Literal And Liberal Mormons

[Calm]

I liked Poll's article more before I actually read it, over thirty years ago. For distinguishing different kinds of Mormons, I find schemes like the Myers-Briggs types, particularly the contrast between SJ and NT types, and the Perry Scheme for Cognitive and Ethical Growth far richer (16 types in Myers-Briggs versus two from Poll, and 9 stages of cognitive growth in the Perry Scheme) and much more helpful.

I would agree. I think any designation that divides a multimillion member group into just two categories or even a continuum based on one attribute is too simplified to be helpful in analysis and more likely to lead to inaccurate assumptions.

[Rivers]

I also think the labels are a bit silly but I certainly acknowlede that there is a spectrum of conservative and liberal thinking people within the church. This is the same with every religion.

[Daniel Peterson]

Sister Skagg's writings should probably simply be read as her personal musings, and not as an attempt at a sholarly analysis of a social construct, inviting "peer review."

I quite enjoyed her musings, perhaps because I'm sometimes somewhat muddled in my thinking as well.

Oh, I quite agree.

My point, really, is that they shouldn't be pressed into the service of a foreign agenda.

[ERMD]

I find Poll's Liahona metaphor to be flawed on many levels. Specific writing appeared on the Liahona, it pointed a straight and undeviating course to be followed, and it worked miraculously according to the faith and obedience of those following it. This seems inconsistent with the dichotomy he is trying to create.

Sorry for the derail.

[Kevin Christensen]

Excellent post, Kevin.

SNIP

Thanks Daniel. I think quite a lot can be done with John Boyd's ideas in our intellectual playground.

Kevin Christensen

Bethel Park, PA

[Daniel Peterson]

Yes. Thanks. I'll have to look at him.

I find Poll's Liahona metaphor to be flawed on many levels.

I didn't like it much when it first came out -- and, yes, I'm old enough, and was paying attention enough at the time, to have been aware of it almost as soon as it appeared -- and I never use it today.

But everything is relative, and it's much less noxious (largely because it's much less cynically propagandistic) than the silly "Chapel Mormon"/"Internet Mormon" dichotomy.

[Duncan]

I see the liahona as helping me, telling me where the iron rod is! because heaven knows I get off the path sometimes!

[Loran Blood]

Rather, the distinction that Sister Skaggs appears to be making focuses mostly on reactions to the social teachings of the Church. She is, she says, "a strong advocate for traditional marriage," and she observes that "the legalization of gay marriage seems to be one of the divisive issues upon which you can differentiate between a liberal and literal Mormon."

There's that word liberal again. She seems to intend it more or less in a political sense.

But is John Sorenson a "liberal" on gay marriage? I don't know. Though I've known him very well -- both socially and as a fellow "apologist" -- for at least twenty years, I can't recall the topic ever coming up. Is Bill Hamblin a political "liberal"? Not to read his e-mails. Is there any reason whatever to believe that people affiliated with FAIR and/or the Maxwell Institute are, to any exceptional degree, out of sync with Church leadership on issues related to marriage and social values? None that I've ever seen. In fact, I wouldn't be particularly surprised to learn that they're more in line with the Brethren on these matters than the Church membership at large.

Sister Skaggs describes "Internet Mormons" as "prideful," and this is often a part of the critics' depiction of those associated with FAIR and the Maxwell Institute, though it seems more hostile slander than demonstrable fact. Moreover, she says that "Internet Mormons" are "rebellious" and "oppositional to many Church policies and leaders," which also accords with the critics' use of the distinction to attack FAIR and the Maxwell Institute. But does it actually fit those affiliated with those two organizations? I'll take the Maxwell Institute as a test case: Men who have served or are serving as officers of the Maxwell Institute have also served and/or currently are serving as members of the Church's curriculum-writing committees and on scripture-translating teams and as bishops and stake presidents and mission presidents and temple presidents. Yet the Brethren don't generally call "rebellious" men who oppose "many Church policies and leaders" to such positions, which seems to suggest that the leadership of the Church doesn't view the leadership of the Maxwell Institute as being "rebellious" and "oppositional." And, just to be clear once again, there is absolutely nothing in Sister Skaggs's article to suggest that she has the leadership of FAIR and the Maxwell Institute even remotely in mind when she writes of "Internet Mormons."

In other words, although Kathryn Skaggs has picked up the terms Chapel Mormon and Internet Mormon, she doesn't seem to be deploying them in the same way that their originator and his imitators do. Hence, I submit, she offers those critics little or no actual support.

Whether or not the critics who love to wield the "Chapel Mormon"/"Internet Mormon" dichotomy as a weapon against believers are crowing with delight at Sister Skaggs's article, I don't know. I've tried, with considerable success, to ignore them for quite a while now. But I expect that they will, if they haven't already. This little post is, I suppose, a kind of preemptive shot across their bow. Not that it will do any good.

My general impression was that Sister Skaggs was being a bit too broad, if I'm reading this correctly, in her understanding of the term "chapel" and "internet" to describe the two camps (a completely artificial designation, in my view, intended, as I've always maintained, and if I may borrow a term from Dr. Sowell regarding similar tendencies outside the Church, as a label of intellectual self congratulation for the apostate and neo-orthodox Annointed within Mormondom generallly) and, in some sense, playing into the hands of those who originated the terms.

While I'm a TBM, its also true that I must be considered an "internet" Mormon, given the sheer amount of time I've spent in more than a decade reading, researching, discussing, and debating online with both supportes and detractors of Church teachings and culture. The idea that LDS who spend a good deal of time on the web studying LDS historical/doctrinal issues for apologetic purposes are somehow, by that definition, more "intellectual" than those who may not is, I think, a missapprehension. Before there ever was an Internet, there were...books. Before I was ever an "Internet" Mormon, I was a book Mormon; I was a Nibley Mormon and a library Mormon. I was also a Christian bookstore Mormon, who used to spend weekends in Christian bookstores pouring over their anti-Mormon section.

The Internet is a wonderful, wonderful tool, but the basic dichotomy the critics have created here, that between cynical, worldly-wise intellectuals and docile, simple minded pitchfork toting TBMs on the other is, for them, a useful psychological reference to their own self image, but of little use otherwise. Though I no longer attend the goings on at Shade's board (save for a now and then foray into the Celestial room for a continuation of some serious discussions with a few people there who appear actually given to that kind of thing), it would hardly be a stretch to come to the conclusion (and any time spent even here will leave a similar impression within certain topic areas) that LDS "neo-orthodoxy" and dissent from core teachings is strongly associated with philosophical/ideological "liberalism," with emphasis on both economic and social issues. As I've written elsewhere, Prop 8 and the homosexual marriage issue was a "fork in the road" for many Latter day Saints, that demanded a choice be made of the "choose you this day" variety.

Political "liberalism," however, is but a manifestation of a deeper general worldview that need not always fall under the umbrella of politics. Even without their political ramifications, support for things such as homosexual marriage, convienence abortion on demand, various feminist doctrines, attempts to meld postmodern ideas with gospel teachings and concpets, sixties/seventies sexual revolution philosophy, non-literal, naturalistic sociological interpretations of BofM and BofA origins ("inspired fiction" accounts of the origins of our modern sciptural canon outside the Bible), preoccupation with the grafting of certain economic doctrines onto the tame olive tree etc., are all indicative of the manner in which generationally bound philosophcal concerns and infatuations, and perhaps an overemphasis on intellectect and scholarship at the expense of other facaulties (such as revelation, faith, and imagination) can come to dominate the approach of intellectually inclined LDS to studying and defending the gospel and Church.

There was a time, not that long ago (in the immediate pre-Internet age and in its formative stages) when the main destination of choice for comitted critics after leaving the Church seems to have been evangelical Protestantism, and in particular, its fundamentalist forms. Perhaps this was an artifact of the sheer aggressiveness and dominance of the evangelical "counter-cult" in the culture at the time, and the fact that much anti-Mormon material one encountered (if not all of it) was of the "born again" Christian variety, but over the last decade and probably more, I've seen a shift away from "I left the Church and found the God of the Bible" to "I left the Church and now I'm "liberated" from its retrograde, reactionary, racist/sexist/homophobic bigotries and anti-intellectual philistinism.

This manifests itself in a bit milder form as LDS "neo-orthodoxy," in which attempts are made to "bore from within," so to speak, and alter core Church doctrines and truth claims by degrees while maintaining a respectable pose of "orthodoxy" as to the Church's fundamental legitimacy ("Yes, Joseph lied about the whole origin of the Book of Mormon, the First Vision, Moroni, the gold plates, and the rest of it, but don't feel bad, its still inspired fiction and contains nice teachings and principles and we can still sit around the campfire and sing Kumbaya after we've deconstructed and demythologized the Church's historical claims about the BofM (and BofA). Don't worry, be happy. The Church is still true even though nothing mentioned in the BofM actually happened. And by the way, those miracles Jesus is said to have performed in the NT are pretty shakey, scientifically.")

I think the real danger to members of the Church, at this jucture, are not the Ankerbergs and the Deckers, but the neo-orthodox secularizers within the Church who really do have intellectual talent and know how to wield the written word (and their academic credentials) to greatest effect.

Edited February 4, 2012 by Loran Blood

[Senator]

I think the real danger to members of the Church, at this jucture, are not the Ankerbergs and the Deckers, but the neo-orthodox secularizers within the Church who really do have intellectual talent and know how to wield the written word (and their academic credentials) to greatest effect.

Yet so many of these "dangerous" individuals feel drawn to the church and desire to serve in many capacities.

Just what are we going to do with them?

Edited February 4, 2012 by Senator

[Daniel Peterson]

A good post, Br'er Blood.

As to what we should "do with them," I'm not inclined to toss them out of the Church unless they somehow make that necessary. Many are good people. And I welcome their service. But I don't want them publicly teaching those particular deviations from Church doctrine. And I'll try as hard as i can to persuade them, directly or indirectly, that the Church's actual teachings are preferable to watered-down, merely symbolic, sentimentalized but non-literal versions of its claims.

Even without their political ramifications, support for things such as homosexual marriage, convienence abortion on demand, various feminist doctrines, attempts to meld postmodern ideas with gospel teachings and concpets, sixties/seventies sexual revolution philosophy, non-literal, naturalistic sociological interpretations of BofM and BofA origins ("inspired fiction" accounts of the origins of our modern sciptural canon outside the Bible), preoccupation with the grafting of certain economic doctrines onto the tame olive tree etc., are all indicative of the manner in which generationally bound philosophcal concerns and infatuations, and perhaps an overemphasis on intellectect and scholarship at the expense of other facaulties (such as revelation, faith, and imagination) can come to dominate the approach of intellectually inclined LDS to studying and defending the gospel and Church.

Just so my point isn't lost, I think I'll repeat it.

Those are the very sorts of things, I think, that Sister Skaggs had in mind. And some critics are now claiming that she was referring, at least in significant part, to people affiliated with FAIR and the Maxwell Institute.

But there is, so far as I'm aware, not a shred of evidence to suggest that people affiliated with FAIR and the Maxwell Institute are given, more than the active membership of the Church as a whole, to support for same-sex marriage, abortion on demand, extreme feminism, postmodernism (Louis Midgley and a few others have been accused of postmodernism, but the accusation grossly distorts their actual position and seriously misunderstands postmodernism), sexual permissiveness, or leftist economics (I am, if anything, a libertarian on economic matters, and many of my friends, though not all, are more or less in my camp on this), let alone to support for non-literal views of the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham as "historical fiction."

This is why I conclude that Sister Skaggs was not referring to people affiliated with FAIR and the Maxwell Institute. I can see absolutely nothing in what she wrote to indicate that she had either FAIR or the Maxwell Institute in mind.

"Yes, Joseph lied about the whole origin of the Book of Mormon, the First Vision, Moroni, the gold plates, and the rest of it, but don't feel bad, its still inspired fiction and contains nice teachings and principles and we can still sit around the campfire and sing Kumbaya after we've deconstructed and demythologized the Church's historical claims about the BofM (and BofA). Don't worry, be happy. The Church is still true even though nothing mentioned in the BofM actually happened. And by the way, those miracles Jesus is said to have performed in the NT are pretty shakey, scientifically."

Yes, that seems to be the kind of view against which Sister Skaggs is reacting. And it's diametrically opposed to the position of everybody I know who is seriously connected with FAIR and/or the Maxwell Institute.

[selek1]

Yet so many of these "dangerous" individuals feel drawn to the church and desire to serve in many capacities.

Just what are we going to do with them?

The danger lies not in their desire to affiliate with the Church and to serve, but in their desire to re-make it in their image.

A secular example of this tendency can be found in the many ex-Californians who fled to Colorado, Utah and other states in order to escape the stifling regulations and exhorbitant costs California had imposed.

These costs and regulations (at every level from home owner's associations to state government) were attributal- by their own admission- to excessive government meddling in private property rights and high taxation.

Yet these same people promptly turn around and attempt to re-make the political landscape in their new home nearly identical to that which they fled- often justifying themselves by saying "That's how we did it in California."

Where they have succeeded, the net result has been a lessening of the very freedoms and opportunities that attracted them in the first place.

Not surprisingly, this has led to a lot of friction between those prefered the freedoms and those who desire the "sophisticated" lifestyle which had driven them out.

-------------------------------------------------------------

I don't see that any faithful Latter-day Saint has a problem worshipping God alongside anyone else- be he liberal, conservative, heathen, pagan, or Democrat.

Once they start attempting to either teach their own Gospel, or to attempt to redefine ours to suit their prejudices or infatuations, then a line must be drawn.

Or as my grandmother was fond of saying, "Too many cooks spoil the soup."

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints exists to teach Gospel truths, not to serve as a quilting circle for the pastiche ideas of pseudo-intellectual would-be theologians.

Those who prefer a meeting-of-the-minds theology to the unvarnished truth are going to be sorely disappointed- either because they find their ideas rejected in favor of God's, or because they have succeeded in polluting the true Church into something unrecognizable.

Edited February 4, 2012 by selek1

[JeremyOrbe-Smith]

Hmm.

I think the Internet/Chapel dichotomy is one of the silliest things I've ever heard.

I have no insurmountable objections to homosexual marriage.

I think the Law of Consecration is about as "Liberal" and Socialist" a practice as you can get, and I weary of those who insist on the absurd tautology that we can't live it now merely because we don't live it now.

I oppose abortion on demand.

I consider myself a "feminist", but I'm also a "masculinist", and even moreso by far, a humanist. An extreme humanist, actually, which is what I believe the Gospel is - such an extreme humanism that every human who has ever existed has the capacity to attain Godhood if they are loving enough and serve others enough.

I think postmodern ideas about translation and non-inerrant scriptures have a place in our theology.

I believe Moroni was a real person, and that there really was a migration from the Old World to the New, and that there really were plates of gold which Joseph Smith really did receive from an angel he really did see and which he really did translate through the power of God.

I believe that there was nothing "supernatural" about this process - that transcendental "supernaturalism" is in fact a philosophical impossibility, and that everything which occurs in reality is "natural", even if we do not possess the scientific capability to understand some events in a naturalistic way at the present time.

I'm skeptical that Adam and Eve were literally the first people ever created on this earth. I'm skeptical that there was no death on this earth before the Fall. I'm skeptical that the people who would shout at me for "demythologizing" the scriptures into "mere" parables and symbolic stories would have a problem with "mere" parables and symbolic stories if we were talking about the Whore of Babylon, the Good Samaritan, the Lost Sheep, the Prodigal Son, the Vineyard, etc..

I think that if the Bible was accurate when it says that God commanded Joshua not to leave anything breathing alive, and to viciously murder women and children, that such a God would be the Devil. Thankfully, Joseph Smith said quite clearly that many things in the Bible do not accord with the Revelations he had received, and that many plain and precious truths were lost, and designing and corrupt priests and errors of transmission and translation had corrupted the content of the Bible. Which is pretty much what modern scholarship says.

I don't believe that one can separate "intellect" and "scholarship" from "revelation" and "faith" since each requires the other. I think Joseph Smith hungered for knowledge and wisdom from whatever source he could find.

I think it is a false dichotomy to think that the "intellectually inclined" are somehow less reliant on faith and revelation.

I believe that if the Book of Mormon is not true, then Protestantism is an extremely weak alternative.

I believe the church is unfortunately retrograde in some areas. I think many members were (and in some cases, still are) racist and sexist and homophobic (I know some older folks in my ward who still believe the absurd crap about blacks being cursed with dark skin because they were less valiant in the preexistence). I know for a fact that there are strains of "anti-intellectual philistinism" within it, because I've dealt with them myself.

Since I don't require perfection of others before I associate myself with them, I try my best not to let those things diminish the good things I find in the Church, such as the progressive, racially-inclusive, gender-empowering, non-homophobic aspects. I focus on the doctrine of Eternal Progression, and the At-one-ment of all radically Free Uncreated Intelligences, and Joseph Smith's searching, yearning, Enlightenment and science -friendly personality, and the utterly astounding, amazing, beautiful, empowering doctrines restored in the Pearl of Great Price, etc.

I also read and reread the bit in the D&C talking about how inasmuch as they err and search out Wisdom, the Saints will be corrected and receive knowledge from time to time, even from "the best books," which - far from originating from within the church - we have to "search out" from outside. I believe that we should be at the forefront of science, and that Revelation comes not just from scriptures and personal prayer, but from the laboratory and in the test tube and search and research. I believe that bigotry and superstition are often times in the way of the prosperity of the Church.

I believe that describing those who have lost faith in the historical accuracy of the Book of Mormon as blithely singing Kumbaya is needlessly insulting.

I think labeling others as "neo-orthodox" presumes that you are among the "orthodox," whereas I think it don't prove that a man is not a good man because he errs in doctrine. I think the entire notion of "orthodoxy" about what one believes is alien to the gospel (certainly the word itself does not appear in the standard works). I think that if there is a truth in heaven, earth, or hell, it belongs to the Latter-Day Saints, it is ours, we claim it.

I believe that there are things to learn from the secular world, and there is no danger to the church from learning from outside sources. Terryl Givens has some fantastic lines about that in his FAIR presentation for 'When Souls Had Wings':

I believe that the charge that some people are "remaking the church in their image" is merely evidence that they are not conforming to what one's own vision of the Church should be, despite the fact that you don't have any more authority that they do to determine what the Church "looks like."

I believe that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints exists to exalt others through service, and it is composed of a grand and beautifully-patterned quilting circle of people seeking personal revelation within the greater tapestry of eternal communal progression.

Personally, I prefer a meeting-of-the-minds theology, in which we seek out the best of books and teach each other, for all have not every gift given unto them; for there are many gifts, and to every man is given a gift by the Spirit of God. To some is given one, and to some is given another, that all may be profited thereby. I think that what few truths we do have will be expanded and refined in the future because the Lord "will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God" which we currently do not have.

Please, someone put a label on me so I'm safely categorizable.

[Loran Blood]

A good post, Br'er Blood.

As to what we should "do with them," I'm not inclined to toss them out of the Church unless they somehow make that necessary. Many are good people. And I welcome their service. But I don't want them publicly teaching those particular deviations from Church doctrine. And I'll try as hard as i can to persuade them, directly or indirectly, that the Church's actual teachings are preferable to watered-down, merely symbolic, sentimentalized but non-literal versions of its claims.

I think that's about the best that can be said about it, and is obviously consistent with gospel teachings (the longer they stay within the church, the longer the Spirit may "rub off on them," so to speak). The wheat and the tares are to grow together, for a very long time, and if I understand the revelations correctly, that means both without and within the church. My chief concern regarding "neo-orthodoxy" is the imprimateur of legitimacy, or spiritual high ground it attempts to take on the basis that the critic of a central Church doctrine (the historicity of the BofM and BofA, that plural marriage was not a mistake or a personal obsession of Joseph Smith, the depriveledging of monogamous heterosexual marraige etc.) is a practicing LDS, goes to church, holds callings etc. and is not an "apostate" in the traditional sense (been excommunicated or stomped out of the Church and has his name removed from membership records). While in no sense do I support excommunicating people for dissenting views, when they seek to insert those vews into gospel doctrine classes, write books sold to the public and to the Saints advocating personal apostasy from key concepts and teachings, or try to influence the CES to overhaul entire sections of teaching manuals to reflect a particularistic intellectual take on a subject, a problem arises.

Just so my point isn't lost, I think I'll repeat it.

Those are the very sorts of things, I think, that Sister Skaggs had in mind. And some critics are now claiming that she was referring, at least in significant part, to people affiliated with FAIR and the Maxwell Institute.

I'm not sure at all that I see her referring to anyone at Maxwell or FAIR or to the apologetic project specifically. It would seem a bit odd that the primary defenders of the Church from an intellectual/scholarly perspective would be singled out for a dressing down by a TBM (assuming she really knows much about or has perused the work of the online apologetic world to any great degree). I think perhaps she may have certain specific personalities in mind (I won't name any names) who defend the the Church on point x but not on point y or z. There are "cafateria" Mormons, some of whom have tangled with me with gusto, who like to think of themselves as in some sense apologists but who bristle intensely when it is pointed out to themt that certaom of their views are, in essense, apostate (in the sense of having abandoned or relinquished support for the teaching or doctrine in question and the Church's legitimacy in teaching it). I've been shown Mormon "credentials" (Temple recommeds, callings, service in Bishoprics etc.) more times than I can remember by people who really don't accept much of what the Church teaches, and can in fact be downright hostile to many of its central claims.

But there is, so far as I'm aware, not a shred of evidence to suggest that people affiliated with FAIR and the Maxwell Institute are given, more than the active membership of the Church as a whole, to support for same-sex marriage, abortion on demand, extreme feminism, postmodernism (Louis Midgley and a few others have been accused of postmodernism, but the accusation grossly distorts their actual position and seriously misunderstands postmodernism), sexual permissiveness, or leftist economics (I am, if anything, a libertarian on economic matters, and many of my friends, though not all, are more or less in my camp on this), let alone to support for non-literal views of the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham as "historical fiction."

With a few notable exceptions, I'd probably have to agree with this (as to your friends, most LDS I've known over the years would probably identify as "conservative," but my strong leanings into Austrian economics places me in territory that sometimes needs explaining even to people who consider themselves as free market conservatives).

This is why I conclude that Sister Skaggs was not referring to people affiliated with FAIR and the Maxwell Institute. I can see absolutely nothing in what she wrote to indicate that she had either FAIR or the Maxwell Institute in mind.

Agreed. Again, there are some apologists loosely associated with FAIR (they have posted extensively at the messege board on the past, at a minimum, or have attended FAIR conferences) that I think she may have in mind who defend the Church broadly speaking, but have also provoked controversy and return fire with highy ideosyncratic readings of scripture or by questioning fundamental Church doctrines/policy. I really don't know because I don't know what her actual background fund of knowledge is regarding the apologetic community out here in cyberspace. I think, however, the people she is really referring to are key players on some other boards, who I will not mention, but who we all know, who attack the Church as "faithful" members or who have left the church, so they claim, due to irreconcilable intellectual dissonance and who play the courageous, maverick intellectual role.

Yes, that seems to be the kind of view against which Sister Skaggs is reacting. And it's diametrically opposed to the position of everybody I know who is seriously connected with FAIR and/or the Maxwell Institute.

I've always sincerely hoped that was the case. I know I should't take alot that is bandied about in here as common to the core of the apologetic movement as a whole.

[Rivers]

Please, someone put a label on me so I'm safely categorizable.

I would say that you're orthodox since you embrace many of Joseph Smith's most beautiful teachings and reject many teachings of Bruce R. McConkie and JFS.

[altersteve]

Please, someone put a label on me so I'm safely categorizable.

How about, "A disciple of Jesus Christ"?

[Loran Blood]

I would say that you're orthodox since you embrace many of Joseph Smith's most beautiful teachings and reject many teachings of Bruce R. McConkie and JFS.

Many?

D&C 84:44 (and is it time to bash BRM yet again?)

Edited February 4, 2012 by Loran Blood

[mfbukowski]

Many?

D&C 84:44 (and is it time to bash BRM yet again?)

Cheesh, didn't you get the memo?

It's every hour ON THE HALF.

Some people just can't be on time- I don't know what it is.

Edited February 5, 2012 by mfbukowski

[KevinG]

I am all for punishing those who abuse the word literal. Like, literally all of them!

[selek1]

I am all for punishing those who abuse the word literal. Like, literally all of them!

But is "literal" actually being abused?

According to the Penultimate Bastion of Wisdom (also known as Wikipedia)-

Literal may refer to:

• Literal and figurative language, taken in a non-figurative sense
  
• Literal translation, the close adherence to the forms of a source language text
  
• Literal legal interpretations also referred to as Strict constructionism and the literal or plain meaning rule
  
• Terminal symbol in regular expressions and in descriptions of formal grammars
  
• Literal (mathematical logic), an elementary proposition or its negation in logical expressions
  
• Literal (computer programming), a notation for representing a value within programming language source code
  
• Literal (magazine), a quarterly bilingual magazine
  
• A typographical error, normally to one letter or number
  
• A chunk of input data that is represented "as is" in data compressed using data compression
  

It seems to me that most (mis)uses of "literal" or "literally" conform to the fifth and to the final usage listed above.

Unlike the unfathomable and intolerable misuse of your, you're, and yore (which merit a literal and unending afterlife of torment) the correct usage of "literal" depends upon what one is trying to communicate, does it not?

My head hurts.....

[stemelbow]

Hmm.

I think the Internet/Chapel dichotomy is one of the silliest things I've ever heard.

I have no insurmountable objections to homosexual marriage.

I think the Law of Consecration is about as "Liberal" and Socialist" a practice as you can get, and I weary of those who insist on the absurd tautology that we can't live it now merely because we don't live it now.

I oppose abortion on demand.

I consider myself a "feminist", but I'm also a "masculinist", and even moreso by far, a humanist. An extreme humanist, actually, which is what I believe the Gospel is - such an extreme humanism that every human who has ever existed has the capacity to attain Godhood if they are loving enough and serve others enough.

I think postmodern ideas about translation and non-inerrant scriptures have a place in our theology.

I believe Moroni was a real person, and that there really was a migration from the Old World to the New, and that there really were plates of gold which Joseph Smith really did receive from an angel he really did see and which he really did translate through the power of God.

I believe that there was nothing "supernatural" about this process - that transcendental "supernaturalism" is in fact a philosophical impossibility, and that everything which occurs in reality is "natural", even if we do not possess the scientific capability to understand some events in a naturalistic way at the present time.

I'm skeptical that Adam and Eve were literally the first people ever created on this earth. I'm skeptical that there was no death on this earth before the Fall. I'm skeptical that the people who would shout at me for "demythologizing" the scriptures into "mere" parables and symbolic stories would have a problem with "mere" parables and symbolic stories if we were talking about the Whore of Babylon, the Good Samaritan, the Lost Sheep, the Prodigal Son, the Vineyard, etc..

I think that if the Bible was accurate when it says that God commanded Joshua not to leave anything breathing alive, and to viciously murder women and children, that such a God would be the Devil. Thankfully, Joseph Smith said quite clearly that many things in the Bible do not accord with the Revelations he had received, and that many plain and precious truths were lost, and designing and corrupt priests and errors of transmission and translation had corrupted the content of the Bible. Which is pretty much what modern scholarship says.

I don't believe that one can separate "intellect" and "scholarship" from "revelation" and "faith" since each requires the other. I think Joseph Smith hungered for knowledge and wisdom from whatever source he could find.

I think it is a false dichotomy to think that the "intellectually inclined" are somehow less reliant on faith and revelation.

I believe that if the Book of Mormon is not true, then Protestantism is an extremely weak alternative.

I believe the church is unfortunately retrograde in some areas. I think many members were (and in some cases, still are) racist and sexist and homophobic (I know some older folks in my ward who still believe the absurd crap about blacks being cursed with dark skin because they were less valiant in the preexistence). I know for a fact that there are strains of "anti-intellectual philistinism" within it, because I've dealt with them myself.

Since I don't require perfection of others before I associate myself with them, I try my best not to let those things diminish the good things I find in the Church, such as the progressive, racially-inclusive, gender-empowering, non-homophobic aspects. I focus on the doctrine of Eternal Progression, and the At-one-ment of all radically Free Uncreated Intelligences, and Joseph Smith's searching, yearning, Enlightenment and science -friendly personality, and the utterly astounding, amazing, beautiful, empowering doctrines restored in the Pearl of Great Price, etc.

I also read and reread the bit in the D&C talking about how inasmuch as they err and search out Wisdom, the Saints will be corrected and receive knowledge from time to time, even from "the best books," which - far from originating from within the church - we have to "search out" from outside. I believe that we should be at the forefront of science, and that Revelation comes not just from scriptures and personal prayer, but from the laboratory and in the test tube and search and research. I believe that bigotry and superstition are often times in the way of the prosperity of the Church.

I believe that describing those who have lost faith in the historical accuracy of the Book of Mormon as blithely singing Kumbaya is needlessly insulting.

I think labeling others as "neo-orthodox" presumes that you are among the "orthodox," whereas I think it don't prove that a man is not a good man because he errs in doctrine. I think the entire notion of "orthodoxy" about what one believes is alien to the gospel (certainly the word itself does not appear in the standard works). I think that if there is a truth in heaven, earth, or hell, it belongs to the Latter-Day Saints, it is ours, we claim it.

I believe that there are things to learn from the secular world, and there is no danger to the church from learning from outside sources. Terryl Givens has some fantastic lines about that in his FAIR presentation for 'When Souls Had Wings':

I believe that the charge that some people are "remaking the church in their image" is merely evidence that they are not conforming to what one's own vision of the Church should be, despite the fact that you don't have any more authority that they do to determine what the Church "looks like."

I believe that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints exists to exalt others through service, and it is composed of a grand and beautifully-patterned quilting circle of people seeking personal revelation within the greater tapestry of eternal communal progression.

Personally, I prefer a meeting-of-the-minds theology, in which we seek out the best of books and teach each other, for all have not every gift given unto them; for there are many gifts, and to every man is given a gift by the Spirit of God. To some is given one, and to some is given another, that all may be profited thereby. I think that what few truths we do have will be expanded and refined in the future because the Lord "will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God" which we currently do not have.

Please, someone put a label on me so I'm safely categorizable.

I quote the whole thing because that was one of my favorite posts I've ever read on any board.

[Loran Blood]

I believe that the charge that some people are "remaking the church in their image" is merely evidence that they are not conforming to what one's own vision of the Church should be, despite the fact that you don't have any more authority that they do to determine what the Church "looks like."

A broad brush assertion such as this simply isn't intellectually serious or defensible, in my estimation. If every single claim of "remaking the church in one's own image" or of "ark steadying" is, by definition, nothing more than a projection of personal doctrinal bias onto the the Church, then no possible ideosyncrisy or even clear corruption of Church doctrine or principle can ever be seriously confronted and scrutinized, let alone, in more severe cases, called what it is and given a proper doctrinal and philosophcal burial. I think it is actually Givens here who, unwittingly perhaps, by claiming the projection of internal psychological material onto others by members who notice odd, shall we say, "neo-orthodox" concepts being bandied about, has projected and laid bare his own internal predilections. We shall see a bit of this expressed below:

I believe that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints exists to exalt others through service, and it is composed of a grand and beautifully-patterned quilting circle of people seeking personal revelation within the greater tapestry of eternal communal progression.

Here we go again. We've been here before and it appears that there is, still growing and festering among a small group of LDS intellectuals, this preoccupation with something called "communal" salvation. Now, of course, the actual restored gospel of Jesus Christ teaches no such thing. Each individual is saved exactly and precisel as an individual, irrespective of, and, as Brigham Young so eloquently said, in spite of, earth and hell, and whether anyone else wishes to go with you into the Celestial Kingdom. We are saved in community, there is not doubt, but not as a community - not communally - and the difference in implication here is vast. No collective can keep a single individual out of the Celestial Kingdom, nor can any unrepentant sinner gain that same Kingdom by dint of association with a community made up of righteous individuals, save he repents of his sins, accepts and lives the gospel, and becomes a righteours individual member of that community.

I can see why, given just this sublte statement alone, Givens may have misgivings about members who notice iconoclastic interpretations of doctrine or scripture among other members, at least when its being spread around as doctrine or as, in my experience, a higher or more advanced, enlightened interpretation of a doctrine or scripture, and ususally those that, for some reason, even the Brethren have not "seen the light" with respect to.

I think this is also perhaps a textbook example of why we, as Latter day Saints, should stay close to and follow the Brethren, and keep a salt shaker in our pockets at every FAIR conference, as all things stated there are not gold, and on some occasions, perhaps less than lead.

Personally, I prefer a meeting-of-the-minds theology, in which we seek out the best of books and teach each other, for all have not every gift given unto them; for there are many gifts, and to every man is given a gift by the Spirit of God. To some is given one, and to some is given another, that all may be profited thereby. I think that what few truths we do have will be expanded and refined in the future because the Lord "will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God" which we currently do not have.

This sugary philosophizing is all well and good, but it quite succinctly oversteps the fact that we have living oracles in our day, within the Church, who have a mantel and calling of authority as "prophets, seers, and revelators" that extends beyond there own lives to the entire Church and its membership. We are to teach, yes, each other out of the best books, but with rigorous care beyond what has been revealed and established by those living oracles, as well as those in the past. Whatever Givens may actually believe here, we are not free to "preach, teach, expound, and exhort" our own gospel, as strikes our fancy or flatters our intellectual pride, or allows us to posture before others as in some sense more "enlightened" or spiritually evolved than they.

Please, someone put a label on me so I'm safely categorizable.

I have long suspected that, to at least some degree, the flight from willingness to be "labeled" is as much a desire to remain a moving target as a fear of being pidgenholed.

Edited February 5, 2012 by Loran Blood