Benjamin McGuire

The Book of Moses was produced as part of the Joseph Smith Translation project, and the Book of Moses specifically was completed no later than February of 1831. There is no doctrine of the pre-existence in this time frame in the LDS Church. The Book of Moses is an expansion on the Genesis accounts. And I think that sometimes LDS struggle with the idea that even within modern scripture there is a chronology or a priority. No one expects that the Old Testament should contain a fullness of the gospel - there is this belief that the New Testament improves upon the Old Testament. The same is true with the revelations in the D&C. They are not all equally useful in establishing present day doctrine. So while we have a tendency to try and read our present theology back onto these scriptural texts, when we do this, we read the text in a way that none of its earliest readers did (or could have). Joseph Smith did not read Moses 7 as a reference to some pre-existence. The ideas in Moses 7 help drive early LDS towards that belief in a pre-existence, but it isn't until 1835 that we start to see any references to it at all. The knowledge that we read about in Moses 7:32 is a reference back to the "knowledge of good and evil," along with the gift of agency in the Garden of Eden. It isn't until the formal introduction of a pre-existence that the notion of agency shifts back into that pre-existence and its war in heaven. In other words, Moses 7 isn't a reflection of later LDS theology - it is a stepping stone to that later theology with its starting to recontextualize the Genesis creation narratives.

I think that this is a challenge on a number of levels. We might ask the same about Joseph Fielding Smith who served as a General Authority as the Patriarch to the Church (not to be confused with the Joseph Fielding Smith who became the President of the Church. Patriarch Joseph Fielding Smith was a sexually active gay man. There has been some discussion in this thread about the problem of age and out leaders. Men generally don't get to be a certain age without starting to show signs of age-related issues. Working in the field that I do, there isn't much of a line between age related cognitive impairment and dementia. We have had several prophets with both age related cognitive impairment and actual dementia. And these kinds of things make me wonder what would actually constitute something that would encourage "God's veto"? Part of this, from my perspective, is the fact that there is certainly a strong belief in the LDS Church that God's veto wouldn't ever be necessary - because if God didn't want the most senior apostle to become the prophet, the easiest solution is for God to call him home prior to it becoming an issue. Or, perhaps we might see something like President Hunter's nine months as the President of the Church as evidence of such a veto? By the same token, there is nothing in scripture that requires the process that we use. There is no reference to prophetic succession in scripture. The LDS page that describes the process makes zero references to scripture. In theory, much like with Catholicism, just about anyone could be chosen to be the President of the Church. But in practice, we have a system that was created and set up and modified to meet certain objectives. Much of this process is aimed at removing uncertainty in the process (and preventing competing claims - as happened in the first apostolic interregnum). Further structuring of the process occurred (as I noted earlier) when Brigham Young made efforts to make his sons the most senior apostles at some future point by ordaining them as apostles at an early age (the youngest son he ordained as an apostle was only 11 years old). So we can say that this is all God's plan. And that God would take steps to prevent something He didn't want. But, we don't actually have any idea of what this would really look like, and we don't know how the Q12 would address this issue in light of the current system which has been relatively set in stone. This is from that link I provided above - the steps to choose a new prophet: There is no option in here for variance (and don't misunderstand me, I think that should the Q12 decide to change this format, there isn't anything to stop them). The Q12 it says "meet to receive confirmation from the Lord that the longest-serving Apostle will be the new prophet." For a long time there was a clarification here - the longest serving in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. There was a long history up to President Kimball's presidency when we had apostles who were never made members of the Q12. This include two of Brigham Young's children. But there were others as well. We no longer do this. Apostles are always ordained and then called to the Q12 immediately so that seniority is always clearly established. And to get back to my point, we have never had the Q12 not confirm the most senior apostle as the prophet. And then in Step 8, we get the sustaining vote. This is a mere formality. The Church as a whole would never reject a prophet - and we have that secondary problem of the idea that not sustaining the prophet becomes an act of apostasy. Put into a question, do you think that we (as members) have an obligation to sustain the actions of the Q12? I am not disagreeing with any of this by the way. I think that there is tremendous value in the LDS Church of establishing an orderly succession. But I am also really aware of the fact that at some point in time, we will have a succession crisis - caused because we have a President of the Q12 who is unable (for reasons of health) to do the job, and we have an acting President of the Q12 not caused because the President of the Q12 in in the First Presidency. Will the Church still pick someone to be prophet because they are the most senior member, even if they have severe dementia? Will they do so because the Church can be managed just as effectively by the Q12? What makes this increasingly likely is that we have gotten so much better at extending life expectancy (without necessarily extending that quality of life). We have had an average age for our apostles of just under 80 for several years now. Even though it periodically drops (President Nelson's death will do that), the overall trend is moving upward. Perhaps even in my lifetime we will see an emeritus status introduced for apostles ... At any rate, the short version of all this is - I think that stating that they are there precisely because God wants them there is a sort of agreement that is aimed at answering all concerns (legitimate or not). I think that the system we have allows for incompetence in a leader (as we have seen historically). I think that it is better to recognize that the system allows for us to have fragile or impaired leaders because the system doesn't rely on that single individual for effective administration of the Church. Eventually there will be a correction to the system to address future problems.

Do you think that people sometimes have idiotic ideas? Perhaps you could share with me a different word I could have used that would have encouraged you to read something that you disagreed with?

I did want to add one thing before I leave this thread - because I actually have no expectation that @longview will answer the question. A while back, the LDS Church put up a web page celebrating a radical antifa individual: Helmuth Günther Hübener. After all, antifa means anti-fascist. And Hübener was executed by the Nazis for his radical anti-fascism. The thing is, most of us are opposed to fascism. We are (as Americans) for the most part as anti-fascist as we are anti-communist. And, if we were suddenly finding ourselves in a nation doing what Germany was doing to the Jews, I would hope that most of us would be radicalized to oppose that fascism - at least in our speech. This whole thing comes across on much the same level as the wokeness issue. The language gets used as a trigger label - but it is largely empty of meaning. Antifa: And, I think that there is absolutely nothing wrong with being against racism and willing to protest against racism. The challenge has been, in recent years, that the alt-right movement has embraced fascism. Which is to say to them fascism isn't something to be despised (as most of us do) but something to be embraced. And to label someone as antifa is in fact to label someone as being against the movement - against white nationalism. Radical antifa speech then is speech that is against the white nationalist movement. To be antifa in this sense is not the slur that the alt-right uses it as, but can be seen as a badge of honor for those who oppose the alt-right. This is no different from progressives who embrace the label of being woke - because of what it has come to mean. When these labels are used in discussions like this, they never really achieve much - because they are viewed so differently by those on opposite sides of the ideological fence. What is clear is that when discussions use these terms as weapons, the goal is not communication, but to create a visceral reaction in their audience. And @longview can have the last word.

Let's see ... "If your read this, you are gay" was on one. The lyrics to the song Bella Ciao was on another. A third read "Hey fascist, catch!". Now, let me repeat what I asked for - since you aren't answering my question: You introduced this idea. Tell me what you mean by it. And now we run into this problem here. Because of course, once you make someone a martyr (as you are doing here) anything that I say that could be construed as going against your mythology would likely be considered by you to be a character assassination, wouldn't it. I think that I will simply bow out of this conversation at this point. I think that your plan is simply to attack anyone who disagrees with you - there is no rational exit strategy.

I actually think that you are just making all of this up. But just to point out some things - When the President of the Church in incapacitated, it isn't the First Counselor that tends to take over management of the Church but the President of the Q12. When there is no prophet, the President of the Q12 does in fact take over (not the First Counselor - the First Presidency is simply dissolved). I am not sure what you think might be learned from being the First Counselor that wouldn't be learned by being the President of the Q12. I don't actually think that your logic means much. But, as I said, if you have any actual evidence of this, rather than your gut instinct, I would be happy to have a look.

No. How would you get that from my comments? I never said I was offended. I pointed out that others were offended. You have this huge chip on your shoulder. It isn't doing you any favors. That was what the link was for ... it is a long page (well was, since they removed the whole database from the internet - hence my link to the internet archive). No. I won't. You need to stop with the double standard here. If you are going to make demands like this - then you need to be willing to back up your claims in exactly the same way. Get to it ... Edit: My point in bringing up the ADL, which until this whole thing in the last few days was considered a reasonably good judge of hate groups in America (except generally by those on that list), was simply to point out that it there is always some degree of subjectiveness, and the use of labels isn't particularly helpful - especially when you just pull them out of thin air. It was a serious question I was asking when I asked you to define "antifah radical speech". It's not something I am particularly familiar with, and I was hoping you could help me out.

I love how we get these vague sorts of statements that are supposed to mean something. What is "Antifa radical speech"? At the same time, the Jewish affiliated Anti-defamation League listed Kirk's Turning Point USA as an extremist group beginning in 2019. So much is simply in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

It isn't true (that this is the most likely reason). You could, of course, provide some concrete evidence for why this is true - and I would be happy to entertain it. There's no reason why Nelson couldn't have kept both Eyring and Uchtdorf as counselors. It is true that the roles of First and Second Councillor follow seniority. But it is also true that the next in line (the current President of the Twelve) is only sometimes brought into the First Presidency. It usually does not happen when there exists a split in views between the prophet and the president of the Q12. Take for example, President McKay and President Joseph Fielding Smith. When David O. McKay was made First Counselor (under George Albert Smith), Joseph Fielding Smith became the acting president of the Quorum. When David O. McKay became the prophet, Joseph Fielding Smith remained as the President of the Q12 - he was not brought into the First Presidency. This challenges the point you raise because David O. McKay went through four First Counselors - Stephen L. RIchards (died), J. Reuben Clark (died), Henry D. Moyle (died), and Hugh B. Brown. The list of differences of views between McKay and Joseph Fielding Smith is large (things like young earth creationism - but let's not forget the fact that Joseph Fielding Smith was one of only three apostles who still opposed lifting the priesthood ban in the 1969, along with Harold B. Lee). In any case, when Joseph Fielding Smith became prophet, he chose Harold B. Lee as his First Counselor, making Spencer Kimball the acting President of the Quorum. When Harold B. Lee became president of the Church, he skipped over Spencer W. Kimball as First Counselor, instead opting for N. Eldon Tanner (who had been second counselor with Harold B. Lee under Joseph Fielding Smith). Spencer W. Kimball became the President of the Q12. Spencer W. Kimball skipped the next President of the Q12 - Ezra Taft Benson. And so this cycle continues. We can see distinct patterns in all of this. President Kimball was a moderate. Benson was a conservative. There is that famous statement made by President Hugh B. Brown (First Counselor to David O. McKay) when asked about Elder Ezra Taft Benson's having been given the assignment as a Mission President in Europe by President McKay (a unique assignment at the time for a senior apostle). President Brown was sent a letter by W. Averill Harriman (who was Under-secretary of State for European Affairs for the US Federal Government at the time) asking how long the Church intended to keep Benson in Europe - because Benson had been a political figure and because Benson had some very distinctive views on communism. President Brown wrote back: "If I had my way, he'll never come back!" At any rate, the point of all of this is to show that there has never been a consistent pattern of moving the next in line (the current president of the Q12) into the First Presidency. It does sometimes happen - and this is often likely when the men have known each other a long time (when they were selected by the same President of the Church, and when they continued to serve together for a long time). Russell M. Nelson and Dallin H. Oaks were ordained to the Q12 about a year apart (1984 and 1985) by President Benson. But, just as often, it doesn't happen - and this is especially true when there are differences in viewpoints that coincide with the prophets who called them to be apostles. I don't think that these shifts are inherently good or bad - I think that it is good that there is diversity in the leadership of the Church. If all of our leaders were identical in their views, this would be a reason to be much more concerned. I think that we can look at history and use it to make some guesses about what the next First Presidency will look like. But, its all useless speculation really. There are always differences. I am reminded in the moment right now of President Nelson's declaration about the use of the name Mormon. And yet we had a several years long (and highly successful) PR campaign created under President Monson (it lasted from 2010 to 2018 - almost the entirety of his Presidency). One of my brothers created a video of himself and his family for part of this campaign - and with President Nelson's comments, the LDS Church quietly scrubbed as much of it away as they could. It is a fascinating sort of view into all of this. This wasn't as major an event as the shift in views on the priesthood ban (between 1969 and 1978, every LDS leader who opposed lifting the ban passed away). But I think it points to the certainty we can have that at some point, we will have a prophet who will undo some of the policies that we think are significant today.

Historically though, this is what we have seen ever since David O. McKay, when philosophical differences in the First Presidency led to complications - especially with prophets who have major health concerns (and old age is one of those major health concerns). The issue with David O. McKay is too much of a surprise - with his dementia, and the eventual six counselors in the First Presidency, there was bound to be some complications. The general preference now leans more towards having the President of the Q12 take over administrative work when the prophet is indisposed than to have the counselors int he First Presidency running everything (another issue that was reinforced in the issues experienced by President McKay's first presidency). Your concern here is a lot like the suggestion that really, anyone could be picked as the prophet (there isn't some sort of written requirement in scripture, after all). However, historically, the President of the Q12 has always become the prophet. And the President of the Q12 has always been given to the apostle with the most seniority. But ... there was that incident with Brigham Young, when he ordained three of his sons as apostles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Willard_YoungJohn Willard Young was ordained an apostle at the age of 11). And to deal with this novel situation, President Lorenzo Snow changed the rule that gave the presidency of the Q12 to the most senior apostle to the apostle with the most time spent serving in the Q12. This reduced the seniority of Brigham Young Jr. (the only one of the three sons who actually served in the Q12). So we can talk about the spirit's involvement in these issues - but - there is a practical reality that these decisions are sometimes complicated, with lots of factors. We shouldn't ignore those other factors - and this isn't about pejoratives. There has simply been a historically present swing between different perspectives in the past. Some of these shifts have been quite significant. It is the First Presidency that chooses new apostles. It is also a matter of historical record that progressive leaning prophets (like David O. McKay or Gordon B. Hinckley) tended to pick progressive leaning apostles. When we have a more conservative prophet, they tend to pick more conservative leaning apostles. Oaks and Nelson were both called by Spencer W. Kimball. This doesn't mean that the spirit isn't involved - it suggests to me that revelation is only a part of the process. The selection begins with those who are believed to be appropriate leaders. I think that these differences in perspective are good for the LDS Church as a whole.

It wasn't original to her. This whole thing was making the rounds on social media several days before she reposted it.

The fact that this is all you got out of that comment speaks volumes.

Let me point out the idiocy of this comment. There is always a significant level of violence by men against their partners (married or otherwise). Isn't it reasonable (using the same logic that you put forward) that we should all have a legitimate concern that men in our community may be dangerous - both to themselves and others? There are a lot of problems with the current rhetoric against transgendered persons. Take your comments here. The biggest problem - especially in connection with the murder of Kirk, is that the killer wasn't transgendered. Violence is far more likely to be enacted on those who are transgendered rather than by those who are transgendered. The rhetoric is a smokescreen of sorts. It is clear that there is a link between transgendered people and mental health issues (this is, in fact, directly related to the core problem of gender dysphoria - the condition you mention). Preventing people from treating gender dysphoria doesn't make these mental health issues improve - it makes them worse (treatment - including transgender transitioning steps - does significantly reduce mental health concerns - it is well documented). So let's take a look at this for a moment. If mental health issues connected to gender dysphoria make people a danger both to themselves and others (your suggestion), then the best result would be to treat the condition, alleviate the mental health concerns, thereby reducing their risk to others and themselves. But that isn't what is suggested here. What is being suggested is that we prevent treatment - and because our prevention of that treatment places them at greater risk for mental health concerns, we need to then identify them, and institutionalize them (as necessary*) to prevent them from doing harm to others or to themselves. Where does any of this actually make sense? The reality is that when we repress a minority, when we take away their voice, when we dehumanize them, we increase the likelihood that they will view violence as an option of last resort. To then blame that violence on their underlying condition. It is not that dissimilar from the Nazis requiring a registry of all the Jews on the basis that the Jews presented a real threat to society. Part of the historical process of suppression of minorities is that when minorities are suppressed, to use their response to that suppression in a circular argument to justify the ongoing and continuing need for suppression. I can already see in your comments how effective this false narrative has become. Your suggestion is that we should use gender dysphoria as an indicator for potential violence. When you misrepresent transgenderism as the cause of the violence, you become part of the problem. And to make a point to all of this, and because I am already at risk (of course) of being put on the FBI's potential list, my transgendered son is not a violent person. They have experiences significant intolerance. His response to much of this is to get clearance from his employer for a transfer to a European assignment if the need should arise. These attempts to turn transgender people into violent offenders are nothing more than a way to try and misdirect attention away from the violence that is being enacted on that group - a group that is subjected to violence and murder at a much higher rate than the rest of the population - and which is having trouble finding support and justice from the current administration.

This isn't at all what I read in your OP: I''ll try once more and then let it go. Suppose that you pray for something - and you have absolute faith that God will give you what you pray for. And it doesn't happen. If you are approaching this by seeking for reasons to believe, you end up justifying the failure of God to answer your prayer by believing that God answered your prayer, just in some other way. Or, in other words, God's answer was not to answer your prayer. In taking this route, your belief that God always answers your prayers becomes stronger. Had the outcome you were looking for also occurred, you would believe that God answered your prayer. In other words, if you start with this frame of mind, that God will answer your prayer, and you look for reasons to strengthen that belief, no matter what the outcome really is, you can choose to understand it in such a way that your belief that God will answer your prayers is confirmed. The same thing can occur from the other direction. If you pray about something with the expectation that God doesn't answer prayers, and it doesn't happen, your belief is confirmed. And if it does happen, you can explain it a way through a variety of mechanisms - which also preserves your belief. The thing is, the OP asks about the suggestion that we should take a route to examining our experiences that is not simply seeking evidence from a neutral place and looking to see if it confirms or rejects what we believe. And I am trying to point out that this process (simplified in this way) results only in confirmation bias. I am all for examining evidence - I think, though, that we have to be careful about our biases when we examine that evidence.

This reminds me of that old joke: "I don't usually talk to English majors. But, when I do, I order a double espresso." I think that you are still misunderstanding - "As part of that process, he researched 'reasons' to believe a specific major would be a best fit for him." I don't think this is actually analogous - because there really isn't any belief in this process of looking at college majors. The idea of belief (as opposed to rational knowledge) goes out the door when we start using some sort of objective means of measuring the differences between them. I could re-write you analogy by changing a single word and the meaning wouldn't change at all - but it's use in this discussion goes away: Belief at this point is limited to his belief that the objective measures of comparison will yield the best fit. If we were to extend this analogy to the question of religious belief and faith, it would amount to creating a list of things that could be used to grade every religious experience, and, once finished, we could score them up to find the best religious experience. Is this really belief? I certainly don't think so - other than a necessary belief that such a system could come up with a best religious fit. And this is an illustration of the thinking behind my earlier comment on the complexity of the epistemology of truth. The challenge is that, in the context of your OP, you aren't discussing a comparison of religions with an objective set of comparatives. You are discussing approaching a specific religious set of beliefs by either "seek[ing] for reasons to believe" or "seek[ing] for reasons to doubt". And in that narrow context, you will always be able to find evidence to support your original belief. What if there is no truth in our subject? How does approaching it by seeking for reasons to believe give us a basis for recognizing that it isn't true? And perhaps just as importantly, such an approach doesn't help us understand how something can be partially true, or a reflection of truth. This idea that we can come to a knowledge of the truth by simply believing it is true and subsequently looking for reasons to believe feels to me more like a simple platitude than any effective process.

If there is something I envy the most about our Catholic brothers and sisters it is the idea that Catholicism has created the space for a rational belief that Mormonism is still struggling with. Some of the most influential voices of faith in my life have been Catholics, and without them, the world would be far more intellectually and spiritually impoverished.

The two quotes at the beginning are from Joseph Smith: "One of the grand fundamental principles of Mormonism is to receive truth, let it come from whence it may" is taken from a sermon Joseph Smith delivered on July 9, 1843. "God judges men according to the use they make of the light which He gives them" is taken from a synopsis of a sermon Joseph Smith delivered on May 21, 1843. The rest of this is mine. I put it in a quote box because I originally wrote it for a guest blog post I was invited to write on Patheos on December 9, 2010. This has always been a challenge for religion - the question of boundaries, and the question of situating faith and belief. Mormonism, in its infancy, really drew on its identity as a restorationist church - the idea that there was nothing new - that it was simply restoring a fullness that had previously existed. And yet, it became clear, as the revelations continued, that this was not simply a restorationist movement but a revelatory movement - and Mormonism has cast aside most of its early restorationist doctrines (even though they continue to have a deep influence on the Church). I would suggest that the LDS Church has never been the only repository of truth - and this was something that Joseph Smith understood. After all, no one in the earliest days of Mormonism would believe this idea - that the fledgling LDS Church was the only repository of truth. The early members pulled belief from many different sources. We have to remember that it would be some time before we really had any members of the LDS Church who hadn't begun their religious journeys as something other than Mormons. Only much later - as the LDS Church begins to have its own journey into orthodoxy and orthopraxy can we start to see this discussion about the LDS Church as a repository of truth. The idea of authority begins really with the introduction of the LDS temple theology - which doesn't reach its current form until well into the 20th century. But this suggestion of yours is something that I also get from the LDS side of the discussion. I noted this in the last part of that blog post: I myself would never claim that the LDS Church is the only repository of truth. And I would argue that most of those who enter Mormonism's Celetsial Kingdom will never have been a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during their mortality. This ends up, of course, being a much larger discussion than the issues raised here.

Sure. I am drawing a distinction between seeking belief and seeking reasons to believe. If we are seeking reasons to believe, then the belief is already a foregone conclusion, and our search is only about looking for validation of our beliefs. The same could be said for deciding not to believe and then looking for justifications or reasons not to believe. In both situations, we have a pre-existing belief and we are merely looking for ways to make that decision to believe (or not to believe) seem more rational to ourselves. This is roughly equivalent to the idea of blind faith (or blind disbelief on the other side of the coin) in the sense that there isn't any real questioning or challenging of that beginning belief stage. Mature faith doesn't come just from seeking belief, it comes from situating that belief in a reality that can present a complex challenge to belief. Why is it that prayers aren't always answered? The simple belief is that there are reasons known to God and unknown to us - and so in such an answer to the question, we find reasons to believe (just think of that Garth Brook's song - Unanswered Prayers). I might further suggest that belief itself isn't something that we search for - it is already a compromise when we can't know. Alma 32 is about testing belief - and it presents a philosophy of belief that is coupled to knowledge. We are allowed to be skeptical - because in our skepticism, we test belief out. And when our belief doesn't yield fruits, we can know that the belief is wrong. This isn't belief or doubt, it is a rationalism towards truth and expectations. If we have a belief that God should do X when we do Y, and God doesn't, then we shouldn't be looking for ways to salvage that belief by modifying the conditions on X or Y. Rather we should, instead, look at out beliefs themselves and see if they are true or not. One of the more memorable of the examples of all of this is the whole thing with Harold Camping. When his predictions failed, his followers simply doubled down on it with another try (predicting the beginning of the millennium). That story contains a lot of people believing far too much - and following this idea of looking for reasons to believe as opposed to examining the beliefs themselves. In fact, truth is just about the information. Something isn't not-true because no one is willing to accept it. And our willingness to accept an idea doesn't somehow make it truth. Our ability to follow truth is certainly dependent on our willingness to accept it - but - if we are willing to accept untruth as truth, it gets complicated. So the mindset of belief or doubt isn't what we want to learn (or to have). What we want is a pattern to follow by which we accept or adopt truth. And within religious contexts, this is always going to be a murky gray area. Alma addresses this through his testing of truth. We test the claim, and it produces results, we can learn truth from that test. Belief comes about when we can't know something because it doesn't exist in isolation. Belief in an isolated claim with nothing to support it is the purest definition of blind faith. But generally, we believe things because we have relatively good reasons to do so. I go to work with the belief that my employer will pay me for my work. The fact that this employer has done so consistently (and on time) for the past 18 years provides some reasonable justification for that belief. We may have a belief in God because of some experience we have had. But should that belief in God suddenly translate to a whole range of beliefs about other things? These are questions connected to the problem of looking for reasons to believe (and looking for reasons to doubt). We can certainly believe that God speaks to us personally. So did the Lafferty brothers. The epistemology of truth is a complex question - and we aren't going to get there through pithy slogans and memes. And in our world of lies and fake news, the ability to find truth is becoming a skill we all need to develop ... Finally - I think that this isn't as simple as it sounds. That we can speak of truth suggests that we believe truth exists. I am reminded of that line in the Indiana Jones movie The Last Crusade. Professor Jones tells his class: "Archaeology is the search for fact, not truth. If you want truth, Dr. Tyree’s philosophy class is just down the hall." People who like that quote rarely pay attention to what comes next. Professor Jones goes on to say "We do not follow maps to buried treasure and X never, ever marks the spot”. The irony intended in this statement by the movie script (and that is lost by extracting the quote from its context) is that the movie presents an Indiana Jones who is indeed searching for truth, who follows a map to the buried treasure, and over the course of the adventure discovers that X can indeed mark the spot (none of which Jones is actually looking for). We start by believing that truth exists. But, the idea that "the truth that we are looking for actually exists" is a slippery slope. The truth that exists may not be the truth we are looking for. And the question is: how do we respond when we start to discover that a difference exists between the truth that we want and the truth that is there? Elder Bruce Hafen in his book The Believing Heart takes a believers approach to this question. His discussion is a good starting point - and to give you a bit of a taste - He goes on to deal with his other two levels - and the discussion is good. I tend to frame it differently. But here is that blind faith issue. An unwillingness (or even an inability) to recognize the gap between what we think is true and the reality we actually experience is not a sustainable faith.

Not in my opinion. The human brain dislikes not having narratives. We can find reasons to believe anything at all (even the most illogical or irrational things) if we seek for reasons to believe. On a subconscious level, we call this confirmation bias. Even within religion, blind faith is a bad thing. And since confirmation bias isn't something that is exclusive to religious belief, the same sorts of tools we employ to recognize our own biases more generally work well within a religious context. The blind believer and the dedicated skeptic will never find real reasons to believe (or disbelieve) - even if they think they have. It is unreasonable to suggest that the Pharisees and the Sadducee didn't believe (and didn't have reasons to believe). Rather, it is easy to believe the wrong things if we are looking for reasons to believe them. Believing too much isn't that much better than not believing at all - and instead of not doubting, we need to be more like the father who cried out (Mark 9:24): "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief." Belief is more of a journey of discovery and not a decision.

Brigham Young spoke of the problem of absolute truth when he said this: One of our problems is that we like the idea of absolute truth (we really don't like ambiguity). But we run into a problem. And that problem is that our knowledge isn't absolute - it is always relative and our understanding of it is progressive (at least from our mortal perspective). In LDS history, we have that moment after the revelation to lift the priesthood ban when Elder McConkie said (to those who were resisting the change): The reality that underlies this statement isn't that we now have absolute truth (with the new light and knowledge that came into the world) but rather that our truth was becoming more aligned with our trajectory towards something better. Within Mormonism, as a religion that believes in continuing and progressive revelation, we can be certain of at least two things. The first is that there is some absolute truth that we are looking forward to, and the second is that we do not have it. At best, we will be in a constant series of events in which we discover new truth - some of which will overturn the truth that we thought we knew (and that we thought we knew was absolute). In fact, Alma 32 tells us as much - that at least in the beginning, the only thing that we can know with certainty is that the "seed is good" - and yet, the seed is not our goal, and the seed, when planted, becomes something else. But these kinds of lessons are difficult because we don't like ambiguity, we don't like this sense of having to learn that what we believe isn't exactly true (or that it is only contextually true or relatively true). But, in the end, not only do we not have complete and absolute truth, we also don't know how far we have to go to get there. Almost fifteen years ago now, I wrote a guest blog post on Patheos about Mormonism and three of its primary values - and I think it is still relevant to this sort of discussion: The first is the idea of ongoing revelation: The fact that we sometimes receive revelation that contradicts or challenges our previous understanding is, from this perspective, a spiritually healthy occurrence. It means that we are not stagnant - it means that we are in a different place than we were, and it means that we can receive that correction that we were not able to get before. The second idea that I discussed was about the idea of authoritative revelation: The point of this is that it is our personal revelation that is most able to help us reorient ourselves spiritually. If we took everyone we know and we drew a line from where they are to an imaginary point where absolute truth is, we would all have unique lines. None of us are in the same place, and all of us will need to take a unique path to arrive at that truth. This is why personal revelation is the most valuable to us - because it alone can take into consideration where we are and where we want to go. Other sources of revelation can provide important insight - but it is a general sort of insight. It is there to help us discover the way to personal revelation. And as Moses told the children of Israel who were unhappy about the individuals in the community who were prophesying without explicit authority (Numbers 11:29): "And Moses said unto him, Enviest thou for my sake? would God that all the Lord's people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit upon them!" This is the goal of religion - not cause everyone to conform but to get everyone moving in the right direction so that we can achieve that eternal objective with the most direct trajectory - so that our knowledge of truth will grow as much as possible in that direct line. The final thing I mentioned was the connection to all of this with our final reward: The idea here is simple - in Mormon theology, we are going to be judged by the use we make of the light that we receive. And here again, that personal revelation is going to be far more significant than our understanding of things provided by someone else. I think sometimes we envision revelation as some kind of absolute truth. That God is supposed to tell us exactly what is right in no uncertain terms, and in a way that is capable of being set in stone for everyone, everywhere. That all we need is to read the scriptures the way that God intended, and we will have all the truth. Brigham Young didn't view revelation in this way (there is a bit of irony in this - looking at the quote above - since of course, he himself was responsible for bringing a lot of his cultural and social views into his calling as a prophet). If we look at the Old Testament, in its context, it was given to a group of people who had certain views, and their scripture was their to guide them in the right direction. What Brigham Young implies in his statement above is that both he and the Church were not yet at the end of their journey either - and I think this is still true today - should we be given scriptures again, they would be quite different in places than what was given in the past - because we (those of us who receive it) are in a very different place than those in the past. Should the Book of Mormon be divinely translated again for us today, it would emphasize different things. And the same is true with our personal revelation. Every time we encounter God, we encounter Him from a different place than we were the last time - and so each time we receive revelation, it is something new. We need to learn not to get hung up on the past, as if it was the absolute truth - and should never be contradicted. There is no living gospel in the past. So, finally, I think that what this really suggests is that the goal for us in mortality (and one that I think we aren't really capable of achieving) is that we don't move from revelation to revelation with these gaps in between. We want to be in a place where we come close enough to the mind of God that we are continuously moving in the right direction - and continuously correcting our course - and continuously receiving revelation. As we approach this, the contradictions become fewer and less significant because we are moving in a more direct line instead of meandering all over the place - and because our understanding gets better. So, for @stelf: If I go back to Lehi and Nephi and their vision of the Tree of Life, something can come from the divine but it also has to come out of our minds. The two things aren't separate. I think that our amazing experiences are transcendent - and they have the power to help us change our lives - but because they are transcendent - because we can't really reduce them to language. And this means that we aren't really experienced in understanding that communication that God gives us - and so we have to work it out. Sometimes, I think that we misunderstand about the things which Jesus speaks in 3 Nephi 19, which couldn't be written. I think that what this means is that the language couldn't express the transcendent experience - it literally could not be written (there doesn't have to be a deeper thing going on here). So, sometimes, in our efforts to understand, we get it wrong. If all we need to know is that "the seed is good," then just having the experience is enough. For others, that struggle to understand may engage a lifetime of faith and a recognition of ambiguity that comes with it. So my advice is this - don't give up on your personal revelation. Those experiences are the most direct route to understanding yourself and your Father in Heaven.

I think, though, that we look at this through the lens of modern LDS theology. Families were not the binding units in the Celestial Kingdom until post 1894. Prior to that date, we did not generally perform sealings to deceased parents. The only way that you could be sealed posthumously to your dead parents was if they had been endowed before their deaths. If they hadn't, you were sealed by adoption to someone else (and frequently, even if they had been, you were often sealed by adoption to someone else. Further, prior to 1894, when deceased women were sealed vicariously, they were often simply sealed to a current temple worker, and not to their husbands or parents. It wasn't until President Woodruff changed (with revelation) this policy in 1894 that the perspective shifted. This is what he said at the time: This ended the practice of sealings of adoption. This idea of having parents sealed to children was not a particularly significant thing prior to 1894 - and especially not in the 1840s. So when we we talk about our "own biological children" belonging "to another for eternity" this is an evolved concept that really wasn't a part of the 1840s LDS temple theology. Viewing it in this way really misunderstands what is going on at the time, and the contemporary response to such an event that might have been held by those individuals.

I am surprised that this discussion hasn't included Abraham 3:28 - I have three points worth mentioning. First, the Book of Abraham material - even coming from the later batch of material that is produced - is still really early in the development of LDS theology and cosmology. There are big gaps between that theology and our modern Mormon beliefs. We need to be cautious about reading our theology back into these early sources. The one section here in Abraham 3:26 that really illustrates this is this statement: "and they who keep not their first estate shall not have glory in the same kingdom with those who keep their first estate." There is an implication here that those who don't keep their first estate receive a kingdom of glory - and yet we know that those who receive perdition don't receive a kingdom of glory from the earlier D&C 88 - verse 24 states: "he must abide a kingdom which is not a kingdom of glory." Second, in response to @the narrator, who noted that the first estate is closely connected to the Garden of Eden, Mormonism's pre-existence/war in heaven becomes a replacement for the Garden of Eden narrative. What I mean by that is the LDS theology places the fall of man (or at least the desire and intention for the fall) into the pre-existence. There creates a more differentiated back drop for the context of Abraham 3:28 - and by extension, the verse that this is connected to in Jude 1:6 - "And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day." Where Mormonism ends up is with Lucifer's fall in the pre-existence, the subsequent war in heaven, and then the creation of man on earth. The challenge with @the narrator's comment is that Mormonism conflates Adam and Eve with all of humanity. And so at least from a current theological perspective, this is discussing every spirit child of God - which includes all of humanity and not just Adam and Eve. Whether or not the events of the Garden should be understood literally or figuratively, Mormonism pushes the decision to fall back into a pre-existence that could occur in the eternity which precedes the mortal creation of the bodies of Adam and Eve. Finally, Mormonism goes much further (even if there isn't a sort of unified explanation or chronology of events). Mormonism extends creation back into the distant past. William Phelps, for example, calculated the beginning of the creation of the earth as having occurred a bit over 2.5 billion years in the past (he publishes this in 1844). He takes this figure from the Book of Abraham, taking the seven days of creation, multiplying them by a thousand years (7,000 years), and then subsequently taking those 7,000 years and multiplying them by 365 X 1,000 years to provide a reference for God's time as used in the Book of Abraham: = 2,555,000,000. For Phelps, the 7,000 years of creation is understood as God's time. While I wouldn't adopt this view myself, it points to a perspective of a very long creative period - during which there is plenty of time for a war in heaven to occur. However, even though we have the fall of Satan as part of this, Satan remains free until the millennial period in LDS thought. And even in traditional Christian thought, there is a challenge in all of this in trying to find some uniformity in chronology or theology. Revelations 20 is a fascinating example of this - because here we have the binding of Satan (verse 2) for a thousand years, and his subsequent release (verses 3,7), and then a second war (Armageddon). LDS theology tends to make this idea of the first estate a discrete slice of time - that is, it happened, it was done, the outcome hasn't been fully executed. We could even argue that while certain aspects of creation ended with the creation of Adam and Eve, that creation continues - with humanity functioning as co-creators in a mortal context. For me, Abraham 3 seems to be a bit of a mash-up of ideas. If it wasn't for verse 28 of Abraham 3, it would be really easy to argue that both the first and second estates refer to mortality, and that these two estates delineate the three degrees of glory - the Telestial for those who fail to keep the first estate, the Terrestial for those who keep the first but not the second estates, and the Celestial, for those who keep both. I think that trying to make a developing theology of pre-existence conform to these potential references in the New Testament creates some of this confusion. Mormonism is trying to recontextualize both the events of the Garden, the fall of man, and the fall of Satan. And in the Book of Abraham, there is more than enough interpretive space for lots of different opinions. Does the war in heaven in the pre-existence fully precede the beginning of creation? I think that this is not a question with an authoritative answer, so different views may be collectively both right and wrong. Anyway, I don't have the time right now to thoroughly edit this - I probably have some mistakes in there.

Just a couple of thoughts - First, I think that the poor Zoramites were likely illiterate (at least for the most part). And this means that there is this incongruity between what is going on and what is being said. But, I would offer a somewhat different reading perhaps. This section seems really dialogic. And I think that there are two dialogues going on. The first is between Alma and the Zoramite experience as a whole. The second is between Alma and the poor that he is talking to. The text in Alma 33 tends to conflate these two conversations. The reason why I see this is that if we don't have these two different discussions going on, but only one (and to an illiterate group at that), parts of this discussion make even less sense than the whole study and read thing. The best we could say is that Alma is trying to point to them where to find a better theology. And yet, we could all come up with something better than this poetry in scripture that makes these same points. So, I would suggest that when Alma is telling the Zoramites to study the scriptures, he is speaking as if to the entire Zoramite population (not just those in front of him). And both groups are present - in Alma 32:6-7 we have two groups: The thing is that Mormon's editorial comment misleads us. Alma continues to talk to both groups - even if he is directing his attention more specifically to the one group. He wants the other group to hear what he is saying also. So we have this dialogue going on between Alma and the poor outcasts of the Zoramites, but Alma is using this dialogue to critique the larger Zoramite community and their theology. The second idea is that Alma's use of Zenos and Zenock is not random. It seems likely that Zenos and Zenock play a significant role of some sort in the Zormaite theology. So Alma doesn't have to justify his quoting of it. There is an assumption (which is why the question in verse 33:12 is rhetorical) that the Zoramites believe these texts - at least in some way - and they are familiar with them, and so he prooftexts. In verses 13-15: "Behold, if ye do, ye must believe what Zenos said; for, behold he said: ... I would ask if ye have read the scriptures? If ye have, ... For it is not written that Zenos alone spake of these things, but Zenock also spake of these things." The idea that Zenos and Zenock are at odds with Zoramite theology only really matters if this creates a conflict. And it is only after these two that we turn to what we would consider the normative arguments like the idea of Moses in the wilderness. So rather than seeing this language of searching the scriptures being directed at the poor, it is being directed at the other (the original) audience - they are the once who are being accused of selective reading of scripture. The message to the poor is simple: your scriptures contain material that hasn't been fully shared with you. And if you believe that Zenos and Zenock were prophets (and Moses as well for that matter), I (Alma) can use these texts to show that your exclusion is theologically wrong. But Alma isn't interested in these people returning to worship with the other Zoramites in their synagogues (whatever that term means here in this context), he is interested in helping them return to Nephite orthopraxy. Anyway, this might help in terms of reading Alma 31-33. These situations where we get only one side of the dialogue without a full context are places where Mormon often distances us from the historical context in his selective presentation and editing. It is the disconnects like the one that you notice that help us understand that perhaps we need to approach the text differently. A final note. I like Diamond. I think though, that it's hard to develop these sweeping theories without also creating some problems. It's been a long time since I really looked at a lot of that stuff, but in terms of the shifts in civilizations, it's easy to over-generalize. Not long after he published that book, I found this research interesting. This is from the abstract:

I do not know where you are getting your statistics of sub one percent to three percent, but those aren't figures that would generally be accepted today. The very lowest estimates (and these aren't taken all that seriously today) are at 3%, with estimates generally closer to around 10%. The 3% figure in modern literature comes primarily from Ehrman - but his views are a challenge because he relies almost entirely on Catherine Hezser's work. Hezser places Jewish literacy in Roman Palestine as closer to the 10-15% mark represented in Roman society. The problem that exists between the two is over what we mean by literacy. If we only consider literacy to exist when we have professional level skills, then the 3% or less almost certainly applies. If we are talking about the ability for basic reading comprehension and the ability to read and create signatures, we are going to see something much closer to that 10-15% range. And Hezser makes this comment in this regard: "Even if only a very small minority of Jews can be considered to have reached the highest levels of literacy, whereas many were able to write their own signature only or were totally illiterate, Jewish society as a whole can be called a "literate society", that is, a society in which writing was employed in various social contexts in Roman-Byzantine times." (Hezser, Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine, 449). In a similar fashion, I think that we need to be cautious about creating generalities from the Book of Mormon text. I think that we can assert that the Book of Mormon suggests that the Nephite Society was a literate society - but this doesn't require us to see more than modest percentage of the population from being somewhat literate and a small percentage from being highly literate. One of the most illuminating discoveries that reflects the literacy of Jewish Palestine around the time of Jesus was the collection of documents in the so-called Cave of Letters. There we find in some of the personal documents comments about literacy. In and around all of this, there is a clear recognition that there is a professional class of literate individuals - and that they helped the illiterate population produce and maintain personal libraries of important documents (not so different even from modern collections - like my bundle of documents which include my birth certificate, my social security card, my marriage license, my passport, my lifetime immunization records, property titles, and so on. Some of these same kinds of documents are found in this collection - and help us complete a picture of the way in which writing functions even among the illiterate parts of the population. The Book of Mormon requires (in its reading) a relatively high level of literacy. But this is a complicated issue because the Book of Mormon text is (at least according to itself) a complex text. Most of the Book of Mormon is written in two specific periods of time. We have Nephi/Jacob writing, and we have Mormon/Moroni writing. and the text tells us that these four authors are responsible for nearly the entire Book of Mormon. These four authors have a high degree of understanding of earlier texts and textual traditions that they incorporate into the text - in ways that suggest that they are participating as part of the highly literate crowd. We also don't have a very good grasp on the extent to which the Book of Mormon (as translation) creates in a modern audience a sense of greater literacy than might actually have existed historically. So, if we follow the general dating used in the published book of Mormon, we have Alma 33, which describes events around 40 BCE. But Alma 33 is composed by Mormon (the author of Alma 33) six centuries later. And then this text is translated in 1830 - and the relationship between the translation in 1830 and the source text (the Gold Plates) and any earlier documents produced closer to that 40 BC time frame is unclear. All of this adds to the problem of uncertainty in the way in which Alma 33 in the Book of Mormon (written around 600 CE, and translated in 1830 CE) reflects Nephite literacy in 40 BCE. I think that the best we can conclude with some certainty is that there existed a highly literate class, a partially literate class, and an illiterate class - and without being able to place the Nephites into a specific historical context, we can't get much better than that, other than the text suggests that the majority of the people were not particularly literate, while the priestly class was. The literacy of the political leadership (as distinct from the religious leadership) is implied. I wouldn't be unhappy with estimates comparable to what we see in Jewish Palestine in the Book of Mormon. Part of the deceptiveness of the text is that we are almost certainly reading about the interactions of the highly literate groups rather than the illiterate groups (this is where histories come from). And, unlike the situation with ancient Palestine, we don't have any collections of Nephite documents - no land titles, no marriage contracts, no lawsuit documentation, and so on. Those are the kinds of things that are the most helpful in understanding the pervasiveness and role of literacy in a society, and in determining the role of literacy among those that are not literate - and which simply don't exist here.

That you can ask this question means you don't understand what cognitive dissonance is. Beliefs exist in frameworks. That is, we believe all sorts of things. We believe that we know all sorts of things. These things are all in various states of agreement and disagreement, and we place all sorts of different values on them. Some beliefs are far more important for our behaviors than others. And sometimes, we have behaviors that dominate beliefs. When we have beliefs that are contradictory - and have equal weight - they create this thing we call cognitive dissonance, which is a psychological discomfort. Usually this discomfort is very brief - because our minds don't like it. We change something to reduce this conflict. So we sometimes experience cognitive dissonance, but we unconsciously (and consciously) take steps to eliminate it - much like we get rid of that feeling of hunger by eating something. So to go back to your example - you present two explicit beliefs, and a third implicit belief. The two explicit beliefs are 1) that the restored church is true, and 2) that Brigham Young, John Taylor, Lorenzo Snow, and Willford Woodruff were all adulterous apostates. The implicit belief 3) is that the restored church cannot be true of these four individuals are adulterous apostates. Since these are all beliefs, the ways to relieve that discomfort (that cognitive dissonance) are really fairly simple. We change one of the beliefs, or we add a belief that changes the relationship between these three. And once we do this, the equality is gone, and we stop having the cognitive dissonance. What this means is that cognitive dissonance is something that causes change. We don't usually speak of having cognitive dissonance - we speak of having changed because of past cognitive dissonance that was resolved by the change we made. You can read all of this in more technical terms in the link above. Before I explore this in application to your example, I want to point out one of the classic examples because it involves more than belief. A person addicted to cigarettes may also know that smoking causes cancer and may lead to death. Since an addiction isn't easy to change by belief, most smokers who do not change their behavior end up finding ways to reduce the conflict between the two. Changing behavior can partially help - after all, vaping is less risky than smoking. But, they may also decide that cancer is just a risk. Not everyone who smokes gets cancer, like my uncle who smoked a pack a day for 40 years and didn't get cancer. That sort of thing. In your example, there are lots of ways to resolve the cognitive dissonance - lots of ways to change. One would be to change any of the three fundamental beliefs. We could decide that the restored gospel is not true (leave the church). We could decide that polygamy is just a complicated historical problem and that most of it isn't true - that polygamy was a sealing thing and not a real marriage sort of thing (it's not particularly convincing to me, but, denial is an easy out for cognitive dissonance). We could decide that belief three is wrong - that people have their weaknesses, and that the truth of the restored gospel is not predicated on the non-apostasy of these four men. Each of these changes would shift the relationship so that cognitive dissonance goes away. But, it is easier in some ways (if those three beliefs are really strong), to shift the balance by adding something. For example, we could add the belief that the restored church is true and continued with Joseph Smith III and not Brigham Young. This would confirm all three of these beliefs - allow them to remain equal in strength, and make you a member of the RLDS church. The addition of that belief resolves the cognitive dissonance. Adding the belief that polygamy was commanded by God would reduce the strength (or eliminate it) that these four men were both adulterous and apostate. Cognitive dissonance is resolved, and no change is necessary in behavior. This could get really complicated - what if we decided that the LDS Church grew out of a restorationist context and eventually abandoned its restorationist roots - but that polygamy, as a part of that restoration, was a misunderstood component of the restoration that wasn't abandoned with Brigham Young, but embraced because of its connections to the early temple rights and the more critical sealings of adoption necessary to structure the hereafter. The four men are then neither apostate nor adulterous but misguided, the restored church becomes a bit of a misnomer because the restoration was really a new revelation, and so on. Each extra belief we toss into the pile changes the relationship between the original beliefs, altering or reducing cognitive dissonance until a comfort level is reached and cognitive dissonance is gone. The point of all of this? People generally don't consistently stay in a place where there are opposing beliefs that cause cognitive dissonance. The idea of having opposing ideas isn't itself cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance describes the psychological pressure created by having opposing beliefs - but we are constantly working to reduce that pressure by changing - either what we are doing, or what we belief. If you think that there are people who belief both of the beliefs that you put forward, and they seem to be comfortable with it, then there are going to be other beliefs that are part of their framework that prevent these two beliefs from having the conflict that you envision them creating. In the same way, I wouldn't suggest to you that you must have cognitive dissonance because you believe that 1) the Book of Mormon is scripture, that 2) the Book of Mormon condemns polygamy, and 3) that Joseph Smith and other early Mormon leaders practiced polygamy in spite of the Book of Mormon's condemnation of polygamy. Clearly, you do not have cognitive dissonance about this - and I would guess it is because you have additional beliefs that we could enumerate that would change the relationship between these three beliefs. Cognitive dissonance is useful for explaining changes in behavior. It works very well to explain why some of the followers of Harold Camping doubled down after the first couple of missed predictions. It does very little to help us understand what is going on in a discussion like this - because when we attempt to limit or emphasize differences without understanding the complete process in an individual, it stops being a useful term or a useful process. We all go through this process (yourself included) even if we don't recognize it. But it's use in forums like this always a misapplication - and the term is generally meant as some form of a pejorative.