Other Notes
Kristy Money, a psychologist who works with sex offenders and is a Mormon in good standing, applauded church authorities for their transparency in coming clean on Smith. But she criticized the men who guide the faith for not condemning the founder’s behavior. At the very least, she wrote in The Salt Lake Tribune, the church should make it clear that religious leaders cannot have sex with young girls just because an angel told them it was O.K. to do so. NY Times, 2014-11-30
This comment perplexed me. If an angel told you to do something, wouldn't you do it, the earthly authorities be damned? This is God speaking, after all. No earthy ruler outranks him. If you really believed that you were looking at or hearing an emissary of God (that's what an angel is, after all), and he or she told you to marry a 13-year-old, I would think you would believe you must obey. That's what Joseph Smith did. His earthy reward was lavish.
So, instead of telling church authorities to make it clear that even the angels must obey the law, perhaps it would make more sense to hold that the church should make it clear to these religious leaders that there are no angels.
Ah-- but then, you see the problem.
Is the real problem here that Kristy Money-- amazing name, especially for a psychologist-- is "a Mormon in good standing" and, therefore, cannot just come out and deny that any of these leaders ever spoke to an angel at all? Because then you might be implying that Joseph Smith was a sex abuser?
Ah-- but then you see the problem.
Surely, as a psychologist, Money understands that religion is a delusion. Belief in a literal god or a literal devil or literal angels is the result of childhood conditioning, not empirical knowledge. But as a Mormon, of course, she does believe. So how does she manage to practice a profession that is deeply and fundamentally founded upon assumptions about human nature that she cannot possibly subscribe to, as a member of the Mormon church, in good standing?
Without writing a book about it, in my opinion, the claims that the field of psychology makes about the human mind cannot ever be reconciled with religious belief. You can't just pick the fruit and deny that the tree exists.
Well, you cherry pick. And why not? That's what many people do about many intellectual conundrums: you pick the solutions you like and discard the ones you don't like, which means, you are essentially making it up as you go along and creating an elegant mask of intellectual consistency and respectability to hold in front of your face as you make pronouncements.
I find this issue troubling only when I hear about "court-ordered psychiatric assessments" or any other application of force to apply an intellectual framework that I believe to be as magical and arbitrary as Mormonism and angels. If I was a criminal and the judge started leaning towards ordering a psychiatric assessment, I would demand that any psychiatrist chosen for this task should first have to prove his competence by performing a miracle.