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My guess is that some of the stories of people being unharmed when they should have been mangled are actually true, but the garments were not the cause of the person’s escape from harm. For every story about garments protecting someone physically, there are probably ten thousand stories where a person was injured or killed while wearing garments, but those aren’t the stories that get told in Sunday School. Since a belief that God always answers prayers often comes from “remembering the hits and forgetting the misses,” a belief in the physical protective power of garments comes from re-telling the few stories where people escaped harm while wearing garments and not telling any stories about people who were injured or killed while wearing garments. I am satisfied with that explanation 🙂 Since the phrase “against the power of the destroyer” is used in regards to the protective power of the garment, the garment’s protective powers are put in the metaphysical realm rather than the physical realm. In any case I suppose that it’s true that no explicit promises of physical protection are offered for wearing the garment, though it is easy to be led to believe such ideas by stories one hears, such as one TV program I watched where Bill Marriott explained that he was exposed to open flames and his cloths (or skin, I don’t remember) were burned all the way up to his garment line, and the flames did not pass his garment line. Also, there’s the time that Paul H. Dunn claimed that his garments protected him from machine guns bullets, though this story is known to be fictitious. I suppose that I can take responsibility for believing folk doctrine.
I struggle with garments for two reasons- one, the clearly Masonic markings on them, and two, the fact that they didn’t protect me when they should have. I’m a pretty athletic guy and played school-sponsored sports almost daily in junior high and high school, and during that time, I didn’t have garments (because I was not endowed) and I never had a serious injury. Then I went on my mission, and less than a month after getting to my first area, I tore my ACL playing basketball with other missionaries on P-Day. I was wearing my garments at the time of the tear and I was keeping all the mission rules. I received a priesthood blessing and was told that I would be “healed in the due time of the Lord by the doctors and nurses.” I had to go home and have knee surgery to fix the torn ACL, and then I returned to my mission. So, for one, why didn’t the garments protect me from the serious knee injury (especially given that I do not have a history of athletic injuries)? And two, why didn’t God save me the pain of a surgery, and save the Church the expense of having to pay for part of it, and give me three more months of time saving his children, and save me the potential problems I may have with my knee later on, all of which could have been accomplished by simply healing the torn ACL with a priesthood blessing?
So I have to say that, even though garments are supposed to be a “shield and a protection,” garments do not protect people from injury, even missionaries. I still wear them at this point, but if they “don’t work,” I may change my mind in the future.
If I were an evolutionary psychologist, I would give this explanation for the “more blessed than thou” mindset: In a world where we are all competing with each other for the good things in life, we can gain a competitive advantage for ourselves if we can persuade others that God loves us more than other people and that God favors our success over the success of others. If we can demonstrate that God has chosen us for special opportunities and privileges, other people will grant us more special opportunities. Evolution is about passing on one’s genes, so if a person can demonstrate that they have better genes than others by showing that God favors their success over the success of others, then that person will get better opportunities to pass on their genes. For example, if a girl in a YSA ward gets up at the pulpit and brags about her blessings, she is saying, “Hey guys in the ward, the reason you should ask me out instead of the other girls in the ward is that God loves me more than them and favors my success over their success. All these blessings I have demonstrate that I am a better mating choice than the other girls.” For a married couple with children, such bragging amounts to, “God loves my children (who carry my genes) and favors their success more than other people’s children, so my children should get opportunities that other children don’t get.” So yes, bragging about one’s blessings is simple evolutionary self-interest. It doesn’t matter whether or not the blessings are real, because it’s the perception of divine favor that is important. Whether or not such bragging is moral is not the point here. A good case could be made that such bragging is moral, because if we are programmed to try to pass on our own genes (even at the expense of others passing on their genes) and if bragging about our blessings helps us to do that, it could be considered moral; however I will not make this case. My point here has been to explain why people do what they do.
Unfortunately, I have never found the BofM to be inspiring, mostly because the book has not been able to answer my questions or solve my problems. It seemed to have a lot of solutions for people who had different problems than me: all of the “repent of your whoredoms, and your lasciviousness, and your strife, and your envyings, and your covetings, and you adulteries, etc.” would be helpful for people who had those problems, but is not helpful for me. My problems have been more social- I was socially ostracized (or just ignored) during significant portions of my life, and the girls that I liked weren’t interested in me, and since the BofM doesn’t have answers for those kinds of problems, I have never found it very useful. I also don’t find much of what could be called spirituality in the book. The book chronicles a God who has a highly responsive interactive relationship with his people, and who is very responsive to prayer, and who and gives specific blessings for specific actions; I have tried to create this kind of relationship with God and have found God unresponsive, so I do not find these kinds of stories inspiring. Much of the BofM also has something of a “gloom and doom” tone to it, which I don’t like. RagDollSallyUT, you really nailed it on some points with prayer. I personally am at the point where I am deciding whether or not I believe in God, so the topic of “Does God answer prayers?” is of special significance. We know that there are some types of prayers that God NEVER answers. Here are a few:
1) God never answers the prayers of amputees to have their lost limbs re-grown.
2) God never answers prayers for world peace.
3) God never answers the prayers of hopelessly infertile couples to have a child of their own.
Who is more deserving of a lost limb to be restored than a veteran of war? And yet God does not answer those prayers. Who is more deserving of a change of sexual orientation than a celibate returned missionary who is struggling with an unwanted same-sex attraction? And yet God rarely (if ever) answers their prayers, and the Church does not teach or expect that those prayers will be answered. One friend I have who has an unwanted same-sex attraction says he has cried and prayed many nights to become straight, and God has not answered his prayers. Why does God fail to answer the prayers of a devout, loving, worthy, responsible but infertile LDS couple for a child of their own, while at the same time sending his spirit children to irresponsible high school girls who get knocked up while they are high at a party?
The problem of competing prayers is very interesting: if ten people are interviewed for a job, and seven of those ten pray and ask God to give them the job, then God must decide to whom he will grant the job at the expense of those to whom he will not grant the job. In situations like these, God is put in the position of allocator of scarce resources and it would force him to make tough decisions about which one of his children’s interests to promote at the expense of his other children.
Every time some guy stands up at the pulpit and thanks God for his wonderful wife/fiancee, there are possibly several or dozens of other guys who have prayed for that girl to like them and God did not answer their prayers. And there are many worthy deserving single people who are praying for a spouse and God will not answer their prayers. I’ve prayed many times for that pretty girl in my YSA ward to like me and it never occurred to me that there may have been several other guys praying for the same thing.
The problem of competing prayers also illustrates a deeper concern I have wondered about: why would God create a situation for his children where they would compete with each other for the good things in life- things like power, money, security, desirable jobs, and attractive mates? Why would God make scarcity and competition such a central feature of the human experience? Why would God wire us to be attracted to good-looking people and then make good-looking people reasonably rare?
I also like the idea that we would see a much different Utah if God answered prayers based on sincerity, devotion, and worthiness (we would also see a much wealthier Utah if tithing worked the way that it is explained in Sunday School.) But since Utah isn’t much better off than the rest of the country in most areas other than church attendance, and is worse off than most of the country in areas like depression and bankruptcy, I think it’s safe to conclude that petitionary prayer, on the whole, doesn’t work.
So if God doesn’t answer prayers to restore lost limbs, or to change sexual orientation, or for world peace, or to save someone from bankruptcy, or for that pretty girl to like me, then what kinds of prayers DOES God answer?
If God does not answer petitionary prayers, does that mean that God does not exist? No. But it would mean that God is something of a deist God, a God who is uninvolved in human affairs. I’m not sure that I want to believe in that kind of God, so I continue to puzzle things out.
I’m struggling with this issue right now. Up until a few weeks ago, I was praying daily, but I didn’t really expect that God would answer my prayers because I have a long history of unanswered prayers. It started to feel like I was kind of insane because I was doing something (praying) that I knew would not change the course of events. Then one night (a few weeks ago) I stopped praying and I haven’t prayed since. It’s something of an experiment I’m trying. I do miss believing that I have God as a “safety net” and I feel alone in a way that I have never felt before. But I have found that this state is preferable to the frustration and confusion of consistently unanswered prayers. I also used to offer a great number of prayers for things like good weather or for some girl to like me, but I have found that those kinds of events run their natural course regardless of whether or not I pray to change them; essentially, God does not answer those prayers. The results of my experiment so far have been this: my life is the same whether or not I pray, indicating that the petitionary prayers that I offered had little or no effect on the outcome of events. In a way, this approach has made me more effective in getting my homework etc. done because I know that I alone am responsible for my success or failure and I can’t depend on God to help me. If I want something done, I must do 100% of the work myself and I can count on God doing 0%. I suppose that it’s helped me become more “self-reliant” in that I do not expect any help at all from God, so I accept sole responsibility for myself and for my own success or failure. If I fail, I must reexamine my actions, and if I succeed, then I give credit to myself rather than God.
But the loneliness hurts. It’s a little unnerving to no longer believe that God will bail me out of a jam. It’s unsettling to no longer believe that everything will turn out alright because God is watching out for me.
But I also think of the arrogance of some of the prayers that I offered: do I really believe that God cares more about me getting to work on time than he does about the prayers of the parents of the 24,000 children under the age of 5 who will die on planet Earth TODAY?
So I miss the belief in a divine safety net. But I don’t miss the frustration of wondering why God isn’t answering my prayers or the exasperation of wondering why God is giving the things that I asked him for to other people.
Quote:some are very relative and situational – only applying to those inside the organization.
I never really understood why the Church doesn’t want members to drink coffee but doesn’t care if non-members drink coffee.
A short while ago I hypothesized that there were two kinds of morality that the Church taught: objective morality and subjective morality. In objective morality, certain acts are condemned by the Church and are always wrong. In subjective morality, it is up to the individual to decide what is right or wrong. In the Church, the word of wisdom and law of chastity are objective morality: drinking coffee and having premarital/extramarital sex are always wrong no matter what. But the Church teaches a subjective morality in business transactions: it is up to each individual businessman to decide what is moral. In matters of business, it does seem to be that the Church believes in moral relativism of the kind that it condemns in questions of sexual behavior or matters of the word of wisdom. I like to avoid complaining or ranting, but it bothers me that the Church is so firm about matters of the word of wisdom and law of chastity with youth and YSAs, but businessmen and lawyers are allowed to do just about whatever they want in their professions. The message to me as a YSA was this: “A Mormon businessman can sell porn, alcohol, gambling, and even prostitutes and have his business open on Sunday if he wants to with no responsibility for what his actions do to others, or he can lay off his workers for his own greed or fail to give them benefits or decent wages because that’s his prerogative, but don’t you even think about touching a girl’s boobs because that’s a grievous sin.”
I personally find this unlimited economic freedom with strict limitations on social freedoms to be troubling, which is part of why I am wanting to develop my own system of morality.
The ability to treat mental illness requires years of training, and most ward members just don’t have the necessary expertise. Even members who want to help will find that their best empathy and skills aren’t enough to solve the problem. The best thing that members can do is be supportive while the individual receives professional help. For the question “What can the Church do about mental illness?” I have noticed that organizations of all kinds have a tendency to solve the problems they know how to solve and ignore the ones they don’t know how to solve or that are too expensive to solve. Additionally, mental illness presents uncomfortable challenges to notions of free will, and I think that a large portion of the church still treats mental illness as a failure of moral character, which is simply abject ignorance.
Of course, mental illness does indeed challenge notions of free will, but that’s a subject for another post.
I have never really seen Joseph as a great deceiver because it seems to me that he really did believe that he was a prophet. My best guess is that Joseph did have a vision of the sort that he described in 1832, and that vision was of either mystical or biological origin. The story of the vision became increasingly embellished over time, as is the tendency for stories of supernatural events. It seems to me that the stories of Jesus are the same. It would make sense that there was a remarkable man named Jesus whose parentage was uncertain, and he taught great moral lessons, and after his death the stories of his life became increasingly embellished until they were written down, at least 40-ish years later, first by Mark, and then by others. I find it remarkable that Richard Bushman is able to remain a TBM in spite of what he knows about Mormon history, which is a whole lot more than I know. I don’t know if he has reached a higher echelon of spirituality and understands that the church is what it claims to be in spite of its historical and doctrinal problems or if he is simply failing to be fully intellectually honest. The LDS chemist Henry Eyring also seemed to be in this same position. My personal opinion on the different accounts of the First Vision is that if I was personally visited by God and Jesus, I would remember it in such exquisite detail that it would be impossible to tell the story of it any other way than the way in which it actually happened. Memory is linked to emotion, and the more emotional a situation, the clearer and more detailed the memory of it.
Brown, I’m glad to hear some things from relativity. In case everyone was wondering, the time dilation that Brown talked about is calculated by dividing the amount of time that has passed for the “stationary” observer by the Lorentz factor (represented by a lower-case gamma) which is one over the square root of one minus v squared over c squared, where v is the relative velocity between the two observers and c is the speed of light. For the astronauts’ case, another correction is necessary because the earth’s gravitational field is weaker at that altitude, which makes time pass faster for the astronauts, and the two time differences would be added together. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to show off the physics I’ve learned 🙂 Metaphysically, Brown, you make a good point in saying that we shouldn’t assume that the fundamental structure of an afterlife will be the same as life here. I watched a very funny segment of a stand-up comedy routine on youtube where the comedian made jokes about the ridiculousness of believing that we’d be doing the same things in heaven that we were doing on earth. I’m thinking that I probably agree with bc_pg that I wouldn’t want to live a human existence on earth for all of eternity, even it if was a good one. But if there is an afterlife, I have to hope that it would be fundamentally different from earth life in some ways, though we don’t have any information on what those differences would be (other than possibly NDE.)
I’m with wayfarer in thinking that Occam’s Razor is on the side of a mythical interpretation of the story of Jesus’ birth. Obviously, the story has been quite successful and arguably has value even if it does not describe historical events. The mythical origin is also simpler when we consider the story scientifically. I had a whole spiel about how Heavenly Father must have DNA with base pairs A, T, C, and G to be able to produce a child with a human, but I’ll spare you all of that 🙂 These responses are helpful. Yeah, I’m really not believing that the stories about Jesus’ birth (and about the nature of Jesus) are literally true anymore. It seems most likely to me that Jesus was a remarkable (probably Stage 6) human whose followers put him through a theosis. Or perhaps the Q source contained the sayings of several different people. As pointed out in the documentary “The God Who Wasn’t There,” Jesus fits the hero archetype that we see in other myths quite well. And he fits the archetype of the dying-resurrecting God and probably other archetypes. It’s true that the need for an atonement is diminished or negated if Jesus was not the literal Son of God. This fits my personal feelings (which I have always felt, even as a TBM) that I didn’t understand why I needed an Atonement to save me. A non-literal interpretation of the Christian story resolves a whole lot of problems for me.
Wayfarer, what I think I hear you saying is that God is the life-force that permeates the universe rather than an anthropomorphic deity. Your description of God is something like Yoda’s description of The Force to Luke Skywalker in the swamp at Degobah. It seems very Stage 5-ish, and rightly so. I’ve really given up on an anthropomorphic deity, though wiping my mind of it is still not fully accomplished. I still find myself getting angry at or about God and I keep having to remind myself that there’s no one to be angry at or about. I keep going through thought processes in my head to demonstrate that an anthropomorphic God is absurd, only to remind myself that I have already reached that conclusion. Quote:I’m sorry but that is not very reassuring to me when trying to justify the total costs the Church is currently asking for in terms of time, money, effort, etc.;
I’m going to be careful not to air too many grievances on this one. I’ve only recently realized that the Church has asked for nothing less than
my whole life,and until recently, I’ve given it to them. I’ve realized that it probably won’t do me much good to continue to give my whole life to an organization that doesn’t have answers to some age-old riddles about life and the divine. I’ve made some large sacrifices- probably some that I shouldn’t have made- to bring myself into mainstream Church cultural compliance. I’ve made the mistake of hiding some of my best talents because those talents are highly mistrusted in mainstream Church culture, and I’m just now gaining an understanding as to why. I think that the Church makes more promises in exchange for obedience than it really has the power to deliver on, which leaves people (such as myself) feeling confused and shortchanged. I suppose that anything further that I give to the Church, I can give with only the expectation of receiving whatever reward would naturally come from my actions. Rather than approach the Church on the Church’s terms and letting the Church own me, which is what I’ve done, I should be willing to contribute to the Church to the same degree that the Church is able to enrich my life and answer some hard questions. I agree that the Church demands a lot from individuals, and it doesn’t seem like a fair trade for such a demanding organization to answer “We don’t know” on many tough issues. The Church is what it is, and rather than criticize it, I need to approach Mormonism on my own terms. That’s the end of that rant 🙂
