Found this photo while using StumbleUpon:
The site where I found the photo is here. ..bruce..
[UPDATED 09-07-1999 0906 CDT — the photo at the site when away for a while; it’s back now, so I grabbed a copy to save locally.]
Category Archives: Main
Mormons and the Vietnam-Era Draft
I see that the Boston Globe, as part of their campaign against Mitt Romney, is trying to paint a sinister portrait of the LDS Church working “hand-in-hand” with the Selective Service Board on draft deferments for LDS young men serving full-time missions during the Vietnam era.
What a load of hooey.
Not that the deferments didn’t happen; they did. I should know: I had one. My draft number (in the 1972 spring draft) was 4, an absolute guarantee that I would be drafted after my 2-year (fixed-term) mission was over. The only person on my dorm floor with a draft number under 100 was Glade Roper (now a judge in Texas), who spent the next few weeks calling me “Sarge”. I made my plans to enlist in the Navy when I came back, since I would no longer have a ministerial deferment at that point. As it turned out, I didn’t have to; the draft ended several months before I returned from Central America.
But this is why the Boston Globe story is a load of hooey: during the Vietnam Era, Mormons were almost certainly over-represented in the US Armed Forces. At a time when many universities were banning or discouraging military recruiters and eliminating their ROTC programs, BYU welcomed all such recruiters and had large and active Army and Air Force ROTC programs. Likewise, anti-war protests during the Vietnam Era were relatively rare and small at BYU. US-based Mormons as a rule were at this time fiercely patriotic, pro-military, and generally anti-Communist; they probably questioned the Vietnam War less than any other major religious group in the US, even when the LDS leaders themselves had long-standing concerns and issues.
By and large, Mormons were not draft-dodgers; instead they were volunteers. Yes, ministerial deferments were available for the standard two-year period of serving a mission, but many LDS young men turned around after those two years and either enlisted or were drafted. In fact, the only person I personally knew of who died in Vietnam was Paul Rose, the older brother of an LDS acquaintance in a neighboring ward (LDS congregation) in La Mesa, California.
I know nothing of Mitt Romney’s personal history with the draft and military service; as I’ve noted before, he’s not my choice for President, and I feel no particular need to defend him. But the Boston Globe’s insinuation that Latter-day Saints were collectively a bunch of draft dodgers is just silly. ..bruce..
A few observations on LDS temples
I received a very thoughtful and civil e-mail from a reader of this blog, who told of his own brief experiences investigating the LDS Church and in particular of some issues he had with the concepts of temples, temple recommends, and temple ceremonies — and how restrictive and exclusionary LDS practices and doctrine regarding the temple appeared to be. He was somewhat encouraged by my posting on “Who gets saved?” but still had additional questions. I wrote him an e-mail reply late last night; I’m going to use a slightly edited and extended version of my response for this post.
The temples detailed in the Bible (Moses’s Tabernacle, Solomon’s Temple, and what is generally called Herod’s Temple [New Testament era]) all had restrictions on who could enter where and when — and restrictions far more strict than the LDS Church has for its temples. Let me focus on Herod’s Temple for now.
Mormonism and Democratic Politics: Are They Compatible?
Richard Bushman is probably the great LDS historian of our generation, much as Leonard Arrington was of his. Under the auspices of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, Bushman sat down with a group of journalists to try to explain, from a historical perspective, LDS interaction with society and politics. His comments, as always, are insightful, informed, and honest. A sample:
Joseph Smith was nominated as a protest candidate in February of 1844. Like other protest candidates, he began to warm to his work and got quite excited about it. He may have dreamed for a moment that through some strange concatenation of events, he would get elected. Every candidate has to dream such things.
His involvement in politics was manifested in a political platform of which he was very proud. He would bring it out whenever he had visitors and read from it. It is an interesting document because it represents a man whose world had been his own people, whose own project had been to create a kingdom of God, and who now had to turn his mind to politics.
He began by citing the Declaration of Independence, the famous passages about all men being equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, which of course could be a lead-in to religious rights. But he didn’t use it that way. Instead, in the very next sentence, he talked about the obvious contradiction: “Some two or three million people are held as slaves for life because the spirit in them is covered with a darker skin than ours.” His platform called for the elimination of slavery, proposing that the funds from the sale of Western lands, a major source of revenue along with the tariff in those days, be devoted to purchasing slaves from their masters in order to avoid the conflict that would otherwise ensue.
Josiah Quincy, soon to be mayor of Boston, visited Joseph Smith in the spring of 1844 when this platform was in circulation. Much later, Quincy wrote about that visit, saying that Joseph Smith’s proposal for ending slavery resembled one that Emerson made 11 years later in 1855.
As Quincy put it, writing retrospectively in the 1880s, “We, who can look back upon the terrible cost of the fratricidal war which put an end to slavery, now say that such a solution of the difficulty” – Joseph Smith’s and Emerson’s – “would have been worthy a Christian statesman. But if the retired scholar was in advance of his time when he advocated this disposition of the public property in 1855, what shall I say of the political and religious leader who had committed himself, in print, as well as in conversation, to the same course in 1844?”
I cite this example to illustrate the radical tone of Joseph Smith’s political thought, which seemed to carry over from his religious radicalism. It extended to prison reform and better treatment of seamen, big issues in the 1840s and 1850s. Smith seemed to identify with all of the underdogs in society. I think that was why he thought he might get elected – because the little people, the beat-up people, would rise and select him.
Read the whole thing. Hat tip to Meridian Magazine. ..bruce..
Top 10 Reasons Why Mormons Should Vote for Mitt Romney
[Inside joke alert — and weak joke/pun alert — most of these will only be funny to a Mormon, and not always then.]
My wife just forwarded this from an e-mail making the rounds in LDS circles:
Top 10 Reasons to vote for Mitt Romney
10. We can do away with these dumb secret ballots and manifest our support
of the candidate “by the usual sign.” And we can get rid of costly
recounts by simply saying “opposed, if there be any.”
9. The Secret Service could be renamed the Sacred Service and would have
dark suits, sunglasses, ear pieces, and CTR rings.
8. The vice president could be replaced by two counselors
7. At inaugural balls, everyone would have to dance a Book of Mormon
apart.
6. NASA could commission a satellite to “hie to Kolob.”
5. All official government prayers could include the phrase “that we all
can get home safely.”
4. The President could not only explain things in Layman’s terms, but also
Lemuel’s terms.
3. At his inauguration he would swear on the Bible “as far as it is
translated correctly.”
2. All foreign policy statements would begin with “We Believe.”.
1. The presidential limo would be a black Suburban with a vanity plate:
“RULDS2?”
[Giuliani is still my candidate, though Fred Thompson looks pretty good, too. ..bruce..]
Some thoughts on higher dimensional realms
[UPDATED 02/27/08: I was startled today to find that Jeff Lindsay has written a poem, “Flatland“, inspired in part by this paper. And a wonderful poem it is; go read it.]
I have a half-finished post on the nature of eternity, but I realized that I really need to address some foundational issues with regard to it. And since I co-authored a paper on the subject (“Some thoughts on higher-dimensional realms”, Robert P. Burton and Bruce F. Webster, BYU Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Spring 1980), p. 281 ff.) nearly 30 years ago, I thought I’d simply repost the paper, both in PDF format (as transcribed — not scanned — by BYU Studies) and as text that you can read here.
The gist of the paper is that there is evidence in the scriptures as well as in LDS sources (historical and doctrinal) that there are macroscopic physical dimensions outside of the 3D+time continuum in which we appear to reside. I did this as a University Scholar project my senior year (1977-78) at Brigham Young University; it was the first published writing I ever did (though certainly not the last), and so it’s a bit more awkward and stilted than I would write today. But it still brings together the sources that led me to this conclusion three decades ago, and my studies since then have only reinforced them.
The article itself appears after the jump. I have inserted some comments within brackets ([…]) when appropriate. Footnotes are also indicated with brackets ([1], etc.) and are given at the end of the article. Finally, I have noticed some typographical errors in the PDF transcription of the article (there are sadly quite a few) and have corrected these silently.
Beardless in Gaza
OK, so my progress on the Trek (1305 miles) hasn’t gone as well in May as it did in April. I should be at around 440 miles by now, and I’m just under 300 miles. If I had a broader readership here, the public humiliation might have been sufficient to get me out on the road more, but so far that hasn’t worked.
So I shaved my beard off.
You have to understand that I’ve had a beard for most of my adult (post-college) life. I started growing my first beard during my last week at BYU (easy to do, since I was sleeping on my desk in my TA office while trying to finish my operating systems implementation project). The beard came and went a bit in my earlier years and, of course, disappeared altogether during my two years of teaching back at BYU (1985-87). But it has been a pretty constant fixture since then, which is to say for the last 20 years, including through two stints as a counselor in a bishopric and several stints as a stake missionary/ward mission leader.
I’ve kept the beard because (a) shaving is a pain, (b) Sandra (my sweet wife) really likes it, and (c) most people agree that I look better with one. Heck, the last time I shaved it off — several years back, while we were living in Washington DC — the Washington DC North Mission president even commented on it, not to praise me, but to say that I “just didn’t look quite the same” without it. Oh, and our dog Deacon barked at me for a minute or so when he first saw me without it, until I convinced him it was still me.
So the beard is gone until I complete the 1305 miles (plus a few other long-procrastinated goals), and I’m now reminded each morning why I liked it in the first place. Of course, the same day I shaved it off, I also stubbed my ‘ring’ toe on my left foot badly, almost certainly breaking it — there’s still discoloration five days later — so it’s not like I’ve leapt back into the walking circuit. But soon, I promise. ..bruce..
No, I haven’t died…
…I’ve just been busy for the past week. I actually have at least one post in incomplete draft form; I may tackle something else first. The challenge with discussing LDS cosmology and related doctrine is that it’s hard to pull one particular topic out of context and discuss it in isolation. I’ll try to get something up by tomorrow (i.e., later today, Wednesday). I did, however, write a lengthy response to a comment on my post about education and intellect.
In the meantime, let me recommend one of the books I’m currently reading: Muhammad, Prophet of God by Daniel C. Peterson (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, MI, 2007). I’m impressed with both the style and content of the book — accessible and yet very informative. Peterson heads up the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative (METI) at Brigham Young University, a joint effort with the University of Chicago Press to provide clear, modern, scholarly translations of classic medieval Islamic, Eastern Christian, and Jewish texts.
I can also recommend Black and Mormon, edited by Newell G. Bringhurst and Darron T. Smith (University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL, 2006), which I just finished a few days ago. This is an outstanding, if occasionally uneven, set of essays discussing historical aspects of the LDS Church’s denial of priesthood ordination to African blacks from the late 1840s to 1978, as well as both analytical and anecdotal analysis of challenges (and blessings) faced by blacks who joined the LDS Church both before and after the change of policy in 1978. I bought it on the strength of the positive review in the current edition of BYU Studies (Vol. 45, No. 4, pp. 165 ff.); the reviewer, Emmanuel A. Kissi, is an LDS convert (and medical doctor) from Ghana who –besides his own work — serves as an Area Authority Seventy in Africa. ..bruce..
The arc of individual existence
I thought I’d start with beginnings, since they affect so much else.
Mormons reject the classic (and largely post-Nicene) Christian concept of creatio ex nihilo, that is, creation out of nothing, in at least two important senses: the existence of individuals and the ultimate framework for our current space-time continuum. Let’s focus on the first for now.
We believe that some essential nature of our personal being is eternal, indeed co-eternal with God. The arc of individual existence, in current Mormon terminology, goes like this:
intelligence: nowadays, this term is used to describe our core eternal being, the part of us that has always existed. This is generally considered to be individualistic — that is, you and I have always existed as separate entities — though a few within the Church have argued for more of a ‘raw bulk material’ concept (with possible recycling). Joseph Smith’s statement (in the King Follett discourse) was that “…God never did have power to create the spirit of man at all. God himself could not create himself: intelligence exists upon a self existent principle…”.
pre-mortal) spirit: at some point prior to this life, God encased our intelligences in ‘spirit bodies’ (and thus became “the Father of spirits“). We know nothing about the process and we frankly know very little about the conditions there, though this doesn’t stop Mormons from rampant speculation and presumption, plus generating a fair amount of folk doctrine. 🙂 It also should be noted that early LDS scripture and discourses on this subject did not make as clear a distinction between the terms ‘intelligence’ and ‘spirit as is currently made in the LDS Church today (cf. the King Follett discourse above, as well as this passage from the Book of Abraham).
mortal being: we are born into this life with an impermanent bond between our spirit body and our physical body — in other words, we’re mortal and will die (breaking that bond).
(post-mortal) spirit: after death, we exist again as spirits for a period until we are resurrected.
resurrected being: resurrection permanently fuses our spirits with an immortal physical body.
Upcoming posts: Mormon perspectives on life, the universe, and, well, everything
As a response to both on-going silly postings on the net and the PBS broadcast “The Mormons”, I’ve wanted to write about several subjects, including:
- LDS cosmology (the nature of the universe)
- LDS ontology (the nature of reality, including God and humanity)
- LDS epistemology (the nature of truth and ways of knowing it)
- the organization and functioning of the LDS Church
The challenge is that they are all interrelated, which is why you get so many goofy and misinformed postings about the LDS Church and its doctrine (as a parallel example, try to write intelligently on the Catholic doctrine of the immaculate conception of Mary without reference to original sin, St. Augustine, or the Fall). I’m not quite sure yet how I’m going to tackle all this — except that I may just pick an arbitrary starting point and go from there. ..bruce..