Church Culture and Doctrine

So this post has been sitting around on my computer waiting for me to finish it ever since another blogger suggested I write it.  I don't think she ever needed it, but I figured it was time to dust it off and bring it out

A big problem of separating church doctrine and culture is that church members tend to simultaneously believe fully that revelation that can be received by their church leaders is infallible, but that the church leaders themselves are slightly fallible.  Since if church leaders were very fallible its assumed God wouldn’t have asked them to lead the church, by default church members believe that almost any statement or policy is the result of revelation direct from God or is so affected by the extent of their revelations of the future and past to be just as good as revelation.  We as a people take the idea of honoring our church leaders as a way to honor the office they hold so seriously that trying to separate out where the man ends and where revealed truth begins makes us very uncomfortable.  For every person you can find who might be willing to dismiss statements by any given church leader as a personal opinion, you will find many people who would rather insist the statement was the word of God coming to us through his servants.  There are very few procedures by which church teachings can be automatically counted as absolute doctrine or absolute opinion unless the leader speaking states which they think they are saying explicitly, and even that is unsure.  I grew up being told to treat any statement from a powerful church leader as being the absolute will of God having an absolute claim on my obedience with very little emphasis given on what kind of thought process I might use to critique which of these statements should have a claim on me.  A few examples that illustrate how that causes problems would be caffeinated beverages, blacks and the priesthood, politics, and courtship.

Take the whole no drinking caffeinated beverages thing.  Some leaders in the church noticed that both coffee and tea had caffeine and they decided that the caffeine must be the important chemical to avoid.  You can find a history of statements from prominent church leaders saying that caffeinated beverages were against the church health code.  These statements were never “canonized” but it is extremely rare in the church for anything to be officially canonized in the sense of being voted on.  I grew up being told that caffeine was only advised against by the church but since these people were prophets seers and revelators I could depend on them having received revelation from God that the spiritual and physical costs of caffeine being something I should avoid.  As a result I remember growing up expecting to hear eventually that science had confirmed the supposed harms of caffeine.  I was very interested when a biologist I knew explained that caffeine can cause problems with calcium levels in the body (his recommendation was drink milk if you want to drink caffeine, but that otherwise there was no health risk he was aware of).  I think the church in the United States has shared that anticipation, even to the extent that an article was published in the official church magazine preaching against the evils of overconsumption of caffeine in energy drinks.  More recently, the church had a statement released by their PR department stating that there was no official doctrinal position saying that you couldn’t drink caffeine.  Looking back I’m glad I’m not dependent on expensive caffeine sources to keep me energized for my day, but I feel a little silly having spent so much effort avoiding mildly caffeinated sodas.   Turns out it wasn’t the will of God, it was just church leaders concerned about their community trying to do the best with the understanding they had.

For another example take the whole blacks and the priesthood thing.  There is a very clear historical record that many early church leaders were very in sync with their times about racial concerns, which is a nice way of saying they fully believed a lot of racist trash.  Despite clear evidence that there hadn’t been a ban on blacks receiving the priesthood under Joseph Smith (one black man in particular even was ordained as an Elder, later a member of a quorum of seventy, and even participated in a variety of temple worship ceremonies before Brigham Young stopped him), the church had to find reasons or explanations to justify the ban on blacks receiving the priesthood so there were many statements issued in general meetings by authorities that were presumed to know the will of God on the subject because they were declared as “prophets, seers, and revelators” who authoritatively said a lot of really racist stuff as doctrine.  I grew up being taught some of those ideas.  It was presented that somehow those ideas were doctrine and mattered until God stated otherwise and then they somehow no longer mattered.  It wasn’t until I checked on the subject as an adult that I learned that a lot of the theological concepts appealed to in the bible to support the church’s position are so divorced from the actual scriptural text that pretty much every other church abandoned the ideas long ago.  In response to a CES instructor who was still teaching the old doctrines, the church has again disavowed the racist teachings (thank goodness), but has failed to replace this history of racist doctrine with anything to explain why it happened.  All we get is a “we don’t know when, who, how, or why.”

A few more examples will help make this all more clear.  Take politics. 

I grew up being taught that since Ezra Taft Benson had from the pulpit espoused certain radical polical beliefs as if they were doctrine, that I should accept those beliefs too.  I heard some people vaguely suggesting that all his supposedly apostolic teachings somehow just didn't count, but I was never taught about B. H. Roberts or any other apostles who more or less contradicted these teachings.  So my family growing up participated in passionate conservative republicanism, belief in widespread communist conspiracies, and even subscribed to the magazine of the John Birch Society.  As an adult, I realize now that church leaders have made political pronouncements favoring multiple opinions and have learned about the steps the church made to distance itself from President Benson’s politics after his death.  Today I’d consider myself a moderate liberal, but I live in an LDS culture where extreme conservatism is assumed to be an article of faith and I regularly listen to political pronouncements from local church and church wide leaders who care about their community and try to provide it with leadership including guidance on their political beliefs.

Courtship practices are an interesting place to point out the difference of church culture and doctrine as well.  I grew up outside Utah in a place where physical affection was somewhat more casual.  By casual I mean that as a teenager I exchanged affectionateless embraces with many girls with whom I had no functional relationship, it was somewhat on the level of saying hello to a casual friend.  This cultural norm of physical affection somewhat affected expectations in actual courtship, although not in an extreme way.  Youth were just somewhat warmer with each other.  When I moved to Utah for college I discovered that friendship and courtship norms were somewhat more reserved, casual friendship hugs weren’t as common and every physical touch seemed to carry more weight of meaning.  I even knew a man who claimed that back east those evil members of the church seemed to believe that unless a date included some kind of sexual contact that it wasn’t a date, leading to a confusion of the church teaching people to date once a week meaning that they should have premarital sex.  Strictly speaking this isn’t true, I’d rate my eastern friends who were members of the church as equally chaste as the friends I found in Utah.  However I knew what the man meant, where I grew up there was more expectation of a low level of physical affection.  To be certain teenagers are likely to fall into all sorts of mischief no matter where they live, but hand holding, hugs, and a kiss goodnight are not exactly what I think of as sexual excess.  Many statements are made by church leaders about courtship norms, often trying to encourage a restoration of an idealized image of the 1950's which supposedly involved less premarital sex and marriage ages and birth rates based on principle instead of economics.  The problem is, in the past young people still had premarital sex.  And arguably, birth rates and marriage ages are determined by economic realities just like they always have been- we just have a different kind of economic structure and average income today.  Official church statements trying to sanctify the 1950's family arrangements as ideal can probably be counted as having as much doctrinal weight as early church leaders decrying the waltz as sexually decedant.

Its impossible to talk about church culture without acknowledging that it is different around the world and that I don’t know much about that.  I’ve lived in two towns in Utah and in one town on the east coast.  There are differences in how authoritative church statements are interpreted every where you go.  But, based on my own experience and on the experiences of a friend whose father was in the military and therefore moved around a lot, I’d say that in the United States there is a cultural tendency for members of the church to believe they are more righteous than members of the church elsewhere.  They tend to see it as inevitable that their particular cultural environment is better suited to being righteous that somewhere else.  To be certain there are specific cultural differences throughout the church that are remarkable and interesting, however I think anyone who believes this actual means one group is better than the other has had too narrow of an experience in the world.  When my father visited Nepal on a business trip a church member there asked if he thought being rich made it harder for him to live the gospel.  Is that any more or less true than the idea that righteousness is easier when you have the support of those around you or that righteousness its easier when your testimony is more pure when you stand out from the people around you?  Every area of the world has its eccentricities and customs and norms, but I don’t believe that you can divide people by geography to show that any one group has a better chance at salvation than another.  Speaking of the rich young man, Christ said that salvation was impossible for all men, but with God anything is possible.

Over the rainbow

While visiting my parents in their new place I explored a little loft they had for a grand kids playroom.  It was a very emotional experience.  Seeing all the little toys that we had played with growing up it felt like someone had taken a bunch of my memories, put them in a box, shaken them, and then poured them out all-out of context.  One toy in particular caught my attention.  There was a little plastic toy music box shaped like a radio that played over the rainbow.  I can still remember seeing it on the shelf at the store and imagining that if I moved the little blue slider up and down that it would play different "channels" or songs but I was pretty happy that it just played over the rainbow.  I really liked musical toys growing up and this was one of the three that I at times insisted should play simultaneously while I was going to sleep.  Finding it in the playroom, my son took a liking to the box and insisted that I play the song over and over again so he could listen entranced while watching the little display showed pictures of kids flying over a rainbow.

Growing up involved its hard knocks.  I was ordered twice to leave the home and never come back and once walked the streets for a good part of the evening before a member of the church found me and took me back home.  I can remember being screamed at to ask if I thought my mother was stupid because I couldn't accept her word as perfect truth 100% of the time even on matters as trivial as what size clothes would fit me or not, being told that I would never accomplish anything in life, being laughed at for being stupid to try to motivate me to think harder on math problems, being told that I was inherently untrustworthy to figure out life skills my own way, and being punished as intentionally rebellious when I honestly had trouble figuring out all my life skills as fast as was wanted.  I rarely had any issues where I intentionally and blatantly tried to defy my parents, but was treated more or less like I was on a pretty regular basis.  Or there were the ways my emotional needs were kind of steam rolled over to make room for the emotional needs of other family members.  These are memories I more or less try to avoid.  They don't bring me happiness to dwell on them.

I prefer to remember how I beat the system and convinced my mother that I wasn't evil.  Like how I chose to have my biggest fight with my parents where I intentionally defied them  about whether I was being an evil rebel child for staying up late to read my scriptures more.  If you pick the right ground to fight on its hard to loose and I won my parents respect.  I won what one of my sibling told me at the time was the first time in which any of us had convinced my mother that we were privileged to conduct our own direct conflict resolution with another sibling instead of having it all controlled and done in isolation by my mother.  I remember doing the math to prove that the rate at which I was doing my homeschooling work had me on pace to complete everything we had planned before I went to college almost an entire year early- that kind of shot down the you'll never get to college put down that I was zinged with on a regular basis before.  I remember being put in situations where a lot of parental support was withdrawn to intentionally try to make me fail at something to force me to accept increasing levels of control and I fought back by achieving my own independence- simultaneously withdrawing my trust in my folks while winning their respect.  These are victory memories which helped define the kind of person I wanted to be.  But victories happen in battles, and battles happen with a lot of bloodshed.  You can be glad you fought the battles, but you don't want to relive them.

Listening to that little music box play over the rainbow was a reminder of all the bright moments, times when there was joy and peace.  The memories of the song aren't about how I survived emotional abuse or even about any other person but me.  Its about laying in bed quietly waiting for sleep while thinking about hope.  Its about finding joy in the beauty of music.  Its about remembering that there is something more to your past than just the dragons you had to slay to survive growing up.  Or a smile or laughter that spilled out often in spite of the circumstances, because life is just a happy place.

Shooting coverage and Asperger Syndrome

With the recent shooting there has been a lot of spin put on demonizing the shooter.  Its easy to understand why, nobody likes a mass murderer.  But with the sensationalistic reporting and the focus on the shooter having psychological problems I've been bothered by attempts to gloss over who the guy was and present black and white ideas like "keep guns away from psycho people" and things like that as if that would have actually solved anything.  A lot of conclusions have been jumped to and a lot of bad reporting is happening.  I had a few thoughts.

There have been media reports that the shooter had "a personality disorder" or "undifferentiated mental problems" but the only specific information that seems to have come out yet is that he was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome.  First, Asperger Syndrome is not a personality disorder.  I'm not going to go into defining it now (as if that were even relevant with the DSM-V coming out) but reporting it so many different ways was kind of dumb to begin with-probably just a consequence of the news trying to get out the information faster than they could verify it.  Apparently they haven't even verified the autism spectrum diagnosis, that's speculation based on publicly observed behavior which has no more verification to its reporting than early reports this his mother was a school teacher, that his brother was the shooter, or that he was dressed in a military style outfit, none of which apparently was true but got reported anyways.

Second, it has been emphasized in some reports that Asperger Syndrome is not correlated with violent crime and that the violent crime in question would be more likely to be done by someone with depression.  I'm happy that some media outlets have taken the time to mention that violence with weapons is not specifically common in Autistics, but the reporting on that end was about as simplistic in a good way as the reports slanted at making him sound "psycho" were simplistically bad.  First, in any large population you will find people with more or less violent tendencies.  Saying that Autism disorders are not correlated with gun violence is like saying that the average joe won't steal your lunch.  A few average joes will steal your lunch, most won't.  Second, saying that the shooting would be more likely done by someone with depression ignores the fact that the rate of depression among people with Asperger Syndrome is pretty high.  I haven't been able to find solid statistics on suicide but from what I've found the anecdotal evidence with Asperger Syndrome also shows a high suicide rate.  I even found one website that said the suicide rate was likely under reported because the adults with Asperger Syndrome are often undiagnosed and therefore not showing up in suicide statistics.

In the reports about his mothers gun collection one nuance is getting left out.  One of Tony Attwood's books recommended watching out for any obsessions with weapons because that could be a warning sign that the child is thinking about taking revenge on the bullies in his/her life.  Since the gun collecting was already a family hobby its possible that this warning sign wouldn't have functioned.  That isn't to say that she shouldn't have had a right to own a gun collection or that having a child with a mental disability should disqualify you from gun ownership, its just a nuance that is overlooked in the reporting.  Granted, at 20 something the shooter wasn't exactly looking for revenge against 1st grade bullies.  My guess is that the kid had a really horrible experience  going through elementary school and wanted to go destroy anybody he could find at the school as a way of expressing his anger at the school he grew up in.  Most people talk about how horrible their middle school years were, I wouldn't know because I was home schooled starting about half way through my last year of elementary school.  However, I can remember one of my favorite things about switching to homeschooling at first was that I had a chance to simply relax and let go of a lot of anger and hatred that had been building up towards my peers.  Since all of the people who had teased or ignored me or simply failed to be able to be my friend were no longer part of my life I could simply let go.  It was a long time before I realized that the bad experiences I had in elementary school were largely caused by my being unable to cope with the social environment rather than it being an environment that was toxic in general.

My experience in elementary school was bad enough that I had stopped hoping to find new friends and I had several incidents in a row where I tried to befriend someone based on the fact that they had not made fun of me in the past and they started making fun of me as a result-apparently to teach me to show my distance so that their social standing wouldn't be hurt by my attention.  I pretty much had come to the conclusion that no matter what new people I met I wouldn't find any more friends beyond the few I already had.  I won't say that homeschooling solved my life problems- homeschooling was hell in some other ways and I'm not sure which set of experiences would have been more emotionally damaging over time- staying in public school or homeschooling.  By the time I left home I struggled with believing that in certain specific ways I was a worthless human being and didn't deserve respect from other people.  And that was somewhat up from my mid teens when I frequently believed I was completely worthless and didn't deserve to live.  The last pieces of that feeling of worthlessness didn't fall away until maybe a year or two before getting married.

A lot of reports are talking as if the shooter was a thoroughly evil psychopath who should have been obvious to identify and therefore treated through better public mental programs or prevented from owning any guns (which ignores the fact that they were his moms guns, not his).  And while murdering tons of little kids is definitely and thoroughly evil, I have trouble seeing the man behind the shootings as pure evil.  I tend to see someone whose life had been hell.  Someone who one day snapped and lashed out at his mother who may have been an angelic caretaker or an infantalizing-you'll-never-achieve-anything-demon-hiding-in-mommy's-social-respectability.  Or maybe a little of both, humans are complicated.  Having murdered her I suspect he kind of said to himself that as long as he was that evil he might as well take out as many people as he could in a place he hated before he killed himself.  Probably if he hadn't snapped on that day he would have eventually found some firmer ground for himself, life would have gotten better in some ways eventually.  Perhaps he could have done about anything, it sounds like the guy was brilliant.  If he had held on for just a little bit longer... but he didn't and he went out in a way that will make it harder to tell stories of people like him without stigma following them.  I just don't see the pure evil that makes good news headlines.  I see someone who maybe was a little bit or even a lot like me-that failed to hold on and reacted violently.  Its true there is nothing about the Asperger syndrome that makes you inherently more violent than anyone else, but if its true he had it we can imagine his life had some pretty hard knocks involved in just getting through the normal world on a regular basis.

Can you love those you do not know?

Last week in Sunday School the teacher asked why people doubted the church.  One of the audience members appeared set on taking a hardline position on the subject in his comments, giving reasons as examples which called into question the person doubting instead of the situation in which the doubt arose.  For example, he remarked that people doubted the church to provide justification for their pursuit of a hedonistic lifestyle.  I had to chuckle at that, as my own periods of doubt have been characterized by gut wrenching soul searching, not so much hedonism.

It was another of those moments that I try to ignore because the teacher really has more power than I do to provide a welcoming or unwelcoming atmosphere for such comments and the question didn't seem worth investing in enough to try to come up with a bunch of alternate view comments.  What are my views?  Though this area is complicated and bigger than you can capture in just a few sentences, I think people doubt the church because the grey area between where the divine revelation stops and the imperfect culturally influenced crazy normal people begins is so fuzzy.  Where exactly the line is is not an area for black and white thinking, and reasonable people can disagree on whether there is any divine element at all.  We are, after all, human.  When we only provide lip service to the concept of the church being made up of imperfect people who are still people, then when their occasional lack of godliness becomes too obvious to ignore it can generate doubts.  When it comes down to it, some things deserve to be doubted.

I remember listening to these comments in Sunday School about how people doubt because of their personal failings and thinking that the man must never have had a heart to heart conversation with someone who was actually doubting or had given up faith.  Or if he had, his need to judge people whose views threatened his own overshadowed his ability to listen.  Perhaps its a form of "Confirmation Bias," where maybe he just tended to only associate with people or remember things about them that reinforce his own views because he is human, and as a result just doesn't know people who have serious doubts or perhaps ignores those doubts and as a result doesn't know the people as complete human beings.  When you allow yourself not to know someone, you remove the possibility of loving them in a concrete way that would actually matter as much to the person on the receiving end.  You could easily love them as abstractions whom you wish to have plenty of calories and shelter, but not the kind of love where the person feels you know who they are, what matters to them, and can sympathize with the personal goals and ideals they have that separate them as an individual from all of humanity.

Even though I tend to be somewhat terrified of establishing real human connections to the people around me on a daily basis, I value the small ways that I can find to give myself a human connection to people whose lives are hurt by the way the word exists.  So I can read a biography about a civil rights lawyer and start to imagine the inner mind set and priorities of people to whom the events of the civil rights movement weren't simply a mildly interesting past.  I can learn to identify how my own mind has been poisoned by a subconscious racism and start to question how that makes me relate to the class Teaching Assistant or to the man sitting next to me at the airport.  I've listened to how homosexuals can describe a quest for self actualization and acceptance using arguments that are exact mirrors of what I might use to describe a need for self actualization and acceptance for autistics and start to let go of fear and question just how concrete the barriers that supposedly divide us are.  Then, when coworkers start berating a bisexual employee who just came out of the closet at work, I can realize that that employee is doing a kind of reaching into darkness that I might do when I take a chance on letting someone know that I am on the autistic spectrum.  There are many kinds of closets to come out of, and people who have shared a sense of isolation and darkness can help each other out.

I can read accounts of women whose quests for self fulfillment have been hampered on so many sides by a society that historically has made a lot of choices for them to benefit someone else.  Then, when I hear someone say that perhaps the world needs to be changed to loosen things up a bit I can see and hear the idea with eyes and ears not just my own, but also of the people who have been hurt.  I can talk to friends and family members who have doubts or who have abandoned faith and cherish having a chance to know a little bit more of who they are, not just who the talks given by church leaders and members say they should be.

That isn't to say that I am particularly skilled at listening and loving.  I'm fully capable of being an ignorant oaf and am poor at regulating the perceptions I broadcast to other people.  I can count plenty of occasions when I've been trying to connect to people and what came out was more or less horrible.  But I feel if I don't try I won't simply be stumbling into the occasional serious social error, I actually will be horrible.

If we cut ourselves off from listening to those who we don't understand or don't lack overt differences with we fail to know them and instead know only the false images of them we create in our mind to provide for our own mental security.  We can never fully know another person just as we can never fully know ourselves.  But, to the extent that we are willfully ignorant of other people, we cannot love them.

Thoughts on the DSM 5

So its been announced finally that the DSM V will definitely merge the autism and Asperger syndrome diagnosis.  As someone who would never have been diagnosed without Asperger syndrome being split into its own grouping, I'm kind of sad to see the name go.  There were a lot of positive cultural things that happened around the Asperger syndrome label with people who wrote books or made movies or made websites showing how there were some people who are different and its not all a bad thing.  Sure, sometimes there is crazy negativity that goes along with anything like this, which for me including not being allowed to serve a mission, a deep sense of social isolation at church from being excluded from the social bonding of being able to share mission experiences, being afraid of ignorant judgmental people at church, and a family member who seemed convinced Asperger syndrome really meant some kind of blend between Frotteurism and antisocial personality disorder.  But the negatives for me were really outweighed by finally figuring out what was going on inside my head, gaining a vocabulary to explain myself to other people, and discovering a community of people for whom experiences like mine weren't unique.  It went from feeling like my life represented some kind of isolated freakshow to understanding that there were many people like me who had joined together to form ways to build self respect.

The passing of the label will have a minimal influence on me personally.  I rarely talk about it to anyone I know in person and I can on a surface level pass as normal most of the time.  When I do talk about it the extra work of defining Asperger syndrome typically outweighs the feeling of risk that no one will believe me if I said I was autistic.  I can typically get away with saying that I'm what it looks like when you have a case of autism that is mild enough that at this stage in life you'd have to know me well to tell it was there.  I can pass well enough as normal and can be am picky enough about who I disclose to I can afford that.  I can definitely sympathize with people whose symptom obviousness or the choices of their caretakers prevent them enjoying such control over who knows and who doesn't.

Hopefully society will stop demonizing the condition as a way to do fundraising for their organizations and people will start to realize that when you have met one autistic you really have only met one autistic.  Maybe the world will stop having so many biases against and constraints on the disabled so that the label will be less of a stigma.  The name change leaves plenty to be afraid of, assuming we don't make for ourselves a better world.

A right to refuse to cooperate?

There has been some conflict in recently times over how much people in society should have a right to refuse to cooperate with any health care or social service they disagree with.  For example whether insurance companies or employers can refuse to provide medical insurance for contraception or whether pharmacists can refuse to dispense the "morning after pill."  In a perfect world everyone would have so many options for their employment, doctors, and pharmacies that it would be easy to only form relationships with people you already agree with.  But its not a perfect world.  Sometimes because of work constraints there many only be one or two options in insurance companies you can deal with, only so many employers you can work for, and pharmacies you can visit.  So a right to refuse to cooperate can easily translate into a right to make it nearly impossible for someone else to receive what they believe is desirable for themselves.  For example, while a pharmacist who believes the morning after bill is infanticide might feel very uncomfortable or conflicted about dispensing it, a rape victim may only have a short period of time to find someone who will give it to them before the drugs effectiveness starts to fail.

So where does my perspective fall on all of this?  Its hard to talk about this much in detail because at my job its considered that they can fire you if you mention online all the details of your employment.  But lets just say I provide customer service and technical support for a company that is a household name, someplace that normal everyday people do business with because they have to in order to function in our modern society.  And occasionally my job involves helping people purchase or troubleshoot their ability to access pornography.

First off some might question whether this is awkward for me.  And the answer is it can be at many levels.  Including:

• It can be heartbreaking to take a call for a mother or a wife who is desperately trying to find out if their spouse is secretly using porn when we were the company that is selling the stuff to their son or husband.  
• Its a fine line to walk when they are certain their family members couldn't possibly have betrayed them that way and I have to break it to them that even if I don't know who was at the controls we have proof that it was ordered and I can't credit back the hundreds of dollars that were ran up.
• Occasionally customers ask that I give recommendations on which porn they might enjoy or if I have any suggestions on what they should purchase.
• I've had to explain to people that just because I'm here to help doesn't mean that I can help them figure out which titles will include lesbian vs heterosexual sex acts or possibly be produced by one porn company compared to another.  Other than reading through large numbers of titles (which is time prohibitive) and making educated guesses, I honestly don't even have that sort of information most of the time.
• I even had an illiterate man call in once who explained that because he could not read he needed me to read him all the porn titles I had one by one until he found one that he liked so that I could place his order for him.
• I seem to recall once even having a customer ask me something along the lines of whether we had any sex videos involving Asians and then proceed to ask me if I was Asian.  Just because I'm tolerating talking to you about your pornographic preferences doesn't mean I moonlight as a professional porn actor, thanks for asking.  Lets not even get into how they misjudged my accent and possibly my gender (somehow a male tenor voice comes across the phone call sounding like as female a good part of the time no matter how many times I tell them my name).

There are also some ways that this is not uncomfortable which might not occur to people imagining this situation for the first time, so I'll list those as well.

• I am almost never exposed to the actual content other than in the title of the item in question.
• Most customers are willing to make their purchase and move on without expecting me to have an extended conversation with them about it (couldn't say if my female coworkers have the same experience).
• Many callers express that they are perfectly ok with their adult sons visiting them ordering this stuff as long as the son coughs up a contribution to the bill to make up for it.
• Very few of my customer interactions center around this
• Most people are o.k. with me not reading every porn title on their bill to them.  They don't mind just me mentioning what kind of movie it is if the title didn't make it obvious enough.
• Most people self service their own purchases and often only need me to troubleshoot their ability to complete such purchases.

So how do I handle it?  Mostly by just doing whatever the customers ask me to do and doing it promptly and with courtesy.  When customers call for customer service they want a representative of a company to answer the phone, not a representative of a specific church or belief system.  And the company who pays my bills expects me to represent them, not my God, my priesthood leaders, or my own personal tastes or preferences.  Being a representative of the company and not myself actually answers most of the questions involved in handling the issues I described above.  It doesn't matter if I'm helping a customer watch Finding Nemo or the latest X rated video claiming to show teenagers doing who knows what, there are certain policies and expectations involved.  Since I represent the company and not myself I'm not obligated to express any opinion good or bad on the shows they ask about.  Since the security rules for accessing accounts controls whether the wife can find out I don't have to make a judgement call on which spouse I'll hold allegiance to.  Since the company only provides a bare minimum of information about the different shows and with almost no useful ability to sort them by anything beyond what is strictly needed to place an order (title, price, where to find it), I can reasonably refuse to assist people in finding the show that fits their fetish best.  Truthfully, trying to assist people any further would involve unauthorized internet browsing to porn provider websites that would quickly get me fired.  I'm just as prepared to assist a family in setting up parental controls as to help someone find out why an error message is showing on the screen instead of their favorite porn show.

So what do I think about a purported right to refuse to cooperate?  I don't think it would make my job any easier.  Even if it was technically legal for me to refuse to help people watch porn or R rated movies that I thought were too risque, I'd have to deal with a lot of angry customers whose lives would be made more difficult by having to call in that many more times just to get a customer service representative who would offer service instead of a sermon.  Can you imagine having to call through an automated system that asked you "to ensure the fewest transfers as possible, please take this survey so we can match your customer service need to an agent who is ideologically affiliated with you"?  Logistically it would blow up so fast that I probably wouldn't even be able to get the job unless I was willing to sign a document agreeing to service anyone no matter what they needed, just like many employers won't hire employees who refuse to work on Sundays.

Many might argue that medical professionals are more morally culpable for their involvement with a patients body than I am involved with what my customers do in their spare time.  And perhaps that isn't unfair in some cases, but that is why doctors and professionals are expected to select services they are willing to perform.  You can't be a pharmacist without the possibility of dispensing many different drugs.  A OB/GYN occasionally might have to perform an emergency abortion to save the life of the mother but normally has the option to avoid specializing in abortion procedures.  An insurance company can hardly expect to be able to only service people whose ideals match their CEO (anybody want an insurance company executive who belongs to Scientology or Seventh Day Adventist dictating what gets covered?).  And while employers might offer health insurance subsidization to attract employees, they shouldn't expect to be able to exercise financial leverage over their employees religious or medical choices.  As I said earlier, in a perfect world everything would be so flexible that you could immediately be perfectly served only by people who agreed with you.  That kind of perfection doesn't exist.  We live in a world where people are free to make up their own minds and part of dealing with that is not always agreeing.  Sure there is room for compromise and flexibility in how we all live together, but not much absolutism.

I am reminded of a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. where he said, “Whatever your life's work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.”  When I go to a hospital I shouldn't have to worry if the nurse is worried about being fired if she puts my wife's life ahead of a pregnancy.  When I go to the pharmacy I should expect the pharmacist to represent that role, not his opinions about whether birth control is against the will of God.  If I have to constantly worry about which service provider might have which opinions so that I can be free to exercise my privilege to live as I choose in a free land, I'm not free, and the service providers aren't doing their job well.  Meantime, I'll keep processing orders for my customers porn with a polite smile on my face.

Exploring the conflict between Science and Religion

As an introduction to this post, most of what follows I actually wrote as a response to a discussion prompt for a class two semesters ago, as have several other blog posts I've done.  So if this seems kind of out of the blue it is.  I just really like what I wrote up so I figured I'd re use it.

The real point of incompatibility between science and religion is the type of logic used by each.  Since 1620 when Francis Bacon wrote Novum Organum science was reoriented to be based on inductive logic where (simply put) you take observations, make tentative assumptions based on observation, and then test the assumptions by more observations.  Previous scientists had made observations but the scientific method didn't really start to be worked out till Bacon.
Religion, on the other hand, is based more essentially on deductive logic as developed by Aristotle.  A series of spiritual experiences or beliefs are taken as assumptions and then conclusions are made based on those assumptions.  Occasionally the assumptions might be revised by a new spiritual experience or from some other cultural source of information but generally speaking the foundational assumptions are not supposed to change.  If anything is encountered which seems to contradict the assumptions then the typical doctrinal response is to ignore it as invalid on its face because it contradicts the assumptions, contradict it by interpreting the assumptions in a more complicated way, or to make more and more complicated interpretations of the assumptions to allow the apparent contradiction to disappear.
Science using inductive logic never assumes it has a completely true and exact assumption but by testing and revising the assumptions a lot over time they become useful or probably mostly true.  Religion using a more deductive style of logic assumes it has achieved at least some things that are completely true and exactly correct.  It is more or less assumed that given time that other truths can be discovered by exploring the complexities and consequences of those original assumptions.
At least as far as traditional biblical interpretation is concerned we have many cases where there is apparent contradiction between science and religion.  How individuals handle that can vary a lot.  I don't have any easy answers.  Over my life I've had a lot of people who tried to reassure me of my faith by telling me a folklore version of science that was easier to disbelieve or where the contradictions didn't exist.  Like claiming neanderthals and humans didn't overlap in time and that humans don't appear in the fossil record till the time that the bible says they should.  I think that's a practice that we should try to avoid.  It seems almost unavoidable that such folklore sciences will show up because as long as normal people try to figure out science they are bound to make mistakes or make stuff up to fill the gaps in their memory or understanding.  But as much as we can I think we should avoid putting words in scientists mouths to reassure ourselves.
There's no easy way to tell science and religion to make nice and stop fighting because a typical religious doctrine system has no inherent logical path to rapidly reform itself when new evidence shows up.  Science has no inherent logical mechanism to adapt to new religious ideas nor any way to judge which religion's ideas should be incorporated.  They are based on two completely different logic systems so it wouldn't really make sense for them to immediately cross fertilize each other.  If you aren't supposed to contradict the assumptions it takes a lot of time for the assumptions to disappear before you can ignore them.  It wasn't until 1822 (per wikipedia ) that the Catholic Church stopped the ban of printing "heliocentric books in Rome".  That's a grand delay of nearly 300 years after Copernicus published in 1543.  Granted its not always that slow, I think when I read one of Stephen Hawking's books (sorry I can't say which I read several) that he said the Catholic church almost immediately gave doctrinal support to his work on the Big Bang because they thought it was easy to reconcile the big bang with the idea of God having created the Universe.  Having already dismissed biblical literalism from their astronomy they were open to further change.  On other subjects literalism is still more or less the official interpretation (depending on which religion you adhere to).  Its always possible that science on any given subject will turn out to be partially or extremely wrong.  Science isn't supposed to give us absolute truth so we can never rule that out.  Its always possible that the range of subjects on which religions will judge their traditional beliefs to be unsupportable will expand and that in 100 years our descendents will look back on us and laugh with scorn about how crazy we were and how we just didn't realize that a few more parts of our belief systems were obviously expendable.  I think the best thing to do would be for each side to be tolerant of each other and pick their fights as respectfully and as humbly as possible.  Science is most certainly not representing absolute truth because its not meant to do so.  On the other hand, there is probably no belief system with a long history where we couldn't look at the early history and find beliefs contradicted by their later history.  Just take the Old Testament statements about what to do with people with contradictory beliefs and behavior and compare that to the time immediately following the Reformation (lots of religious wars-kill the heretic and force them to believe) and then again with modern practice of Christians.  Or look at New Testament statements about the spirituality and worth of women (1 Timothy 2:12-15 for example) and compare it with recent statements by LDS church leaders (I won't bother linking any, the statements that women are spiritually superior is so frequently repeated it doesn't bear citing).  No matter whether you think its good or bad, no true contradiction, or happened for valid reasons and that both were right in their times, some doctrines change.