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mapsedge1. Pray and meditate upon my words, for therein shall ye find wisdom for this, my restored Church in these latter days. 2. By no means shall ye look behind the curtain. Or study history.
Addendum: Or even pay close attention to the leaders. Um...especially the paying attention part.
It was short, a Facebook toss-off aimed at a very specific audience, but there's more to it. That comment, and some pieces of the commentary that follows, is aimed at the heart of the American Restorationist Movement.
Let us begin with my general feelings on the matter of religion in general.
I don't begrudge anyone their beliefs, but I find "blind, unswerving, uncompromising faith" to be extremely tiresome - and sometimes frightening - because it implies an abjuration of responsibility.
For my part, I'm a pantheistic agnostic, by which I mean I believe in a causative force (or forces), and while I'm not willing to suggest that the odd miracle doesn't happen from time to time and I have been known to pray, I don't really think that any god is involved in our lives all day every day. For that matter, I find rather comforting the thought that there isn't some capricious, telepathic, unknowable Something messing about with, say, my coffee machine.
When the light turns green, it does so because that's what it's programmed to do. That it's convenient for me is ... well, convenient. I could say, "Wow, God was good to me on that one!" and ignore all the red lights I hit to that moment, but I don't.
As far as it goes, Faith is a choice.
Two football teams go onto the field. Beforehand, each team prays to win. Each team is comprised of men: some have committed adultery; some, assault; some have stolen; some may have killed; some may even be living saintly lives. One wins. One loses. That's the game, that's how it works. At the end, the winners will thank God, the losers will say, "We just couldn't get it together, Howard. We should have tried harder."
If I win, God is good. If I lose, I suck. Um...No. Not so much.
I prefer a stance of personal responsibility. I suck or I achieve, and in either case it's because of who I am. The furthest I'll go, I think, is that when my life began, let us suppose that God pulled back the plunger and launched my ball into the game. Now it'll bounce and rebound and roll toward the hole at the bottom. The difference is, as the ball, I have choices to make along the way. I choose to live my life according to ideals written down in the Bible because, you know, that's a pretty good system if you can avoid tripping over the minutia, most of which is man-made anyway...
Like I said. faith is a choice. I will raise my children as Christians, because the Christian idea is an easy one: love God, love other people. Don't kill. Don't envy. There's a building they can go to, and a community they can be a part of. I don't see any hypocrisy in that: you have to start somewhere, after all. When they're older and shades of gray have meaning to them, we'll explore the Greater Mysteries.
Now, some specifics from the Mormons/CoC/Temple Lot/Rigdonites/et al, compared to some Biblical parallels.
Dead sea scrolls: got 'em. A 4000 year old copy of Isaiah that survived generations of wars in the Middle East. That's astonishing. Anybody seen it? Plenty.
180 year old golden tablets in peaceful, upstate New York? Gone. Seer stones? Sorry, gone too. Wow, that's convenie---sorry...I mean, unfortunate. Anybody seen them? Supposedly, back in the 1830s, and half of those dudes later recanted. Anyone seen them since? Oh. Wow, bummer.
Jerusalem? Jericho? You can find them on Google Maps, here and here..
Zarahemla? Nope. Independence? Okay, yeah, we know where that is, although Smith's layout of The Temple is somewhat undersized. You'd think God, at whose direction Smith placed the stone markers, would have a better conception of scale, or at least be more optimistic of the future membership of His Church.
Shall we talk about American Indians being descended from the lost tribes of Israel? Only if we're willing to ignore DNA and what it has to say on the subject. (Short answer: they're not.)
The restoration is built upon the words of men with agendas. (Most religions are, when you get more than one or two people involved.) My own father, an elder in the Temple Lot who preached from the Book of Mormon, suggested that any time Smith needed something done, he'd "rear back and have a revelation." Many of them were rewritten after the fact or are so transparently convenient that it defies credibility, a tradition that continues into our own time:
Prophet's got no sons? Okay, so after one thousand, seven-hundred-fifty-two years* of patriarchal gender discrimination, God says women can officially serve in the priesthood**.
Lucky thing, that.
* Starting with 1984; subtracting 32AD, the commonly agreed date of the crucifixion; adding back 200 years, since women were active during the first couple of centuries.
** For the record, my objection is the convenience, not the gender.
It should also be noted that the LDS church supported women in the priesthood as early as 1843, though it wasn't called "ordaining" as it was for men, and women so endowed had no official status within the church.
Addendum: Or even pay close attention to the leaders. Um...especially the paying attention part.
It was short, a Facebook toss-off aimed at a very specific audience, but there's more to it. That comment, and some pieces of the commentary that follows, is aimed at the heart of the American Restorationist Movement.
Let us begin with my general feelings on the matter of religion in general.
I don't begrudge anyone their beliefs, but I find "blind, unswerving, uncompromising faith" to be extremely tiresome - and sometimes frightening - because it implies an abjuration of responsibility.
For my part, I'm a pantheistic agnostic, by which I mean I believe in a causative force (or forces), and while I'm not willing to suggest that the odd miracle doesn't happen from time to time and I have been known to pray, I don't really think that any god is involved in our lives all day every day. For that matter, I find rather comforting the thought that there isn't some capricious, telepathic, unknowable Something messing about with, say, my coffee machine.When the light turns green, it does so because that's what it's programmed to do. That it's convenient for me is ... well, convenient. I could say, "Wow, God was good to me on that one!" and ignore all the red lights I hit to that moment, but I don't.
As far as it goes, Faith is a choice.
Two football teams go onto the field. Beforehand, each team prays to win. Each team is comprised of men: some have committed adultery; some, assault; some have stolen; some may have killed; some may even be living saintly lives. One wins. One loses. That's the game, that's how it works. At the end, the winners will thank God, the losers will say, "We just couldn't get it together, Howard. We should have tried harder."
If I win, God is good. If I lose, I suck. Um...No. Not so much.
I prefer a stance of personal responsibility. I suck or I achieve, and in either case it's because of who I am. The furthest I'll go, I think, is that when my life began, let us suppose that God pulled back the plunger and launched my ball into the game. Now it'll bounce and rebound and roll toward the hole at the bottom. The difference is, as the ball, I have choices to make along the way. I choose to live my life according to ideals written down in the Bible because, you know, that's a pretty good system if you can avoid tripping over the minutia, most of which is man-made anyway...
Like I said. faith is a choice. I will raise my children as Christians, because the Christian idea is an easy one: love God, love other people. Don't kill. Don't envy. There's a building they can go to, and a community they can be a part of. I don't see any hypocrisy in that: you have to start somewhere, after all. When they're older and shades of gray have meaning to them, we'll explore the Greater Mysteries.
Now, some specifics from the Mormons/CoC/Temple Lot/Rigdonites/et al, compared to some Biblical parallels.
Dead sea scrolls: got 'em. A 4000 year old copy of Isaiah that survived generations of wars in the Middle East. That's astonishing. Anybody seen it? Plenty.180 year old golden tablets in peaceful, upstate New York? Gone. Seer stones? Sorry, gone too. Wow, that's convenie---sorry...I mean, unfortunate. Anybody seen them? Supposedly, back in the 1830s, and half of those dudes later recanted. Anyone seen them since? Oh. Wow, bummer.
Jerusalem? Jericho? You can find them on Google Maps, here and here..
Zarahemla? Nope. Independence? Okay, yeah, we know where that is, although Smith's layout of The Temple is somewhat undersized. You'd think God, at whose direction Smith placed the stone markers, would have a better conception of scale, or at least be more optimistic of the future membership of His Church.
Shall we talk about American Indians being descended from the lost tribes of Israel? Only if we're willing to ignore DNA and what it has to say on the subject. (Short answer: they're not.)
The restoration is built upon the words of men with agendas. (Most religions are, when you get more than one or two people involved.) My own father, an elder in the Temple Lot who preached from the Book of Mormon, suggested that any time Smith needed something done, he'd "rear back and have a revelation." Many of them were rewritten after the fact or are so transparently convenient that it defies credibility, a tradition that continues into our own time:Prophet's got no sons? Okay, so after one thousand, seven-hundred-fifty-two years* of patriarchal gender discrimination, God says women can officially serve in the priesthood**.
Lucky thing, that.
* Starting with 1984; subtracting 32AD, the commonly agreed date of the crucifixion; adding back 200 years, since women were active during the first couple of centuries.
** For the record, my objection is the convenience, not the gender.
It should also be noted that the LDS church supported women in the priesthood as early as 1843, though it wasn't called "ordaining" as it was for men, and women so endowed had no official status within the church.