I am the Tapirback Writer.

introduction | statement of purpose | thoughts about people & beliefs

Introduction

Call me Victor Himmel. It’s not my name in daily life, but I like it for the task at hand. It’s a nom de plume and a nom de guerre for my trinity of post-mormon projects:

Tapirback Writer (with new articles to be posted every Wednesday)

Heaven is for Winners (cartoons; updated every Sunday morning)

Abide With Memes (like cartoons, but less work; updated every Monday and maybe more)

All three of the above are branches extending from one overarching process that’s been years in the making: overcoming the external and internal forces that kept me in the mormon (LDS) church for the first two and a half decades of my life. Even while I was trying my hardest to remain a “nuanced believer” and wasn’t ready to admit to myself that I was on my way out, I was writing prose and sketching comics about mormonism and christianity in general, and about rational thought and ethics as I refined my understanding of what they meant to me.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve shared some of these writings and comics with ex- and post-mormons I know personally, and with friends I haven’t met yet in the exmormon community (particularly through /r/exmormon, under a different username that I prefer not to associate with this one). Many have encouraged me to develop the writing and comics further and share them more broadly. At the beginning of 2017, I decided it was time to do so.

Statement of purpose

While the purposes and goals of Tapirback Writer will change and grow with time, circumstances, and my understanding, here is why I’m doing this now and what I hope to accomplish with it:

I aim to write honestly and accessibly about:

the journey out of mormonism and religious belief in general,

ethics and morality without supernatural claims, and

criticism of historical and current events in the LDS church.

I want to engage with others, whatever their positions on the issues I write about. As part of this goal, I will do my best to write fairly, in a civil tone, by which I mean I will criticize ideas, beliefs, and actions, but not people. I will not attribute ill will even to those who hold and express irrational and harmful beliefs, because I know all too well that such beliefs are often inherited from a person’s surroundings, not consciously chosen.

So: although anger and mockery have their place in the process of healing from the harms of a high-control religion, I will do my best to confine my more savage expressions to the comics and memes on Heaven is for Winners and Abide With Memes.

Speaking of which…

Thoughts about people & beliefs

I recently had a thought-provoking twitter exchange about people, their beliefs, and their identities. The other party in the exchange is a guy about my age, from what looks to be a remarkably similar background, and although I don’t know him personally, we do have at least seven known friends in common (last I checked on the facebeast). If my physical and mental health had been better while he and I were both attending BYU, we might even be good friends today.

Anyway. He wasn’t addressing me (and probably didn’t know I existed) when he tweeted:

“If you make meaning in your life out of constantly attacking somebody else’s culture or religion… [GIF] you want to go home and rethink your life [/GIF].”

This is such a classic mormon response to criticism. It’s close kin to the good old “They can leave the church, but they can’t leave it alone.” This is meant to discredit critics, but criticizing (or even attacking) the organization and its teachings and practices is perfectly legitimate. And when the organization in question is a church that openly wants to exercise a high degree of control over your family, social interactions, life events, personal identity, and even your private thoughts — which mormonism does — it’s absolutely deserving of criticism. Really, it ought to be destroyed if possible.

And a past mormon apostle just so happens to have stated conditions under which it hypothetically ought to be scrutinized and destroyed:

“If we have truth, [it] cannot be harmed by investigation. If we have not truth, it ought to be harmed.” — J. Reuben Clark

(Note: Clark was, on an unrelated note that in no way invalidates the above quote, a tremendous asshole in many ways, as described here by a faithful mormon.)

I shared that quote, and then (because I wanted to express my meaning more clearly and because I was mildly amused with it myself) I added:

OK, I admit I thought of the name first and then the quote to justify using the name.

He replied, quoting himself:

“Don’t be a jackass about it.” — [his real name, redacted here]

I responded:

Honestly I try not to be a jackass about it in my daily life. People I care about are still in & both helped and harmed by it. But the loud laughter is a necessary medicine for a lot of us to cope with years, opportunities lost & psychological fallout.

(I promise, this is approaching the point I’m trying to make)

He responded:

“necessary medicine” includes derisively mocking and belittling others and their beliefs? Okay…I guess.

So here’s the point I wanted to make. I said:

People inherently deserve respect. Ideas (incl. beliefs) do not. The challenge is when [people] identify an idea as part of self.

Apparently, this guy not only identifies his ideas as parts of his self, but also considers beliefs to be inseparable from identity in general, because he replied with:

The whole point of having beliefs is they define us and what we value. You can’t separate beliefs from those who hold them.

The more I think about it, the more this seems like a fundamental change of perspective that I have undergone in the last five or six years, one that was essential in my journey out of religion with all its cognitive traps.

One of the most essential steps in that journey came indirectly, as I allowed myself to name, accept, and consciously contemplate my mental illnesses —by necessity, I began to think much more seriously about why I believed what I believed, about the relationship between my mind and objective reality. I’ll write about that in more detail another day.

For now, I’ll try to finish this thought, starting with my response to my twitter opponent’s assertion that “beliefs define us and what we value” and that “you can’t separate beliefs from those who hold them.” In the heat of the moment, I wrote:

I am shaped by my beliefs, but they are not me. My beliefs change w/ new evidence; I remain (though changed).

The philosophy of identity and essential… self-ness? is not a topic I’ve gotten around to reading up on yet, but it seems to me that this guy was right in part, while getting major elements backwards. Our beliefs influence our actions and our interpretations of events in the real world, of course, but they necessarily change as our experiences change and as we increase or improve our understanding. When one of my beliefs changes, do I become a different person? I don’t want to get into the definitional complexity of “different” or “person” here, but as I understand the terms, I’d have to say no.

This line of thought led me to discover that I have developed meta-beliefs. While I’m sure they’re not absolutely, perfectly accurate, they’ve been a much more successful model in my practical life as an irrational conscious being. They are, in part:

1 — I should not trust anything just because it appears to come from my own mind. I know that my mind is fond of playing tricks on itself. Worse, there are forces outside of me that want to deliberately deceive me, and one of their most effective techniques is to make me believe that their idea is actually my own idea. Like Inception, but with less impressive special effects.

2 — At the same time, I can’t rigorously examine every single belief and thought that ever crosses my mind. I’d be permanently paralyzed. Instead, I’m working on programming my mind’s “belief immune system” to prioritize on at least two axes:

2.1 — the approximate amount of evidence I have for or against a belief, and

2.2— the belief’s potential to affect my actions and reactions, especially where what I do has ethical implications.

2.3 — As an example of these axes: (2.1) I have access to a great deal of convincing evidence that variations of human sexuality on a spectrum of orientations are natural, and are not a personal choice. I have zero convincing evidence that any supernatural beings are upset by these variations in sexuality. And (2.2) the way I treat individuals of various sexual orientations, the way I speak about them, and the policies of organizations and representatives I support can all contribute to a difference between life and death.

Hence the blood on the hands of all mormon (LDS) general authorities, many local authorities, and many individual members. Hence my categorical refusal to so much as hold the coats of such an organization while they throw their stones.

3 — When I identify an unjustifiable thought or belief, I do my best to consciously reject it. But I know that the roots of belief run deep, and that the mind will never be totally rational or consistently ethical. Rather than struggle against stubborn wrong thoughts and beliefs, I follow some of the mindfulness practice I’ve learned: I notice them, I name them, and I accept that they are present without condemning myself for them. Then I deliberately consider them in light of why I decided to discard them in the first place.

3.1 — In my experience, chasing beliefs back into the shadows only encourages them to dig deeper into the unconscious places, buried under shame and much harder to remove. Bringing them front and center, under a spotlight, is a much better way to dissolve the wrong ones and grow more confident of the right ones.

3.2 — It’s important to extend this same compassion toward others who have fallen prey to mistaken, even harmful beliefs — even while making it clear that the beliefs are wrong and the actions they lead to are unacceptable. People are people, in all their flawed and irrational glory. When beliefs lead to hurtful action, anger is natural.

…And I’m not tone policing, here, but I am saying that it doesn’t make sense to assume the worst about individual people; their beliefs may come from indoctrination, deceit, logical lapses. And for those who are looking to most effectively help others escape harmful thoughts, please consider (3.1) above — shaming often leads to hidden infestations, whereas calm, epistemological discussions (“why do you believe that?” etc.) force the unsupportable thoughts to stand under stark lights and be known for what they are.

4 — To the extent that beliefs do shape one’s identity, I want these meta-beliefs to shape mine. I believe that with deliberate examination of thoughts and compassion toward myself and others, I will tend to be less and less wrong, and to do less and less harm. And that’s about as much as I can hope for.

To close, I’ll return to the young apologist on twitter who wanted to invalidate criticism of his beliefs. He’s welcome to complain about it. I even agree that this is sometimes justified, when critics get personal in their attacks. He’s not entirely wrong about beliefs and identity; what we believe does shape our perception of the world around us and the way we act and react. Rather than giving all beliefs a free pass to go unscrutinized and uncriticized, though, this more fully condemns people who are able to contemplate these questions but who build the house of their identity upon sandy foundations of unsupportable beliefs all the same.

The young apologist is free to believe whatever he can get himself to believe. But he’d be a serious dumbass to believe everything he thinks. As would we all.