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Tim wrote:
Can you imagine if all science was done this way? Start from a conclusion and go backwards, you dig and dig until you find a few scraps of obscure and weakly associated evidence that support your hypothesis, while ignoring the obvious and compelling evidence that is right there on the page!
Bad science but good apologetics. I think all he’s trying to do is show that, at a few important points, the evidence is partial and complicated, and therefore leaves “room for belief” that Joseph was a prophet. That’s how apologists put it, though I think the goal is even more modest than that: To create room for doubting that Joseph was absolutely a fraud. And it doesn’t take much to establish that seed of doubt. If you can establish that one cannot know 100% absolutely positively without doubt that Joseph was atotal fraud, mission accomplished. sundancegt wrote:Producer of the site is a professor within the BYU system.
The owner of the domain is listed as an e-mail address at byu.edu
Funding for the video probably came from the video department at BYU, and scripted by professors within BYU, or possibly within Fair, which again is paid out of BYU.
BYU is owned by whom?
I would consider this to be officially church sponsored, supported, backed, researched, produced, and endorsed.
No, Packard teaches film theory and produces his own films. I don’t know anything about the website, but the films are Packard’s own initiative. Even if he was able to get some support from various campus units, this is in no way a BYU production. If it was, it would says so. BYU doesn’t do stealth.church0333 wrote:DB, do you know who is the backing behind this? Is this officially church sponsored or private?
I’m guessing the site was put up by the producer of the videos, Prof. Dennis Packard of BYU’s Dept. of Philosophy.Quote:They are doubly offended, for you threaten their security and insult their judgement.
Perfectly stated. If anyone targets you with a religious test, it’s all but guaranteed that one of these two “offenses” stands behind it. And to many members, for me to simply say “I doubt” does both these things at once.First of all, congrats on not turning to drink and women! :thumbup: westfield1825 wrote:I do agree that the church is good in many ways, in fact in most ways. However I have always been the kind of person that it’s either true or it’s not. If it is true then I need to do the things that they say, as I know that the foundation is true, this is how I have lived up to this time. I also am the kind of person that does not do guilt.
You know, my TBM wife and I were just talking about this difference between us. She has never been an “it’s either true or it’s not” Mormon, because as a child she saw and experienced great contradiction in the church that revealed such a dichotomy to be impossible to maintain. She had both great and terrible experiences; she saw both truth and falsehood. She seems to have entered adulthood at a different place in Fowler’s stages of faith schema (Google it) than I did.I personally think (as do many others; again, see Fowler) that one of the main things that determines whether one stays or leaves after a faith transition is whether they can first get over the “it’s either true or it’s not” hump. Whether one is able to come to see the church in complex terms; that is, see the church not as “either/or,” but as “both/and.” I think you are even now doing that, given your statement here (it’s good “in most ways”), and are immediately facing another hump. Namely, one has to reject the church’s own claim that “it’s either true or it’s not” as a false dichotomy, which admittedly it vigorously advocates (for practical reasons), yet do this without rejecting the church itself. This may be behind some of your immediate concerns.
What are the practical reasons for insisting on either/or? I think another thread is discussing this right now, but one is simply boundary maintenance. If the church is both true and not in turns, right and wrong in turns, just like other churches, it weakens the us vs. them boundaries that literally define the “us.” If there is no us, there is no church. This drives much of our rhetoric re. religious truth. E.g., I can say there is much truth “in” another religion, and I just look enlightened and generous. But if I say of another religion that “much of it is true,” many Mormons would fidget or even give me a stinky eye. And if I say “much of it is true, just like Mormonism,” I get to talk with the bishop after church.
Is there really that much substantive difference between these three constructions? But it seems like a subtle and slippery slope. What church would want to argue it is merely as true, or even just more true, than other churches? No church does. That claim can be debated in ways a strict either/or claim cannot. Or at least, that’s how it appears to most people (not to me).
westfield1825 wrote:I guess I feel like a person sitting in a room with people that are still trying to say the earth is flat, and pointing to things that seem to prove their point. . . . I feel like the person that was on that ship and now knows the world is not flat, but also knows if he says something everyone will say I am a trouble maker.
Remember, everyone in that room but you may very well see the church in strictly either/or terms. And frankly, even you may be doing the same thing. Even though you are considering more possibilities, you may still be assuming only one of them can be correct. The earth is of course both flatandcurved, depending on your method and standards of assessment. In other words, it’s complicated. And so is the church. Yes, this article is easy to pick on. My own list of “evil acts” that are destroying civilization goes well beyond those found in For the Strength of Youth. But can you imagine how terrible it would be to have to dispense timeless and universal truth from the highest perch of a criticism-free zone? You’re drinking your own Kool-Aid at every meal. Unless your wife happens to read it and say, “Dallin, dear, I think you’re off your game here,” everyone else will just hold their breath and smile. Especially to an apostle who has taken some serious licks on this issue and is standing his ground. I think I’m being only slightly hyperbolic. I’ve seen somewhat up close the stupefying effects of Q15 star power. Listen, this article is in deep theological fertilizer from the very title: “Balancing Truth and Tolerance.” He defines truth here, of course, as “absolute truth.” Any talk of balancing absolute truth against tolerance is necessarily nonsense. Absolute truth trumps everything. Every. Single. Thing. Not just tolerance for nose piercing and bare shoulders. Let your mind run wild. There is nowhere to go with this.
Which reminds me of Garry Wills’ great column yesterday on the papal abdication. It contains a substantial meditation on the impossible constraints imposed by the dogma of infallibility, which is just one construction of religious claims to absolute truth:
Quote:In 1870, [Pope Pius IX] elicited — from a Vatican council he called and controlled — the first formal declaration that a pope is infallible. From that point on, even when he was not making technically infallible statements, the pope was thought to be dealing in eternal truths. A gift for eternal truths is as dangerous as the gift of Midas’s touch. The pope cannot undo the eternal truths he has proclaimed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/13/opinion/new-pope-ive-given-up-hope.html?_r=1& ” class=”bbcode_url”> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/13/opinion/new-pope-ive-given-up-hope.html?_r=1& Well worth reading on from there, as he illustrates how this can be particularized. Our church’s own construction of absolute truth is no less ossifying. Continuing revelation can only extend absolute truth in a non-contradictory way, necessarily. More directly to the point here, tolerance is openness to the possibility that your apprehension of the truth in conflict is flawed, or the truth itself is relative, partial, contingent, etc. I think any definition of tolerance that is less than this is just water for tea. It’s mere nose-holding, or submission to practical constraints, or an attempt at politeness. Tolerance is not just empathy, friendliness, right to free speech, etc.; they are their own things; and his distinction between belief and behavior is totally opaque to me.
Absolute truth precludes tolerance in any meaningful social sense, however much cultural pressure we may feel to practice it. Fortunately, most of us draw a very tight circle around absolute truth. For most of us it does not include pagan painting of body parts, bad words, etc. We understand that to proclaim something absolute truth is to drop an H-bomb on everything beneath it.
Sorry to go on so long. I just think this is a Triple-Whopper-with-Cheese of a theological problem.
It’s no party being any of us, and I totally feel you, brother, so don’t take this the wrong way. And maybe I am trying to pull too much out of your very savvy post. But I have to say that as spiritual misfits go, you seem to be in really great shape. You are young, bright, articulate, and amazingly self aware. Compared to my neurotic self, you appear a model of emotional health. You have all the marks of a true seeker. Your wife supports you and already, it seems, you intuit that this struggle is really just the journey of life. I’m dead jealous that I was not you at 30. I am wont to see all this as a journey of discovery. The doubt and uncertainty we experience, in any sphere of our lives, is just the necessary corollary to imagination, openness, and the very capacity for discovery. Would you give up the latter to eliminate the former? This isn’t just pointless suffering, this is transformative suffering. I’ll hazard you are a wiser Matt today than even one month ago, and very much in nontrivial ways. I’m not dismissing the difficulty and pain of it, but this world and this church needs more wise people. I am so very, very glad you are one of us. Thanks for daring to ask these questions, and for daring to surrender simple answers for ones both complicated and obscure. Dang it, I wish you were my home teacher.
Life_Journey_of_Matt wrote:
I don’t want to sound like I’m blaming the church for everything. In the end my spirituality is my responsibility, so the buck stops here.
I think owning our spirituality is the key to reconciling with the church, because then we completely own the church in our life. Too often I still feel like the church owns me. I don’t want to trivialize the trauma many of us have experienced in the church, but too often that is a result of resisting spiritual yearnings that are leading us down other paths. We blame the church for our own unhealthy attachments to it. I think I now own about 80% of my spirituality, but I’ll know I own it completely when I can say, “I don’t blame the church for anything.”westfield1825 wrote:I have a friend that I mentioned that I was having doubts, and I could see his mind just close off. I really just want to discuss this with others, so I can have a rational discussion.
Many people find expressions of doubt highly threatening. It’s as if when you express doubt about something they have faith in, even just in reference to yourself, you are challenging their faith. Hackles quickly rise. It’s a little hard to explain, but you’ve already experienced it. So yeah, save your hard questions for groups like this.
I’m so glad you’re reaching out here. You’ll get a lot of virtual hugs, whether you want them or not, so I hope you don’t have virtual space issues. If you feel like you’re bottoming out, well, you just might be. And that’s good news. That means it gets better from here. I don’t know the exact path forward for you, but I suggest you approach any major real-life decisions very slowly. I understand very well the need the spill it all to those close to you or, especially, to just run away. In fight or flight situations, I almost always choose flight. That hasn’t usually improved things. There is a healthy middle way between fight or flight. It takes patience, charity, and courage to navigate it, but a lot of us here are doing just that and are regularly surprised by the peace and joy of it. Right now you are feeling spiritual vertigo. You’re emptying your vessel. But over time you’ll fill it back up, and this will all seem more like a journey than a catastrophe.
In the mean time, this is a safe place to question and vent. Go wild.
This is great advice that I can’t really improve on, but I’ll share a few things that I’ve learned about myself that have helped me manage the boomerang effect. I suffer from anxiety in contexts unrelated to church, too, and I’m slowly learning to manage it. My approach is tried and true. It’s basically summed up in something found in every 12 steps program: the Serenity Prayer. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
The courage bit, for me, is managing anxiety triggers where I can. For example, I find certain church contexts very challenging, like adult classes. So I’ve asked for a calling that removes me from those contexts into something more positive (Primary). I also find ward parties challenging, stake conference, etc., so I just don’t attend. I make no excuses. I do as much as I can healthily do. But asking for special consideration or contradicting expectations takes courage.
But some things just require serenity. Since it’s important to me to be temple worthy, I attend Sacr Mtg even on Fast Sunday, which can be a real gut-clencher. I always remind myself that don’t have to be there; it’s my choice. But it gives me a chance to practice letting go of my anxiety. I ignore the speakers and practice my zen. That may not be the intended blessing for such meetings, but I’ll take it. It makes me a better person, which is exactly what church is supposed to do.
I suppose the wisdom bit figures in there somewhere, but honestly, armed with courage and serenity, I think it can be dispensed with. Thank goodness. Courage and serenity are acts of will, but wisdom comes only with time and experience. And I’d rather not just wait around for it to arrive.
Submar wrote:Throughout this experience I feel like my relationship with my Heavenly Father has actually gotten better. I have poured out my soul to him, because he’s the only one I’ve been able to turn to. By combining prayer and faith with reason and intellect, I have received subsequent personal manifestations that have been just as undeniable as my Book of Mormon experience. If I were to share these spiritual experiences with a TBM, he or she would most likely tell me that Satan is deceiving me.
So either the church’s promise of the manifestation of the Holy Ghost has backfired on itself in my case, or there is a more general way to interpret/reconcile each of these spiritual experiences, or Satan really has deceived me. But how can Satan have a hold of me if I have never felt closer to my Heavenly Father?
Welcome! As you know, many of us here have had precisely this same experience. I say, own it completely. But also toss out the “Is Satan deceiving me” question completely. Maybe Satan is trying to deceive you by causing you to wonder whether God’s revelation to you is a satanic deception. Honestly, this kind of self-doubt is endlessly circular. You are clearly trying to do the right thing. God is not a schmuck. He does not play head games with us. He is not messing with you. This is just what growth and progress sometimes feels like.
(Apologies for the assertive tone. Just one person’s opinion.)
I remember 20 years ago, when interacting for the first time in my life with people of other faiths, how cool it felt to be a Mormon. Belonging to this booming church, our missionaries sweeping in masses of new members from across the globe, while my Protestant and Catholic friends belonged to once-dominant faiths now in serious decline. Killed by too much modernism (Protestants) or too much conservatism (Catholics). Sure, a core of the faithful still believed, their faith fueled by their heritage, however poorly the present compared to it. Or if they didn’t much believe, at least many felt strong social and familial ties, bordering on ethnicity, that kept them in. But that seemed to me weak tea. Now I’m feeling more humble and my religion seems less different. I’m not saying our best days are behind us, but I regard that as at least a possibility. I’m much more certain that the days of our innocence are behind us, and that the future shape of the church is unguessable. And I find that really, really exciting. I say, bring on the change, you internets!
littlelostsheep wrote:Having established everything I don’t believe it’s time to discover what I do believe. The world suddenly seems a much larger place with so much new knowledge to acquire now that I’m not tied only to the Mormon way of thinking. My journey suddenly seems quite exciting.
I’m so glad I checked in today and read your post. I feel your sadness, but even more, I feel your excitement. It
isan exciting journey and you have a whole lot of us traveling with you. Now go rent Baraka! I’m new myself, but my sense is you’ll find much support here, though probably few quick fixes or clear answers. Though I also expect, like most of us, you may transcend the need for clear answers, and find out that simply embracing the intractable complexity and mystery of life is a big part of the fix. And I personally prefer the sense of wonder and openness to possibility I now enjoy over my old certitudes. As hard as it’s been, I’d never go back. But that transition can be very challenging to ourselves and others. Even coming out the other side of it a better and happier person can present a challenge to others, since it threatens their own certitudes and paradigms. However much we’re suffering, and need the understanding of others, this demands of us much charity and patience. I’ve wrestled with ideas, wrestled mightily, don’t get me wrong. But you’ll push through that. I don’t think it will be the constant struggle you imagine. Many of us find rather that negotiating our personal and church relationships is the real and persistent challenge. But you’ll find reserves of charity you didn’t know you had, and seeing that, others will reciprocate. And when that fails and you’re pulling your hair out, well, you have us to commiserate with. It took me about 18 years of marriage before I was able to tell my wife I was not a believer, and in fact, had not believed for many, many years. I’d just been silently suffering and more or less living a lie. She said, “I already know that. But I’m glad we can finally talk about it.” And that’s made all the difference ever since. So in a crucial respect you’re working through this 18 years faster than I did. This may be a challenge for you guys as a couple right now, but many of us find to our surprise that in our marriages, our differences in faith is not the fatal issue we fear it will be. Mrs. Sam (progressive but TBM) and myself (struggling middle wayer) fight more about who has to take out the garbage than anything related to church. In fact, the church is never a source a friction, even when I just can’t bring myself to go and she has to cover my church class. We may not be typical, but just sayin’.
