The Philosophy Of Leaving The Church Over Historical Issues-Like What Is It?

[LDSToronto]

How to tell truth from falsehood when we don't have all the first hand accounts? How to tell good revelation from bad?

The short answer is a long term realtionship with God that starts with trust/faith then builds on the fundamentals, brings us to a greater knowledge of God and grows from there... Obedience to His revelations is the requirement for gaining further light and knowledge.

I think I want the long answer. Building a long-term relationship with god - let's start there.

H.

[Jeff K.]

Building a relationship kind of rolls right off the tongue. I would suggest you review those who have had a long term relationship and see the sacrifices they have made.

[LDSToronto]

Nothing of the sort, I have merely stated the obvious.

A prophet can, the warning was for people who cannot.

If you cannot see the color yellow, no matter how I describe it, you will remain incapable of the concept, so to you it will simply not exist. Your deficiency disallows from knowing what it is, how to differentiate from others, indeed, you are lost when others attempt to explain it to you.

Maybe one day you will have a desire to know, a true desire. Right now you only have a desire to disbelieve.

Jeff, sometimes I wish that you'd engage the actual discussion rather than saying I am incapable of grasping concepts and that I have deficiencies and other such pronouncements.

H.

[LDSToronto]

Building a relationship kind of rolls right off the tongue. I would suggest you review those who have had a long term relationship and see the sacrifices they have made.

Are you an example of someone who has built a long-term relationship with god?

H.

[volgadon]

What if what they know is incorrect? Was there a follow up? Or are we simply relying on the surveyor to know depth versus personal understanding? Wouldnt knowing the wrong information pretty much make your claim false? In fact it would.

How could you say that??? Deeply shocked.

Of course the Russian Orthodox priest who stated on a Russian documentary that we baptise corpses knew what he was talking about when rejecting our truth claims.

[KevinG]

I think I want the long answer. Building a long-term relationship with god - let's start there.

H.

First - these boards or any other religious/philosophical debating society is a fun place to explore ideas but has no bearing on our knowledge of God. Yo might as well try to get a PhD in nutrition by watching the Food Channel.

Some of my favorite verses are of course the essay on Faith in Alma 32

...but another favorite is D&C 93 where I have come to understand that God being a repository of all truth, encourages us to come unto Him, learn from Him and as we learn to do so we receive more knowledge to the point that we can join Him in understanding all things.

Getting to eternal, unveiled truth requires we have faith in the God that is in posession of it, follow His counsel to become more like Him and in the end receive a fullness of what He has. It is a long (eternal) process and not an event that we should allow flawed histories, random facts and imperfactions of prophets or other brethren to derail us from.

Edited January 21, 2012 by DaddyG

[KevinG]

Are you an example of someone who has built a long-term relationship with god?

H.

Would you let Jeff's imperfections and weaknesses be a stumbling block for you to directly go to God yourself? That is a trap.

I wouldn't use anyone here as a reason to explore or reject any personal attempt to approach and understand God.

Let's face it we're not exactly on University lecture hall or Sunday School behavior in this room.

[KevinG]

No man's history is reason enough to prevent me from seeking to be more like Christ. If I am in error over my revelations and learnings then let the sin be on my head- but I can then face God at the judgement in good conscience and say "I did my best to know you".

[LDSToronto]

Your analogy was silly. You presumed that upon things medical, that people should use spiritual tools. It creates a false and flawed argument, so it is easily rejected.

LOL! You admit the problem in your attempt to cut me down. You see, of course it would be silly for me to rely on a doctor who claimed she got all her medical training from god. I want my doctors trained in medical schools. Same as history; I don't want to trust my historical research to someone who claims she was told by god that one piece of history is true and another piece of history is false. I want my history from people who are trained in the field.

Two people, a member of the church and an anti Mormon can look at historical evidence and come out with different interpretations, because historical evidence is open to interpretation, it is open to subjective understanding. You and I for instance can look at evidence and see distinct positions based on that evidence.

What about two people, a member of the church and another member of the church? Can they both have different interpretations of historical evidence? The problem with history as opposed to say, physics or mathematics, is that everyone thinks that they can make qualified statements about history that are correct and valid.

And believe me I have seen much more evidence than you from much stronger anti Mormons.

Not only am I an anti-mormon, I'm a weak anti-mormon. Life sucks.

H.

[mfbukowski]

Fowler's stages of faith model is quite well known, and some find it helpful. I prefer the Perry Scheme for Cognitive and Ethical Growth because, with regard to doctrines, it is more concerned with how people process information than the conclusions they come to hold.

The following is from an email I got from Veda Hale, based on her Sunstone Paper that used the Perry Scheme as a way to view Levi Peterson's Canyon's of Grace. I post it now and then, and it seems relevant to what I see on this thread.

Kevin Christensen

Pittsburgh, PA

PERRY SCHEME OF COGNITIVE AND ETHICAL GROWTH

TABLE OF TRAITS BY POSITION AND TRANSITION

POSITION 1 - Basic Duality. (Garden of Eden Position: All will be well.)

The person perceives meaning divided into two realms-Good/Bad, Right/wrong, We/They, Success/Failure, etc. They believe that knowledge and goodness are quantitative, that there are absolute answers for every problem and authorities know them and will teach them to those who will work hard and memorize them.

Agency is "Out there". The person is so embedded here that there is no place from which to observe themselves, yet they have a dim sense of there being a boundary to Otherness somewhere that gives their Eden-like world view boundary.

Transition 1-2 - Dualism modified. (Snake whispers.) The person starts to be aware of others and of differing opinions, even among authorities. This started the feeling of uncertainty. But they decide it is part of the authority's job to pose problems. It takes hard work to deny the legitimacy of diversity and to keep the belief in the simplicity of truth.

(It should be kept in mind that in any of the transition states it is easy for the person to become depressed. It takes time for the "guts to catch up with leaps of mind." When a sense of loss is accorded the honor of acknowledgement, movement is more rapid and the risk of getting stuck in apathy, alienation, or depression is reduced. When one steps into new perceptions he is unlikely to take another until he comes to terms with the losses attendant on the first.)

POSITION 2 - Multiplicity Prelegitimate. (Resisting snake)

Now the person moves to accept that there is diversity, but they still think there are TRUE authorities who are right, that the others are confused by complexities or are just frauds. They think they are with the true authorities and are right while all others are wrong. They accept that their good authorities present problems so they can learn to reach right answers independently.

TRANSITION: 2-3 - Dualism modified

Now the person admits that good authorities can admit to not knowing all the answers yet, but they will teach what they know now and teach the rest when they have it. They accept that disciplines are divided into the definite and the vague, but that in the end even science fails. Though they have given up dividing meaning into just two realms, they still feel knowledge and goodness are quantitative and that agency is "out there".

POSITION 3 - Multiplicity Legitimate but Subordinate. (Snake's logic considered)

The person still feels that the nature of things naturally produces differing opinions, but it's as it should be, because the Authorities will figure it all out and hand on their conclusions eventually.

ALL OF THE POSITIONS ABOVE FEEL ABANDONMENT IN UNSTRUCTURED LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS. WHEN CHANGES IN THINKING START TO HAPPEN, IT CAN BE A DANGEROUS TIME. (The forbidden fruit has been partaken and one is out of the Garden of Eden.)

There are seven ways a person can go.

Transition 1. The person can make the transition by modifying dualism drastically to where one no longer trusts authority to have any answers, and they think it will be a long, long time before they will; therefore, there is really no way to be judged by them. Bitterness sets in, as it seems as if rewards don't come by hard work and rightness, but by good expression and arbitrary factors. With an inability to distinguish between abstract thought and "bull", disillusion settles and blinds the person to where they become dangerously cynical and take advantage of any opportunity to get gain.

Transition 2. The person could decide that, if there are so many different answers a depending on individual perspective, that it is impossible for any true judgment; therefore anything goes. All is of equal value. To have an opinion makes it right.

Transition 3. Same as above, except it dawns that there are some facts that, if known, can make for a better choice among the many.

Transition 4. Anger and frustration win out. Instead of becoming cynical and opportunistic, person acts out negatively.

Transition 5. The person is moving closer to accepting relativity. He trusts authorities to have valid grounds for evaluations. To get along, one needs to accept that authorities are using reasonable information in making their answers. So the person tries to discover what it is authorities think and want.

Transition 6. Person realizes that on some matters, reasonable people reasonably disagree, that knowledge is qualitative and is context-dependent. They begin weighing factors and approaches in ways that force comparison of patterns of thought, they think about thinking and this occupies the foreground. But they still tend to want to conform so much that they have trouble thinking independently.

Transition 7. This position between multiplicity and relativity is now closer to relativity. The person sees that thinking relatively isn't just what the authorities he has been dealing have reasoned out and want him to accept, it is the way the world works, in most cases.

NOW UNCERTAINTIES OR DIVERSITIES MULTIPLY UNTIL THEY TIP THE BALANCE AGAINST CERTAINTY AND HOMOGENEITY, PRECIPITATING A CRISIS THAT FORCES THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NEW VISION OF THE WORLD, BE IT ONE MARKED BY CYNICISM, ANXIETY, OR A NEW SENSE OF FREEDOM.

POSITION 5 Relativism discovered.

The person accepts that all thinking is relative for everyone and are much taken with this new perspective. It could be a time of profound anxiety as the person struggles to understand how to make right choices. They decide they can and must do something about this new world view, but they may spend a long time before sensing a need for commitment. They can take responsibility for a task at hand, but don't yet realize they have a responsibility to choose commitments.

THIS POSITION COULD MAKE FOR A PERSON WHOSE AGENCY FOR MAKING SENSE HAS VANISHED ENTIRELY. THEY COULD ALSO REACT BY POSTPONING DECISIONS, FALLING INTO APATHY OR GOING INTO A RAGE. IT COULD GET SO BAD IT COULD APPEAR THE PERSON NEEDS CLINICAL HELP. THE POTENTIAL FOR CYNICISM COULD BECOME EQUALLY ALARMING EDUCATIONALLY.

If the person RETREATS, rage takes over and he loses agency to make sense. He survives by avoiding complexity and ambivalence and regresses to Dualism, position 2, (multiplicity prelegitimate). He becomes moralistic righteous and has "righteous" hatred for otherness. He complains childlike and demands of authority figures to just tell him what they want.

If the person at this point doesn't retreat, he may go into a state of TEMPORIZING. His agency for making sense has vanished, but he postpones any movement. He may reconsign agency to some possible event. If so, Guilt and shame accompany the uneasiness about a failure of responsibility they feel hopeless to cope with.

Or if not either of the above then the person may try to ESCAPE. He becomes apathetic. His agency for making sense has also vanished, but in his feeling of being alienated, he abandons responsibility and uses his understanding of multiplicity and relativism as a way to avoid commitment. He is drifting and has some sense that later he will find himself to be living a hollow life. This drifting with insecurity about "goodness" of his position can make for such a detachment that precludes any meaningful involvement. He starts to rely on impulse. THIS CAN BECOME A SETTLED CONDITION. "For the students reporting their recovery of care,...their period of alienation appears as a time of transition. In this time the self is lost through the very effort to hold onto it in the face of inexorable change in the world's appearance. It is a space of meaninglessness between received belief and creative faith. In their rebirth they experience in themselves the origin or meanings, which they had previously expected to come to them from outside." (page 92 of the Perry Scheme.)

POSITION 6. Commitment Foreseen.

FROM HERE ON THE PERSON WILL FEEL FRUSTRATION IN TOO-STRUCTURED OF AN ENVIRONMENT.

Now the person thinks he is alone in an uncertain world, making his own decisions, with no one to say he is right. He makes choices aware of relativism and accepts that the agency to do so is within the individual. He sees that to move forward he must make commitments coming from within. He foresees the challenge of responsibility and feels he needs to get on with it. He also senses that the first steps require arbitrary faith or willing suspension of disbelief. He knows he needs to narrow his focus, center himself and become aware of internal, what could be called, spiritual strength.

He starts to see how he must be embracing and transcending of: certainty/doubt, focus/breadth, idealism/realism, tolerance/contempt, stability/flexibility. He senses need for affirmation and incorporation of existential or logical polarities. He senses need to hold polarities in tension in the interest of Truth.

He begins to maintain meaning, coherence, and value while conscious of their partial, limited, and contradictable nature. He begins to understand symbol as symbols and acknowledges the time-place relativity of them. He begins to affirm and hold absolutes in symbols while still acknowledging them to be relativistic. He begins to embrace viewpoints in conflict with his own. Now the person has a field-independent learning style, has learned to scan for information, accepts that hierarchical and analytic notes are evidence of sharpening of cognition. He is willing to take risks, is flexible, perceptive, broad, strategy-minded, and analytical.

The TRANSITION position between Position 6, "Commitment Foreseen", and position 7, "Commitments in Relativism developed" is as follows:

Besides the above, the person feels he is lost if he doesn't decide, that if he can once make one decision, everything else will be OK.

POSITION 7. Commitments in Relativism developed.

The person makes first commitment while being aware of Relativism, and has a vivid sense of CLAIMING AND POWER. He now more fully feels that agency is within him and foresees responsibility with excitement and anticipates more empowering as he makes more commitments and choices. The TRANSITION between Position 7 and Position 8, sees the person having made his first commitment but feeling that everything else is still in limbo and he is foreseeing problems coming from trying to juggle responsibility. He senses need to be: wholehearted--but tentative, to be able to fight for his own values--yet respect others. Now, besides the other ways of studying, the person begins to read not to conciliate Authority, but to learn on his own initiative.

POSITION 8. Commitments in Relativism developed continues.

The person makes several more Commitments while realizing he must find balance and establish painful priorities of energy, action and time. He starts to experience periodically serenity and well-being in the midst of complexity. He has a sense of living with trust in the midst of heightened awareness of risk. He accepts fact that order and disorder are fluctuations in experience. He searches for models of knowledgeability and courage to affirm commitment in full awareness of uncertainty. HE STILL NEEDS TO RECOGNIZE THAT EVEN

THE MODEL MUST BE TRANSCENDED, AND HE SENSES HE NEEDS TO DEVELOP IRONY. The TRANSITION between Position 8 and 9 brings trauma. The person feels everything is contradictory and he just can't make sense out of life's dilemmas. But he begins to develop sense of irony and sees he must embrace viewpoints in conflict with his own, not in the old multiplistic way of "separate but equal" or "live and let live" but truly embrace them with what might as well be called "love".

POSITION 9. Commitments in Relativism further developed.

The person now has a developed sense of irony and can more easily embrace other's viewpoints. He can accept life as just that "life", just the way IT is! Now he holds the commitments he makes in a condition of "PROVISIONAL ULTIMACY", meaning that for him what he chooses to be truth IS his truth, and he acts as if it is ultimate truth, but there is still a "provision" for change. He has no illusions about having "arrived" permanently on top of some heap, he is ready and knows he will have to retrace his journey over and over, but he has hope that he will do it each time more wisely. He is aware that he is developing his IDENTITY through Commitment. He can affirm the inseparable nature of the knower and the known--meaning he knows he as knower contributes to what he calls known. He helps weld a community by sharing realization of aloneness and gains strength and intimacy through this shared vulnerability. He has discarded obedience in favor of his own agency, and he continues to select, judge, and build.

Everyone here should just frame this post.

Go ahead, make a copy. Get a frame and put it on your wall.

[KevinG]

The human condition.

(I really wanted to share a Willy Wonka video here but there are embedding problems. Go enjoy Varuka Salt's "I want it now" for the full effect)

Edited January 21, 2012 by DaddyG

[mfbukowski]

Well, you and your tiny Restoration Branch are free to believe that. I can't convince you otherwise. But you are wrong. It's a historical fact.

I think the very notion of "historical fact" needs to be examined very very carefully.

Everyone has an axe to grind.

[Jeff K.]

Jeff K., on 21 January 2012 - 11:32 AM, said:

Nothing of the sort, I have merely stated the obvious.

A prophet can, the warning was for people who cannot.

If you cannot see the color yellow, no matter how I describe it, you will remain incapable of the concept, so to you it will simply not exist. Your deficiency disallows from knowing what it is, how to differentiate from others, indeed, you are lost when others attempt to explain it to you.

Maybe one day you will have a desire to know, a true desire. Right now you only have a desire to disbelieve.

Jeff, sometimes I wish that you'd engage the actual discussion rather than saying I am incapable of grasping concepts and that I have deficiencies and other such pronouncements.

H.

You meant discussion that favored your point of view? Or pointing out the flaws in your point of view?

[mfbukowski]

I haven't read through the entire thread, so forgive me if I repeat a lot of what's been said before. It isn't my view that the best available history proves the Church false (whatever it means for a Church to be true or false anyway). It is my view that the best available evidence is at least not sufficient grounds to believe that the relevent foundational Mormon claims are true and to commit oneself wholeheartedly to a Mormon lifestyle.

Ok so you are not sure what makes a church "true" but you are sure about what makes "foundational claims" worthy of being ordained as "true"?

You knew I was gonna ask this, huh?

[Jeff K.]

Jeff K., on 21 January 2012 - 11:34 AM, said:

Building a relationship kind of rolls right off the tongue. I would suggest you review those who have had a long term relationship and see the sacrifices they have made.

Are you an example of someone who has built a long-term relationship with god?

H.

No just someone who knows empty rhetoric when he sees it.

On a more serious note, you have much to learn. Relationships with god are personal and individual. If you haven't had one, then you might be tempted to ask what type of relationships others have. God speaks to us and guides us to the level that we have that unique relationship with him. I suggest you attempt to sacrifice some of your pride and empty rhetoric and maybe really go out and look for that relationship. Its much more satisfying than what we are reading from anti Mormons these days.

[KevinG]

I would be careful attributing "a desire to disbelieve" to critics and doubters. My own Father is very respectful of Mormonism and my choices but he himself has a difficult time looking past some bad experiences with some religious shysters in his early years. While he is pleased I have been "struck by lighting" he doubts it could ever happen to him.

How much worse would it be to try to find the truth of Mormonism if Mormons themselves were the source of offending behavior?

Mockery or cynicism seems to me to be a natural outgrowth of feeling deceived or kept in the dark. On the other hand at some point in a persons life they need to seek for themselves, on their own terms, without using a false standard of perfection as an excuse or stumbling block.

[LDSToronto]

First - these boards or any other religious/philosophical debating society is a fun place to explore ideas but has no bearing on our knowledge of God. Yo might as well try to get a PhD in nutrition by watching the Food Channel.

Some of my favorite verses are of course the essay on Faith in Alma 32

...but another favorite is D&C 93 where I have come to understand that God being a repository of all truth, encourages us to come unto Him, learn from Him and as we learn to do so we receive more knowledge to the point that we can join Him in understanding all things.

Getting to eternal, unveiled truth requires we have faith in the God that is in posession of it, follow His counsel to become more like Him and in the end receive a fullness of what He has. It is a long (eternal) process and not an event that we should allow flawed histories, random facts and imperfactions of prophets or other brethren to derail us from.

Underlying what you are saying is the fact that one begins to build a relationship with god by reading about him. Is that correct?

I'll buy that. When I started to build a relationship with god, I started by reading about him - well, reading what I was told to read about him. And the first thing I read about god was that he has a body of flesh and bone. He is not a spirit - he is a finite body of matter. So is Jesus Christ.

I believed this to be fact the same way I believe that you have a finite body of matter. Sure, god has a resurrected body, but close enough. This fact was instilled in me because I read the Joseph Smith History and because it was preached many times over in classes. I will even divulge that when I prayed, with a desire to know that god had a body, I felt a warm, tingling feeling in my head and chest. Everything I had read and everything I had been told, and everything that I desired to know, came from the LDS Church and it's authoritative history.

The question I have is this: Why do I now believe that the account found in the Joseph Smith History is not a historically accurate fact? Why is it that when I hear that god has a finite body of matter (perfect as it may be) preached I do not believe it? And why is it when I prayed again, if god had a body of flesh and bone, I did not receive the same answer I had received on every other occasion?

Let's explore this - I don't mind being the guinea pig.

H.

[KevinG]

Underlying what you are saying is the fact that one begins to build a relationship with god by reading about him. Is that correct?

Not quite. The Scriptures are just the class manual. Knowing a real person involves a conversation and listening for answers.

Let's explore this - I don't mind being the guinea pig.

H.

You wont find truth here. It is a real time, open ended experiment.

The nature of God's physical or refined body is not salient to your Salvation; neither is the consistency of the accounts of Jeseph's first vision. Why nibble around the edges while failing to practice what is to be learned in the core curricula?

Edited January 21, 2012 by DaddyG

[KevinG]

oops

Edited January 21, 2012 by DaddyG

[LDSToronto]

Not quite. The Scriptures are just the class manual. Knowing a real person involves a conversation and listening for answers.

You wont find truth here. It is a real time, open ended experiment.

The nature of God's physical or refined body is not salient to your Salvation; neither is the consistency of the accounts of Jeseph's first vision. Why nibble around the edges while failing to practice what is to be learned in the core curricula?

To make clear - I meant that we could use my past experience. The church is my past, not my present or my future.

God's physical body is essential to my salvation. The details of that body can be left to fun speculation; the notion that he has a body is core to LDS belief because a perfected physical body is one of the promises of the resurrection.

If I discover that there are strong reasons to doubt that a perfected physical deity appeared to Joseph, then I have reasons to doubt that a perfected physical body is in my future.

Make no mistake - as I explained before, I felt that I had a relationship with god when I was a faithful believing member of the LDS Church. And yet, historical accounts are what made me see things differently.

This leads right back to where we started: personal revelation from god can not be relied upon to defend one from historical discrepancies because it the source of personal revelation is not necessarily from god.

One can claim they have a long-term relationship with god, but that really requires evidence in order for someone else to believe. If one claims they talk *to* god, that's one thing. But a claim that god talks *to* people, that requires some type of evidence.

H.

[Jeff K.]

Underlying what you are saying is the fact that one begins to build a relationship with god by reading about him. Is that correct?

I'll buy that. When I started to build a relationship with god, I started by reading about him - well, reading what I was told to read about him. And the first thing I read about god was that he has a body of flesh and bone. He is not a spirit - he is a finite body of matter. So is Jesus Christ.

I believed this to be fact the same way I believe that you have a finite body of matter. Sure, god has a resurrected body, but close enough. This fact was instilled in me because I read the Joseph Smith History and because it was preached many times over in classes. I will even divulge that when I prayed, with a desire to know that god had a body, I felt a warm, tingling feeling in my head and chest. Everything I had read and everything I had been told, and everything that I desired to know, came from the LDS Church and it's authoritative history.

The question I have is this: Why do I now believe that the account found in the Joseph Smith History is not a historically accurate fact? Why is it that when I hear that god has a finite body of matter (perfect as it may be) preached I do not believe it? And why is it when I prayed again, if god had a body of flesh and bone, I did not receive the same answer I had received on every other occasion?

Let's explore this - I don't mind being the guinea pig.

H.

[LDSToronto]

LOL!

But seriously, Jeff, I don't understand why you don't engage me on the issues. Are you afraid that if you actually try to have a discussion you won't have much to say? Resorting to depictions of one's foe is always easier, I admit, but you really haven't shown you have much to offer a discussion in terms of valid, progressive commentary.

For what it's worth, I think you are doing an excellent job representing the church. Rarely do I meet a member of the church as rabidly pro-Mormon as you, my friend.

H.

[KevinG]

When confronting a conundrum I try to leave open the possibility that I'm the weak link in the chain of comprehension.

[KevinG]

Rarely do I meet a member of the church as rabidly pro-Mormon as you, my friend.

Remember this is an internet discussion board, not a Sunday School class or Missionary lesson. People tend to take positions and defend them vigorously.

[LDSToronto]

Remember this is an internet discussion board, not a Sunday School class or Missionary lesson. People tend to take positions and defend them vigorously.

Hey, whatever floats people's boats. I feel best when I act the same here as I do in real life. But that's just me.

H.