at all because in practice they are not.  But I thought a lot about their garments and the clothes they wear, their long hair.  These things are quite cultural.  Mormons use to have longer garments like the FLDS and used to wear clothes like them (back when everyone wore clothes like that) but Mormonism is evolving with modern culture, just always staying a little behind.  That bothered me.  First it bothered me that Mormonism that to change and conform to cultural change.  When I was in young women's they came out with the one piercing, no flip flops thing for teenagers and that was a reaction to American culture. Should religious rules change because of culture?  As grateful as I am for birth control, I understand why the Catholic Church has tried to hold onto the belief that it is wrong (although lots of Mormons still have like 6 or 7 kids despite using birth control, so that was Mormonism's answer) to not 'multiply and replenish the earth.'  But it also bothered me that Mormonism can't just stick with culture if its going to be reactionary.  Why not just say, okay spaghetti strap shirts are fine as long as your not showing your breasts (which is actually what modesty is trying to avoid).  Like being conservative and holding back helps contain sex, promiscuity  and wrong doing.  Maybe it does, I don't know.  But I just wish that I could be Mormon and have a testimony without having people know it by what I'm wearing or drinking.

Into the abyss for me means asking about the fuzzy stuff, the cultural stuff.  The unnecessary stuff.  Like, it's not that women can't give the prayers at conference, they just don't.  No one ever thought to ask a woman.  Really?  Or even the resolved issues of the past.  Blacks were given the priesthood in Joseph Smith's time but then Brigham Young put a stop to it (by the way, this whole issue just seems to be another reaction to American culture but in the direction of acceptance instead of rejection) and then in 1978 Prophet Spencer W. Kimball reversed the policy.  I don't hold this against Brigham Young because I think the Prophets and General Authorities are human and sometimes in trying to get revelation from God, they are as affected by the environment they live in as any other person.  But before I let myself really think about it, those kind of issues just festered inside of me and hindered my beliefs. Now I'm just trying to sort through them.

p.s. the same fuzzy issues exist in science, the difference is in the culture.  Scientists have realized that any 'fact' can be overturned with the right evidence.  We are taught to never fall in love with an idea or theory because its probably not the whole picture or it might be wrong all together.  If you love your theory too much you'll never be able to accept its short comings and you'll hinder the progression of your own research.


Thursday, January 17, 2013

The First

I am not new to Mormonism or science, but the two halves of my life have gradually come into greater and greater conflict throughout my life.  I was raised Mormon, baptized at age 8 by my dad who is an engineer who loves space and took my brother and me to the Clark Planetarium often growing up.  My mom was born in Maputo, Mozambique to Portuguese born parents and grew up in apartheid South Africa (she became Mormon later).  Between my dad who loved science and my mom who did not grow up as a Mormon, I was not as fully immersed in the Mormon culture as most of my friends.  The first day I realized this fact was November 5, 1996.  My second grade teacher had us vote for President on that election day.  It had never occurred to me that I was in the minority.  Ever.  I was sitting next to my best friend Rachel watching as my teacher tallied up the votes on the board.  In a class of 25, I was one of four to vote for Bill Clinton.  Now, did I have any clue really the difference between Clinton and Dole?  No.  All I knew was that my mom talked favorably about Clinton.  I asked Rachel who she voted for, and of course she said Bob Dole.  Even at age eight I understood that this meant that my family was not quite the same as everyone else.

Why does it matter that my family was different?  As a child I wasn't sure, but today I know.  My older brother graduated from high school and went to UC Berkeley, I graduated four years later and went to Cornell University, and this year my sister is graduating and going to the University of Tampa.  We were different as children and weren't afraid to stay different later.  My dad had attended the University of Utah (along with every member of his side of the family) so it was unprecedented when Tony decided that he wanted to go out of state.  We did the whole college tour thing, I saw schools like MIT and Harvard, UCLA and Berkeley.  When I started looking at colleges, I already knew I didn't have to stay in Utah and I didn't want to.

I was not confined by Mormon culture to being a stay at home mom (or, it could be put like this: I was  not indoctrinated into believing that being a stay at home mom was wonderful and fulfilling).  My mom did stay home until I was eight (quite the turning point year in my life clearly).  But I could always tell she wasn't really completely happy.  Not that she didn't love us or enjoy raising us, but that she wanted to be a productive member of society.  It wasn't hard to see actually.  Before she got a job, my mom would make crafts (paint wood crafts house decorations or cross stitch wall hangings) and sell them at a local craft store.  My mom was an excellent artist and it seemed to alleviate her feelings of impatience with her life.  It wasn't really a surprise to me at all when she got a job at Delta Airlines part time.  I didn't know it at the time, but I later learned that my mom had been in law school in Johannesburg when she converted to Mormonism and moved to Utah.  She had always thought she would work and it was hard for her to give up the mindset.

My mom's job had a double influence in our lives as kids.  We flew (fly) for free.  Anywhere Delta flies.  By the time I was fifteen I'd been to most major cities in Western Europe and most Central American countries.  Once you've become comfortable seeing so many different cultures and people you lose your fear of leaving.  I was not even kind of afraid of leaving the Mormon belt of Arizona, Utah, and Idaho.  I already knew that most people are good and that Mormonism is not the only way to be a happy person.

So, I did not see a problem with going to an expensive college to get a great life for myself and doing it somewhere else.  I am decently talented at academics meaning I am pretty good at knowing how to get good grades.  In elementary school I was in a satellite program for gifted and talented students.  That program did a lot for my abilities as a student and was actually an early networking program.  At our high school graduation more than five years after they split us up to different junior highs and long after we were very good friends anymore, they announced all the 'different' colleges people were going to.  All of the out of state colleges except one or two out of eight or nine were from my little gifted class (our graduating class had 711 students).  One kid went to Princeton, one girl went to the Royal Academy of Music in London, another kid went to the Naval Academy, etc. (The reality is there are a lot of smart kids in Utah who could go to great colleges but simply don't care to leave the Mormon belt).

So the point of all this: I went to an Ivy League school and studied science.

While I went to Cornell, I came to recognize that my religion and my studies could not fundamentally challenge one another.  Mormonism is built on faith and testimony while science is built on experimentation to achieve facts.  This is not the post where I will discuss the details of those concepts, but it is sufficient to say that I do not think that science can disprove God or religion dispute science because they are incompatible.

In fact, it was Ithaca itself that has somehow created a conflict in the religious half of my life.  You see, Utah Mormonism has a lot of self contained culture (you know, the part of Mormonism that I just described not fitting into) but in Ithaca, NY I went to a Cornell student branch.  That branch was the best religious environment I have ever been involved in.  We had married and single students (I started single, eventually got married) and we were small, say about 80 people total.  Well, Cornell is a pretty liberal school so we had quite a few liberal thinking academics alongside traditionally minded Mormons.  But even the people in that branch that were traditional Mormons were very smart people and had put a lot of thought into their beliefs and contributed to thought provoking discussions with the moderate and liberal Mormons in the branch.  I was able to really grow as a person and develop more beliefs and knowledge of why I believed certain things.  I was also able to come to term with certain aspects of Mormonism (ex: I don't know why we don't drink coffee, I understand there are studies showing coffee has plenty of health benefits.  I also will acknowledge coffee is healthier for you than the aspartame filled diet soda I drink instead and so health is probably not the reason for Mormons not drinking it).  The liberal culture of Ithaca plus being in a university setting still made us feel conservative but intelligently so.  There was much less blind acceptance of any belief than anywhere else I have been.

Of course, all good things must come to an end.  I graduated from Cornell in 2011, got married two weeks later, and started my PhD in biology two weeks after that.  This is the point in my life when I started to notice the escalating conflict in my life.  Now I'm back in a ward not too different from the one I grew up in.  I live in San Diego which one might expect to be a liberal place given that it is 1) a city and 2) in California (which currently has a super majority of democrats in both the houses of congress) however, San Diego has like four military bases and is one of the most conservative (big) cities in the US.  So, our ward here is a lot of military families and is huge.  I feel totally lost most of the time because I fit in less here than I ever did as a kid.  At least as a kid I had a class of kids my age who went to school with me and related to my general life experience.  Now, I am older than the young women and younger than the relief society.  I am the only girl who is a graduate student and since I'm married I only have limited interactions with the men who are students.  I feel like adulthood has come to fast and isolated me from the few people I have similarities with.  Plus, I'm not very social.  I prefer to read books at home to meeting new people and going out.

If I were to go out, I would go with people I know.  Here, the only people I'm very comfortable with are the students in my PhD class.  Science and academics also have a culture all their own.  Being a lot newer to the science culture, it is harder for me to pinpoint all the details, but for certain scientists are very forward thinking and benefit a lot from the democratic party thinking (i.e. funding for science/academics is good!).  There is obsession with your work and then much needed breaks (which range from innocent dinners to hard core clubbing).  In Mormonism, it is very common to be married by your early 20's.  In my PhD class, there are 32 students and only 4 are married and I am the only one of those four who is under 30.  Most of the girls imagine having families in their thirties when they've long since finished their PhD and are very secure in a professorship or an industrial job.

It is the cultural conflict that has my life all confused.