Author: Ophelia Benson

Warren Jeffs lectures the girls at ‘Alta Academy’ – Alta Academy being the pseudo-school inside the walls of the FLDS compound. The teachings give an interesting insight into the ‘beliefs’ and practices of Jeffs and his subjects.

The Lord on purpose has sent us into this world to meet the two opposite powers, and we must choose. And I testify to you young ladies the right, the eternal way, is Priesthood. If Priesthood is not involved in something, we should not want it. The holy Priesthood is the eternal power where God himself places his nature into a man. The women do not bear the holy Priesthood, but they have the power of that Priesthood in them through their husbands or their father if they are unmarried.

Clear enough? The Priesthood is everything. Whatever ain’t got the Priesthood is anathema. God sticks it into men. He doesn’t stick it into women. Women get to use the power of it through a man, but they don’t get to have it itself. It’s for men. Women are – how shall I put this – not good enough.

And when you are sealed to a man, you become part of him. I emphasize, “part of him.” You don’t become all of him, but part of him. The woman who wants to be everything, will seek to rule over her husband. And it’s our job, each one, to find our place in this oneness as part of the work of God. In this world today there are great battles between men and women and their rights. So I remind you of what the Prophet said. “It takes a man and a woman to make a man. It takes a man and many women to make a man.”

Clear enough? Women become part of men, but not all of them. It takes a lot of women to make one man. Women are kind of like building material – but men are the actual buildings. Women are an old pile of bricks and window frames, men are the buildings.

You wake up each day yearning to please [your husband]. You rejoice in his will towards you. You pray for him, you seek his counsel. In your life there’s no secrets you keep from him, but you keep his secrets. You keep sacred your relationship with him, and all this as a oneness with your Priesthood head…I remind you that Priesthood government is persuasion through love. It is not force…And so you ladies, to fulfill that command of the great Jehovah that, “Your desires shall be to your husband and he shall rule over you,” it requires you willingly submit.

Right. Here’s how it is; it’s like this and no otherwise; listen up and do what I say. This here is persuasion through love; it is not force. And so to fulfill the command, it requires you willingly submit. You have to, but you have to do it willingly. You are required to submit, willingly. After that would you kindly go to the blackboard and draw us a square circle in the hand of a married female bachelor.

Now what if you detect that he might have a weakness? Maybe you have come from a good father, and perhaps you would be given to an inexperienced man or a man who has great weaknesses, or you think so. What should you do? For sure, if a woman rules over the man, both will lose the spirit of God. If a man only does good because you tell him, both of you don’t have the spirit of God, you both lose. Pray for him, seek his counsel in faith on the Lord Jesus Christ, our Heavenly Father.

Clear enough? The Priesthood is in men, and it is not in you, so even if we shove you onto a stupid nasty man who hasn’t got the morals of a stoat, he’s still your boss and you’re still scum, so what you do is, you pray and hope for the best. Don’t, whatever you do, try to tell him what’s what, because if you do, God will hate you. And don’t forget you have to do all this willingly. Or else.

I am approaching this lesson toward the path of success, not just the warning of failure. And the success is to give yourself to your husband — mind, body, soul, with a living faith in God that the Lord will guide him right in teaching you and training you…[A]s the prophet Brigham Young said, a mother or wife who has the spirit of God will never intrude on the rights of her husband. She will never go beyond her bounds and try to rule over him. Don’t try to step out ahead, say the Prophets.

Even if he’s a shit and a fool and you’re not – still – don’t you dare try to step out ahead. Why? You know why. He’s got the Priesthood, you ain’t. Even if he is a shit and a fool, he’s still better than you, because of the Priesthood. He’s always better than you, no matter what, because he’s a man and you’re a woman. The Prophets said this.

So when the prophets say, “Beware. Don’t try to dictate your husband,” you must realize it could happen in any area of life where you haven’t on purpose sought to become one with him. And oneness means submission, “Thy will be done.” It’s a living faith in God that He will lead you through your Priesthood head, your husband.

True womanhood is attained through Priesthood. Motherhood, womanhood, is glorified, honored and blesses others through Priesthood. All your connection with other women should be through Priesthood, through your head. All your conversations with other women should be to please your head. Your secrets, the desires of your heart, should be centered in him. And that takes some doing.

Yes I just bet it does – even if you’ve been trained to it by Warren Jeffs and his slaves from infancy on up, it still takes some doing – it still takes Warren Jeffs coming along to nag and nag and nag and nag just in case any of those Priesthood-deprived girl-humans might disobey. Gotta get in there and really ‘persuade’ those girls to act like zombie slaves for the comfort of men.

Holy holy holy.

What is fanatical atheism? Dan Gardner had some thoughts in the Ottawa Citizen last year.

In the past, I’ve tried to avoid talking about religion in such sharp terms. It’s not that I fear giving offence (which would be something of a limitation in my line of work). Rather, I know, as all humans do, that it’s scary knowing you’re going to die. And if belief in angels on high eases the existential fears of some, I won’t begrudge them. Whatever gets you through the night, as a long-haired prophet once said.

Sure. I don’t go to funerals so that I can tell the assembled mourners that there are no angels on high. I don’t force my views on anyone. But I do feel entitled, and permitted, and free to talk about them among friends and acquaintances, and to write about them here and elsewhere. I draw a distinction between forcing one’s views on people, and talking and writing about them in public places. And this means that I get more than a little tired of people who call atheists who discuss their atheism in public fanatics or too noisy or similar. I get called all those things myself now and then, and I think the charge is fraudulent. I think it’s fraudulent when made of the putative New Atheists, too. No one is forced to buy their books, or to read them, or to listen to them through buds in the ears, and it’s not as if they’ve altered the prevailing culture so radically that religious belief has all but disappeared. So where does the fanaticism come in? Where are the evil snarling monsters of fanatical atheism?

The first problem for the moderate believer comes from those who like their faith hot. You’ve agreed God exists and that He mucks about in the world. You’ve agreed this book contains His holy commandments. So how do you respond when the mad religious zealot says, “hey, here on page 23, it says we should slice open unbelievers and use their guts for garters. And over here on page 75, it says we should bury homosexuals up to their necks and stuff olives up their noses.”…[T]he more common response is to simply pretend the garters-and-olives passages don’t exist and prattle on about how God is merciful and loving.

But the garters-and-olives passages do exist, and lots of people think God is not merciful and loving but wrathful and punitive, at least when dealing with other people. So why is the onus on us to pipe down?

Then there’s the problem on the other side — among the atheists such as Richard Dawkins who have been labelled “fanatics.”…When the Pope says that a few words and some hand-waving causes a cracker to transform into the flesh of a 2,000-year-old man, Dawkins and his fellow travellers say, well, prove it. It should be simple. Swab the Host and do a DNA analysis. If you don’t, we will give your claim no more respect than we give to those who say they see the future in crystal balls or bend spoons with their minds or become werewolves at each full moon. And for this, it is Dawkins, not the Pope, who is labelled the unreasonable fanatic…This is completely contrary to how we live the rest of our lives. We demand proof of even trivial claims…and we dismiss those who make such claims without proof. We are still more demanding when claims are made on matters that are at least temporarily important.

Just what I was saying yesterday. We want good reasons to believe even trivial claims in the rest of our lives, so why is there this fenced-off bit of our lives where we don’t? And why is it considered fanaticism to ask questions like that? (As long as one changes the wording, at least. To ask questions like that in the same words over and over again, day after day – okay that’s fanaticism. You know who you are. Don’t make me write your name on the blackboard.)

George H Smith remarks in his book Why Atheism? that salvation religion includes the belief that “at least some knowledge necessary for salvation requires faith in divine revelation, knowledge that cannot otherwise be justified through reason alone.” [p. 28 n. 1] That’s an interesting idea. It means that salvation religion believes in a god who is a terrible cheat and bully – one who makes “salvation” dependent on voluntary stupidity.

It also requires us (if we want “salvation”) to divide our thinking and functioning in two – because for ordinary purposes, faith is not the right way to go, it’s the wrong way. It’s wrong and we know it’s wrong. We don’t claim to use faith for purposes of ordinary inquiry. We may use it of vague guessworky subjective matters – the future, people, results of actions – in combination with more rationally-based knowledge, but we don’t use it of empirical subjects. On the contrary, we use maps and schedules and recipes and blueprints and we expect the people who make them to use something other than faith. Yet in this other area, the rules are completely different. Well why? Why do that? Why make different rules? Why give us a reliable way of finding out things, and then make it a condition of “salvation” that we not use it in this one important area? What kind of arrangement is that? A perverse, unfair, backasswards, unreasonable one, that’s what. If faith isn’t good enough for ordinary inquiry, why is it good enough for any kind of inquiry? Even in the more guessworky subjects, blind faith is no good. Blind faith in a person you have abundant reason to know is a malicious enemy is a bad idea. So what kind of god would make faith the right way to get knowledge in one area but not the other? A trickster? A demon? What?

In a way that doesn’t matter, because of course the real reason “faith” is necessary is the fact that there is no evidence. But in another way it does matter, because it means that people believe in a god who plays wicked games with human cognition.

Andrew Coyne’s running blog of the Macleans-BC Human Rights tribunal hearing is fascinating and horrifying. He keeps pointing out that the chair is deciding this or that but that it’s hard to know what the basis of the decision is when there are no rules of evidence. Ponder that. Macleans is up before a tribunal but the rules are made up on the spot.

1:59 PM: [W]e’re walking through another passage—which Faisal Joseph notes is particularly significant—in which Steyn particulalry disavows any suggestion that his concerns attach to all Muslims, but rather that the trends he observes prevail in “enough” of the Muslim population of Europe to be worrisome. This strikes me as eminently arguable—but whether it is or not, it is just surreal in a free and democratic society to be calling in a government panel to decide it. Instead of, you know, arguing it.

A couple of hours later –

3: 50 PM: Back from a break, as the tribunal members wrestle with yet another ruling on admissibility in the absence of rules of evidence. They’ve decided again to sort-of admit questioning about the “impact,” not of Steyn’s article, but of various, mostly obscure blogs who were allegedly “inspired” by Steyn’s piece. Understand: we’re now to be subjected to the state’s inquisition, not for anything that appeared in the magazine, but for whatever lunatic ramblings might appear anywhere in the blogosphere! 4:10 PM: Now we’re into, not even blogs, but comments left on a YouTube post. Is bathroom grafitti next?

Inspiring, isn’t it?