Defense of Truth

Wow, has it really been this long since I've posted anything?  I have GOT to make this more regular... So the whole Romney leading the Republican pack thing has generated questions about Mormonism, some from genuinely curious people, others from gotcha artists trying to get attention by making the candidate stumble or handle something gauchely.  For the most part, Romney's been equally artful at closing down the situation, usually with a terse "I'm not answering questions about my faith right now?" On the right, however, whenever situations make the news, the inevitable anti-Mormon attack squad comes out, followed by the defenders (some equally combative, and others simply standing up for their beliefs in a peaceful non-contentious manner).  Myself, I probably fall in between.  In a face-to-face situation, I generally judge if the person with tough questions is genuinely curious or not, and if they are, I'll take all the time necessary to help them understan...

Just a short post today (funny how even when I say that I end up pushing 1500 words)… I found it incredibly odd that in the account of Joseph Smith's martyrdom PBS chose not to include a detail that they could have exploited to great effect to forward their framing of the man as a power-hungry con artist: at the time of his martyrdom he was in possession of a handgun. Of course it is highly illegal to have smuggled a pistol into the jail where he was being held when he was shot, so this could have been good incriminating evidence not only to frame JS as fundamentally unethical, but also to frame the church leadership (who never mention this detail in the official account either) as secretive, exploitative, and cult-like. On the other hand, however, they do miss a great opportunity to understand the man via analysis of his last act in mortality. They DO correctly state, and surprisingly word-for-word from the official account, that JS died exclaiming "O Lord, my God" falli...

So given the economic nature of the basic threat discussed in my last post, and given that perceived threats on both sides led both sides to "defend" (whether that be preemptively or purely defensively depended heavily on the context, which itself was perceived differently by either side) quite vigorously and with arms as they felt necessary, is it really contextually appropriate to depict Joseph Smith as some sort of American religious Napoleon wannabe "obsessed with power" as they claim, and trying to set up a very martial sort of theocracy? PBS played a bit of a contextual dance of bait and switch when they moved from discussing the persecution of the Saints as a whole, to the frame of Joseph Smith as architect and directing authority of societal experiments each requiring greater centralization of power and each successively failing ever more miserably. (I just watched the segment one more time, and I am frankly continually awestruck at how easily learned histor...

The PBS special gave much ado to revisions and changes to the story of the First Vision so as to challenge the LDS belief in the official version of the foundational narrative of their faith. The basic charge: Why revise the truth? Only guilty parties need change their stories, right? Under this framework, hostile witness testimony can be completely honest about the facts of the successive revisions with this framework, and therefore no personal bias need be evident since the framework itself does the work of charging that Joseph Smith was a megalomaniac successively deluding himself in his desires to delude others by ever more grandiose and detailed accounts which served to consolidate his power and others' belief in him. And neutral observers are aimed to conclude that from their position the JS official version is vastly less credible than ignorant Mormons believe, and that the explanation of the scholars is much more compelling than that of the believers. So let me ask you: h...

It's a travesty that even serious thinkers refuse to engage debates on faith. For many who have faith in logic, reason, and scientific principles (you'll excuse the circular definition for the purposes of illustration here, I hope), faith has come to mean whatever is beyond their purview—something that's simply un-provable by empirical, objective means. But if faith truly can be defined as a motivating belief in a truth of which the evidence is not readily discernable, then the truths behind it can be verified, are acquired by a "scientific" process of hypothesis testing and confirmation of truth or rejection of falsehood, and it is therefore missing an opportunity to grow in knowledge and intelligence to simply bracket certain areas of inquiry as unfit for experiment, debate, or even serious thought. Defining faith as a principle of action based on truth implies that it's more like what most would call knowledge than the unsubstantiated hokey claims of irrati...

As a budding scholar dealing with the literature of black Africa, I'd like to think I have some understanding of the risk I take in revealing some relevant elements of my identity here in this inaugural post: I'm a white anglo-saxon protestant heterosexual male. This is how I might identify myself if I believed in the categories all those adjectives represent as if they were pre scriptive. I guess as a de scription, they're as accurate as anything, but one of them is entirely debatable: protestant. The point is that I feel a group solidarity with Christians, and more specifically with non-Catholics. My affiliation with the larger group of Christian as well as my distanciation from the sub-group Catholic is entirely doctrinally based--I have no biases against any given Christian sect other than the disagreements I have with them based on their interpretation of Scripture and the key doctrines found therein. However, I'm also Mormon. Born and raised. Oh yeah, I had a peri...