My Mormon Life
The Delusional Mind
My Mormon Life is the true story of a boy raised in the Mormon religion and taught to believe that fantastical stories are real. A child can be taught that almost anything is true. Children want to believe what their parents believe and later what their community believes. This can lead to some rather strange beliefs.
We see a lot of problems this creates in the world. Most obvious to Americans is the radicalization of young people around the world that leads to terrorism. But there are many other problems that arise from this manipulation of children's minds. When children are taught that fantastical things are true their minds become habituated to the concept that belief is a form of thought. In this system beliefs are more important than thought and cannot be influenced by facts. This creates a mind that is essentially dysfunctional and unable to differentiate between fact and fiction. Decisions are made by following the group. The only thinking that is involved is the determination of which group a person belongs to. And even this is mostly determined by where a person is born.
This process leads to the death of truth. All that is important is what the group thinks, and any fact that contradicts the group think is simply ignored.
We see the effects of this all around us. Most prominently in politics. The political candidates say the most ridiculous things, nearly every time they speak, yet no one seems to pay much attention to the absurdity in their words--it simply doesn't matter if what they are saying makes any sense or not.
Perhaps one of the best examples of group think in recent times is the lead up to the Iraqi war. The reasons for going to war were almost entirely absurd. The experts said that there were no weapons of mass destruction that they could detect. The yellow cake uranium that the Iraqi's were supposedly importing was not being imported and the experts told us so. There was no Al Qaeda in Iraq as we were told and no evidence to support that--Saddam and Al Qaeda were fierce enemies. Iraq was not involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks and there was no evidence what-so-ever that implicated them. Our Secretary of State went before the european nations and showed them pictures of milk trucks and insisted that they were mobile biological warfare agent factories. Yet none of this was of any importance to the American people. What was important was the movement of the group--in this case the nation--they wanted revenge and didn't care where they got it. The facts were simply not important.
Some people argue that we were deceived, but I was in Europe at the time and there was no one that I met in Europe that was deceived. The facts were plain and available if people wanted to look at them--Americans did not. Three years into the war one third of Americans still insisted that we were in Iraq because the Iraqis were the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks.
This type of group think is not really thought at all, it is belief, and we train the young mind to deal with all decisions in this manner. The truth is what you want it to be. Or as they say, "My mind is made up, don't bother me with the facts."
We face some daunting problems in the years ahead: climate change, resource depletion, the limits of water and land resources, destruction of the forests and reefs, the aging population--just to name a few. It is difficult to see how we can rise to the occasion and make good decisions as a species when our minds are formulated from a young age to not think.
We see a lot of problems this creates in the world. Most obvious to Americans is the radicalization of young people around the world that leads to terrorism. But there are many other problems that arise from this manipulation of children's minds. When children are taught that fantastical things are true their minds become habituated to the concept that belief is a form of thought. In this system beliefs are more important than thought and cannot be influenced by facts. This creates a mind that is essentially dysfunctional and unable to differentiate between fact and fiction. Decisions are made by following the group. The only thinking that is involved is the determination of which group a person belongs to. And even this is mostly determined by where a person is born.
This process leads to the death of truth. All that is important is what the group thinks, and any fact that contradicts the group think is simply ignored.
We see the effects of this all around us. Most prominently in politics. The political candidates say the most ridiculous things, nearly every time they speak, yet no one seems to pay much attention to the absurdity in their words--it simply doesn't matter if what they are saying makes any sense or not.
Perhaps one of the best examples of group think in recent times is the lead up to the Iraqi war. The reasons for going to war were almost entirely absurd. The experts said that there were no weapons of mass destruction that they could detect. The yellow cake uranium that the Iraqi's were supposedly importing was not being imported and the experts told us so. There was no Al Qaeda in Iraq as we were told and no evidence to support that--Saddam and Al Qaeda were fierce enemies. Iraq was not involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks and there was no evidence what-so-ever that implicated them. Our Secretary of State went before the european nations and showed them pictures of milk trucks and insisted that they were mobile biological warfare agent factories. Yet none of this was of any importance to the American people. What was important was the movement of the group--in this case the nation--they wanted revenge and didn't care where they got it. The facts were simply not important.
Some people argue that we were deceived, but I was in Europe at the time and there was no one that I met in Europe that was deceived. The facts were plain and available if people wanted to look at them--Americans did not. Three years into the war one third of Americans still insisted that we were in Iraq because the Iraqis were the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks.
This type of group think is not really thought at all, it is belief, and we train the young mind to deal with all decisions in this manner. The truth is what you want it to be. Or as they say, "My mind is made up, don't bother me with the facts."
We face some daunting problems in the years ahead: climate change, resource depletion, the limits of water and land resources, destruction of the forests and reefs, the aging population--just to name a few. It is difficult to see how we can rise to the occasion and make good decisions as a species when our minds are formulated from a young age to not think.
