Category Archives: Belief systems

LDS bishop tackles truth, Evangelical Christianity

Belief systems, Humor, Main, World Religions

From a posted news item:

Today, many people generally view Evangelical Christians as a people with strong family values and clean living, according to the bishop of the McLean 3rd Ward (Latter-day Saint). Some also believe they are just one of many Christian denominations.

But that view is the result of a multibillion dollar campaign over the last couple of decades by Evangelical Christians who have attempted to present themselves in such a way, according to Bishop Todd Phillips of the McLean 3rd Ward.

Many Americans, including Christians, see Evangelical Christians as “just another branch of Christianity who talk about Jesus all the time and likely do a better job at adhering to family values than most Christian do in churches in America,” Phillips told hundreds attending service on Sunday.

That perspective, however, is in stark contrast to just 50 years ago, when Evangelicals were seen as “conservative, backward religious zealots who didn’t dance or drink, and lived in the South, intermarrying, handling snakes and doing tent revivals,” Phillips said.

“They were also marked by many as extreme right-wingers out to destroy even the concept of political, religious and social tolerance.”

They were perceived by Catholics and most Protestants as a fringe Christian denomination at best and a cult at worst, he noted.

As part of a seven-week series of talks during Sacrament meeting, Phillips was attempting to answer the question of whether Evangelical Christianty and biblical Christianity are the same.

Oh, wait! That’s not what the news item said at all! ..bruce..

The nine billion blessings on the food

Belief systems, Humor, LDS Doctrine, LDS Society, Main, Technology, World Religions

A common discussion among Latter-day Saints (and among many other Christians as well as believers in other faiths) is the all-too-easy tendency for prayer to devolve into mechanical recitation as opposed to, well, talking with God. That’s why this website (hat tip to Futurismic) caught my attention:

Information Age Prayer is a subscription service utilizing a computer with text-to-speech capability to incant your prayers each day. It gives you the satisfaction of knowing that your prayers will always be said even if you wake up late, or forget.

We use state of the art text to speech synthesizers to voice each prayer at a volume and speed equivalent to typical person praying. Each prayer is voiced individually, with the name of the subscriber displayed on screen.

The website is well done, if a bit home-grown looking, and fairly complete. It let me go through the entire process of buying a one-time prayer and paying via Paypal (and, yes, I got the payment confirmation e-mail from Paypal), so it’s not (entirely) a joke. And for all I know, they may well have one or more computers set up with voice synthesizers.

Many of you will of course be reminded of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous short story, “The Nine Billion Names of God”, though the stated intent here is merely petitionary prayers, not bringing about the end of creation. They have sections for specific religions: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and Unaffiliated, with corresponding prayers and “special package deals” (no, really).

They don’t have “Mormon” or “Latter-day Saints” on the list of religions, and when I clicked on the “Other Religions” button, a page came up with this wonderful headline: “We apologize but other religions are not yet supported.” What is both funny and a bit sad is that I suspect most of us could come up with a standard template for LDS morning and evening prayers, as well as blessings on the food.

So here’s the questions/challenge for all of us: what distinguishes our prayers (personal and family) from those that could be set up and recited by a computer?  ..bruce..

Some thoughts from a Catholic as well

Belief systems, Current events, LDS Organization, LDS Society, Main, World Religions

E. D. Kain at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen has also taken note of Michael’s Spencer’s prediction of the collapse of Evangelical Christianity and added some thoughs of his own from a Catholic point of view:

Now my personal take is that the disintegration of the highly political evangelical movement which Andrew [Sullivan] identifies as Christianist would be overall a very good thing. But if Evangelicals drift over into the Catholic Church I do think there is cause for concern.  I think one thing the Church absolutely does not need is a large population of biblical literalists and fundamentalists swelling its ranks.  The problem with protestantism in general, to my mind, is its lack of mooring in history and tradition, something that really forms the foundation of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches.

What the Catholic Church does need is a Vatican III.  What could help save Catholicism, which I think in the long run stands a better chance of survival than evangelical or even mainline protestant churches, is a reform in its priesthood.  It’s time to allow priests to marry.  This prohibition on marriage in the priesthood is foolhardy, and one of the major stumbling blocks not only in recruiting new priests, but in winning back public trust of the Church itself.  Beyond that, the Church needs more transparency.  I think there is a case to be made against total transparency, but with all the scandals that have beset the Church in the past few decades, from child molestation to cover-ups, the only way to quell the slow uproar over these seemingly never-ending revelations of deceit is to open up.  Let us see what’s going on behind the veil of obsfucation.  The wrong thing to do would be to take the Church away from Vatican II reforms.  The right thing to do would be to move toward a relevant Vatican III.

Of course, what neither Spencer nor Kain address is what happens if some significant percentage of those Evangelicals move into the LDS Church (as opposed to the Catholic or Orthodox Churches).  ..bruce..

[UPDATE: Here’s a post to discuss possible futures of the LDS Church, particularly in America.]

Study: religion correlates with greater self-control

Belief systems, LDS Doctrine, Main, World Religions

An interesting article in the New York Times on New Year’s resolutions discusses the role of religion:

[Dr. Michael McCullough’s] professional interest arose from a desire to understand why religion evolved and why it seems to help so many people. Researchers around the world have repeatedly found that devoutly religious people tend to do better in school, live longer, have more satisfying marriages and be generally happier.

These results have been ascribed to the rules imposed on believers and to the social support they receive from fellow worshipers, but these external factors didn’t account for all the benefits. In the new paper, the Miami psychologists surveyed the literature to test the proposition that religion gives people internal strength.

“We simply asked if there was good evidence that people who are more religious have more self-control,” Dr. McCullough. “For a long time it wasn’t cool for social scientists to study religion, but some researchers were quietly chugging along for decades. When you add it all up, it turns out there are remarkably consistent findings that religiosity correlates with higher self-control.”

As early as the 1920s, researchers found that students who spent more time in Sunday school did better at laboratory tests measuring their self-discipline. Subsequent studies showed that religiously devout children were rated relatively low in impulsiveness by both parents and teachers, and that religiosity repeatedly correlated with higher self-control among adults. Devout people were found to be more likely than others to wear seat belts, go to the dentist and take vitamins.

But which came first, the religious devotion or the self-control? It takes self-discipline to sit through Sunday school or services at a temple or mosque, so people who start out with low self-control are presumably less likely to keep attending. But even after taking that self-selection bias into account, Dr. McCullough said there is still reason to believe that religion has a strong influence.

Read the whole thing. The self-selection issue is an interesting one and has some theological implications (“we will prove them herewith”); it also ties into enduring to the end. On the other hand, we believe that Christ’s atonement gave Him the power not just to forgive us but to change our very natures — to make us better than we are. I think our start is quite simple — “God, be merciful to me, a sinner” — but we have to follow where the Lord leads us.  ..bruce..

Utah prophet predicts nuclear holocaust

Belief systems, Current events, Main, Preparedness, The Last Days, World Religions

No, no, it’s not an over-the-pulpit First Presidency letter that you somehow missed or yet another rumored fast & testimony meeting talk. The prophet in this case is Leland Freeborn of Parowan, Utah, as reported by the LA Times:

Reporting from Parowan, Utah — Our trip to the Parowan Prophet began with a letter to the St. George Spectrum. It was set among missives proposing that oil companies bail out Detroit automakers, that county inmates be forced to winter in tents, that lawyers be barred from public office. A rough crowd.

This particular letter to the editor in the St. George, Utah, newspaper carried the headline ” ‘Prophet’ shares grim forecast,” and it was signed by one Leland Freeborn of Parowan, who wrote that he was known to many as the Parowan Prophet.

After establishing his bona fides as an international talk radio guest and proprietor of a survivalist website that has “passed more than 100,000 hits,” Freeborn wrote:

“I think that you should hear what my opinion about the Obama election is: that he will not be the next president. I said on my home page in August that if he lost to expect to see the ‘riots’ that 2 Peter 2:13 tells us about. He didn’t lose. But the story is not finished yet. I still think they may begin the riots before Christmas 2008, as I said.”

These riots, according to his prophecy, will encourage the “old, hard-line Soviet guard” to seize the moment and rain down nukes on the United States, killing at least 100 million of us.

“Prepare now,” Freeborn’s letter concluded. “We are downwind from Las Vegas. I hope you can survive.”

Here’s Freeborn’s letter, along with several others that make for interesting reading as well. Ah, those wacky Southern Utahns! Hat tip to the Drudge Report.  ..bruce..

Let’s hear it for atheists!

Belief systems, Current events, Main, Politics, World Religions

No, really. Over in England, where the government has been drifting slowly towards a de facto Sharia law, a group of atheists has started a cheeky public ad campaign, stating that there probably is no God:

The sides of some of London’s red buses will soon carry ads asserting there is “probably no God,” as nonbelievers fight what they say is the preferential treatment given to religion in British society.

Organizers of a campaign to raise funds for the ads said Wednesday they received more than $113,000 in donations, almost seven times their target, in the hours since they launched the project on a charity Web site. Supporters include Oxford University biologist Richard Dawkins, who donated $9,000.

The money will be used to place posters on 30 buses carrying the slogan “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” The plan was to run the ads for four weeks starting in January, but so much money has been raised that the project may be expanded.

In a global climate where Mozart concerts are cancelled, novels are pulled from shelves, and video games are recalled over fear of offending Muslims, it’s nice to see a group exercising free speech — what of it remains in England.

The REPO Atlas: the Jaredites (part 1)

Belief systems, Book of Mormon, Main, Politics, REPO

[Here is an introduction to the REPO postings. Also I’ve made a few updates below.]

It’s hard to mine any detailed information about the Jaredites out of the book of Ether itself. What we have is Joseph Smith’s translation of Moroni’s highly selective and condensed abridgment of his (or Mosiah[2]’s) translation of Ether’s very condensed (“twenty-four gold plates“) and late summary of somewhere from 2000 to over 3000 years of Jaredite history. Outside of the brother of Jared’s theophany of the premortal Messiah, and the occasional speculation on just how those barges were built, most of our quotes from the book of Ether tend to come from Moroni’s commentary rather than anything the Jaredites did or said.

Ether becomes a bit more interesting, however, when we ask ourselves just how the Jaredite civilization(s) splintered, interacted (usually by fighting), and re-merged, and what kind of religious behavior and institutions existed. It’s particularly interesting to note how different the Jaredite narrative reads from the Lehite narrative in both political and religious aspects.

Continue reading The REPO Atlas: the Jaredites (part 1) →

The Book of Mormon REPO postings: an introduction

Belief systems, Book of Mormon, Politics, REPO

“The first rule of historical criticism in dealing with the Book of Mormon or any other ancient text is, never oversimplify. For all its simple and straightforward narrative style, this history is packed as few others are with a staggering wealth of detail that completely escapes the casual reader. The whole Book of Mormon is a condensation, and a masterly one; it will take years simply to unravel the thousands of cunning inferences and implications that are wound around its most matter-of-fact statements. Only laziness and vanity lead the student to the early conviction that he has the final answers on what the Book of Mormon contains.”

– Hugh Nibley, 1952 (The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Vol. 5: Lehi in the Desert / The World of the Jaredites / There Were Jaredites [Deseret Book/FARMS, 1988] p. 237.)

Some months back, I had a lengthy back-and-forth discussion in the comments to a posting I made over at Mormon Mentality. The starting point was Dan (of The Good Democrat) taking issue with a comment I made about the Book of Mormon’s applicability to current world situations. Dan’s contention (see comment #8) was that the Book of Mormon dealt strictly with a bipolar situation (Nephites v. Lamanite), which had little bearing on today’s multi-polar world. I strongly disagreed with Dan’s bipolar characterization of the religious-political situation described in the Book of Mormon and expressed my opinion that a careful reading showed a very complex, multipolar situation instead.  The argument went back and forth for several postings, with neither of us convincing the other.

However, it did trigger my desire to do a series of postings discussing the religious-political (REPO) “atlas” (if you will) of the Book of Mormon. I’m not breaking any new ground with this; real Book of Mormon scholars (starting, as always, with Nibley) have been doing this for years.

But I think it’s worth taking the time to see what the Book of Mormon has to say about the very complex religious and political elements of the peoples it discusses. As Nibley and others have noted, the Book of Mormon record is far from simple or simplistic. We tend to read it that way because Nephi and Mormon — who account for the vast majority of the Book of Mormon text — both followed the theme of the ultimately doomed Nephites vs. the ultimately redeemed Lamanites.  (See this article by Steven L. Olsen for an interesting discussion on whether Mormon consciously patterned his abridgment of Nephite records after Nephi’s small-plates writing.) But in spite of that, the Book of Mormon text itself reveals and suggests a far more complex religious, political, and social milieu. The goal of these postings will be to point out some of that.

Some of my observations may be original, but I tend to doubt it. 🙂 I own and have read over three dozen volumes dealing with the Book of Mormon; I also have read just about every issue of the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies. Most of my insights are likely ones that I have gained elsewhere. Where I can and am willing to dig back in, I will offer specific cites (such as the Olsen article above), but my intent at this point is not a scholarly work; it is merely to suggest complexities that may be easily overlooked in a normal reading of the Book of Mormon.

I’m going to start with the Jaredites for three reasons. First, they predate the Lehite arrival and set up a context for it. It’s pretty clear that there were Jaredite/Lehite interactions well before Coriantumr staggered into Zarahemla, given some 400 years of geographical coexistence and the occasional Jaradite name showing up in Lehite circumstances. Second, the Jaredites represent something unique in the scriptural canon: God’s dealings over a few thousand years with a post-deluvian, pre-Abrahamic (and pre-Melchizedek) people.  Third, we (as members and even as LDS scholars) really tend to ignore the Jaredites, so it’s good for them to get a little more attention.

Now to go write that Jaredite posting.  ..bruce..

BYU Honors Program reading list (mid-1970s)

Belief systems, BYU, LDS Society, Main

It is, of course, fashionable to mock BYU as somehow being parochial or backwards, even (especially!) among the Bloggernacle. Having attended BYU in the 1970s and taught there in the 1980s, I don’t really buy that. BYU students as a body have more real-world exposure to international culture, language and politics — not to mention genuine third-world poverty — than any other major US university. Also, as I have written here before, my freshman Honors English class was actually “composition and reasoning”, and we had to learn to construct and defend a logical argument, a skill sadly lacking in current public discourse, especially in academia and politics (and, frankly, religion).

Scrounging through my files after an e-mail exchange on reading lists with a good friend (hi, Linsey!), I ran across an “HONORS PROGRAM RECOMMENDED READING LIST” from my undergraduate years (1971-72, 74-78). I don’t know exactly when this was compiled; some analysis of the articles cited might establish a “no earlier than” date. But I had this before I graduated in 1978, since I didn’t have a lot of interaction with the Honors Program during my two years of teaching at BYU (1985-87; I was an instructor in the Computer Science department).

So, here’s what the Honors Program recommended back in the 1970s that we as undergraduates read. I’ve reformatted it a bit (and corrected a few typos, though probably introduced a few of my own; this was most likely typed upon on a typewriter on a mimeograph stencil), but the overall structure is still the same. Note that the original takes up seven pages, two columns per page. I’ve put in a few notes in italics and brackets. The list itself contains occasional duplications (e.g., Captial/Das Kapital by Karl Marx shows up in two different places); I’ve left those intact.

Given that this list was complied 30 years ago, what would you add or drop? What entries surprise you the most? [UPDATE: Here is the current BYU Honors “Great Works” list.]

Continue reading BYU Honors Program reading list (mid-1970s) →

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

Belief systems, Current events, Main, The Last Days

[crossposted from And Still I Persist]

Jerry Pournelle over at his blog has linked to the Rudyard Kipling classic. Written nearly 90 years ago, it is remarkably apt right now, as our financial system threatens to melt down over human greed and stupidity:

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place;
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.“

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four—
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man—
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:—
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will bum,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Amen and amen. (Here’s a though: correlate this poem with the Book of Mormon.)  ..bruce w..

P.S. “Copybook headings”: classic proverbs and wise quotes printed at the top of each page of blank school booklets (copybooks) used for essays and handwriting practice.