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Mr. Aron Ra was born in Kingman, Arizona. He was baptised as a Mormon. He is the ex-President of Atheist Alliance of America. He is a public speaker, secular activist, and an advocate for reason in education. He hosts the Ra-Men podcast with Dan Arel and Mark Nebo of BeSecular. Here we talk about his early life as a young male non-believer.
Ra and I talked about early life for him. He was born in Kingman, Arizona. He was baptized in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints or the Mormons. Although, to remain polite, the term “Mormon” within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints gets taken as an epithet or invective, not a term of endearment.
As a short social lesson, I would suggest, though may be wrong, not using the term “Mormon” in conversation or in the description based on the tone and perceived derision in the term “Mormon” to some or many members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. However, I will use the term here, simply for ease and not for offense.
When we began the discussion, and as Ra remains one of the most prominent popularizers and speakers on mainline atheism and New Atheism in particular, which amounts to an outspoken form found in at least two subgroupings with Dr. Richard Dawkins in Militant Atheism and with David Silverman in Firebrand Atheism.
He stated, “Well, my family background largely identified as Mormon. Although, most don’t know what that means. We have some people in the family that do the whole magic underwear thing. Some even to the point of not drinking coffee or eating cinnamon, but those are very, very rare. Most Mormons are disciplined for the most part. And most of my family are (way) not.”
I laughed “way” part. He continued to speak on the family identification with Mormon. A lot of individuals within the family still identify as Mormon. The family members identify as Christian. Other denominations of Christianity do not view the Mormons as Christian.
Many do not view the Catholics as Christian, or the Eastern Orthodox as Christian. It comes from the same trend, of which Ra described to me.
“This was an advantage for me growing up. I got to see the interdenominational bigotry within Christianity,” Ra continued, “When we lived in places like New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado that were Mormon dominant, they were places that the Mormons controlled everything. And if you were not a Mormon, you were not employed, at least not if you were white. There were places that were like that. Utah is rife with them. When we moved to other places, and I moved a lot as a kid, I moved an awful lot – up to 8 times a year.”
He would switch between parents moving from one house to another. There were different places. He moved to the Los Angeles area at one point. He found the Mormons did not control the area. Someone asked the question about faith to him.
He noted two issues there. One with individuals caring about his faith. Another with the ensuing or upcoming argument based on it. Because the assumptions in the statement about the title of a faith matter to people, especially in America – as the nation ranks off the spectrum in adherence and degree of religiosity compared to other advanced industrial nations.
Ra, based on the conversation from the question of personal faith, opined, “Mormons do believe ridiculous things… Every religion does, to be completely honest. But the Mormons have their own collection of ridiculous things that are exclusively Mormon that are not the same ridiculous things that other Christian denominations believe, but the accusations these people were making were ridiculous things that my family, so far as I could tell, did not believe – none of them. So my mum was always the most devout of all of the Mormons in my family that I could talk to.”
When he would invite them into the home to explain to his mother the things believed by them, they would always reject the invitation for some reason.
Ra said, “They would always refuse the invitation. The refusal of the invitation seemed telling. It shows that they know what they are telling me is not true. They knew how quickly it is that I could refute all of that. I have been involved in the religion versus anti-religion argument unknowingly my entire life.”
Furthermore, he remembered a series of conflicts with people because of religion at the ages of 5 and 8. Ra did not realize it. That is, this became a consistent theme throughout the entire life for him. He would ask about how Jesus Christ made water into wine and other things.
“But as it turned out, when I grew up I looked it up. It is only the difference of a carbon atom. The molecules are much more complex. But they involve oxygen, hydrogen, and some additional carbons. That’s it. But all I knew at the time, water is H2O, and alcohol and fruit juice are something else,” Ra explained, “How does Jesus turn water from H2O into H2O and whatever else? I thought someone would give me some kind of intelligible answer. Like how Jesus does that, whether he uses telekinesis or whatever he does.”
Ra found a consistent phenomenon. The individuals in conversations did not seem to want concrete, naturalistic explanations.
The common notion within the community emerged in the form of the stereotyping of skeptics. That is, they get seen as cynics. That can create problems. It can become a conversation stopper. Something to restrict full conversations in a healthy way, for the inter-belief conversations.
If someone prays, in other words, and if another person looking on doubts its efficacy, the doubter gets seen as a cynic rather than a skeptic. It amounts to an assertion about the other person problem. This happens to the non-religious community, often.
“They should’ve paraphrased this: People that make up stuff and call it truth have the power to imagine all kinds of nonsense. But that’s what it is all about. It really is make believe, and it took me the longest time to figure that out. I thought, honestly, naively, even into middle age. I was in my 30s before I realised there were some people who do not believe what they do for a reason,” Ra lamented.
He continued to state, “If you ask anybody, ‘Why do you believe X?’ They are going to give you a reason why they think X is true. I thought this was true for everyone. I thought that you couldn’t believe something for no reason because that’s stupid. You wouldn’t believe something against all reason. I have had people tell me exactly that. I get into more and more arguments moving into my 30s. I would identify as an activist since then, since around Y2K. I got into these arguments heavily on the internet, on Usenet.”
He was at a period of life with the unlimited use of the internet time. He has a 12 hour per day job. It permitted the use of the internet to learn and become obsessive about the topic of religion, atheism, and belief superstructures and metanarratives. The ways in which people’s total beliefs structure themselves and religious narratives orient people’s entire lives.
Ra stated, “And I get into these discussions, in-depth discussions with professional scientists and professional theologians on both sides. They are both giving me references to look into. So I did for a number of years. It was almost obsessive the amount of time that I dedicated to this subject, this argument. When I came across people and asked them, ‘Why do you believe this?’ I had never really bothered to ask them this. The answers people give are, ‘I believe this because I want to. I believe this because it makes me happy.’”
He sees the answer to the searches there. People believe what they do not think as true, tacitly. They state this as a truth. They act in certain ways. However, they feel an uncomfortableness about the entire endeavor of faith practices. That seems like a common realization in the earlier life of Ra.
Then when he points this out, he gets criticized.
Ra said, “They’d say, ‘Why can’t I believe what I want to believe?’ Why would you say that about something that I just proved is not true? Why would you want to believe something after finding out it is not even possibly or even probably true, in either case? It is not possibly true. It is not probably true. It is not indicated by anything. It is disputed by everything. There is no possibility here. This did not happen. There are no two ways about it. What the hell are you going on about? ‘But I want to believe that.’ Why [Laughing]?!”
Ra joked, “[Laughing] I want to believe I’m a multimillionaire. I do. I want to believe that I have time travel capabilities. Great! But that doesn’t make anything real. And it is insane to imagine that. It took me forever to realise that. I actually said this myself ahead of Peter Boghossian. He famously did a video on ‘faith is pretending to know what you don’t know.’ As if people know they don’t know it, and they’re pretending on purpose. But yes, I said something similar on video prior to that.”
The quote or statement was as follows:
But faith is often a matter of pretending to know what you know you really don’t know, and that no one even can know, and which you merely believe – often for no good reason at all.
Ra talked about how he did not make as much money from the particular statement. However, he does consider faith to be nothing more than make-believe in a literal way. He considers the belief in God and miracles magic.
That is, if someone believes in a higher power with omnipotence and similar traits and if the individual beliefs in the abrogation of the laws of nature, then, in Ra’s view, this amounts to the belief in magic. He considers this within the definitions of miracle and magic from a variety of dictionaries.
“You will discover that if you compare the definitions between a miracle and magic, you will see that they are both the ‘evocation of supernatural forces or entities to control or forecast natural events in ways which are inexplicable by science because they defy the laws of physics, meaning they are physically impossible,” Ra explained, “That’s what both miracle and magic mean. So miracle is the same things as magic in the same way a boat is a yacht is if it is big enough.”
He compared murders and assassinations and miracles and magic. If a murder is a very important person, then it is an assassination. A miracle amounts to that for the magical world.
Ra stated, “Let’s imagine that there’s some form of technology sometime in the future that can detect the essence of God and can measure it. We can confirm God exists, and importantly whose God it is. All of these people are making claims about this personal God and calling it Allah, or Krishna, but failing to call it Jesus. Jesus isn’t the only personal saviour out there. There’s a bunch. All of these people making absolute statements about what they know for absolute certain about this absolute God.”
He concluded on the idea that the beliefs are not mutually exclusive but, rather, mutually inclusive and so cannot be all true or all wrong. One of the belief systems has to be right and the other has to be wrong. Ra views the beliefs of the formal believers who grew in the religions as having been lied to their whole lives through propaganda.
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Image Credits: Pixabay