Defense of Truth

Excuse me a little bold language here, without meaning to be harsh, but firm: I have serious doubts as to the qualifications of the historians cited in the PBS special "the Mormons". The same guy who claimed that there was no archeological evidence either for the story of the Exodus or for the Book of Mormon (topic I dealt with here ), made the fantastic claim that the 1830s in America were a time of crisis for the nuclear family. After an hour on various Google searches, I can find no evidence to substantiate that claim. Gold rushes around that time period DID cause a number of families in the East to be more or less temporarily broken, but I don't believe census records on the number of households containing nuclear families reduced so drastically as to support the idea that Joseph Smith's insistence on the sealing of families could be reasonably seen as a reaction to it. And the other female historian makes the nonsensical claim that the question of the celestial s...

It's been enlightening for me reflect upon some of the different types of marital relationships that I observed in such a multicultural tapestry as the Côte d'Ivoire. I say multicultural because there are over 60 different languages spoken by the different peoples within the nation's borders, and though many of their traditions are similar if not analogous, there are also competing varieties of modern European and Eastern traditional types of marital arrangements there also. There was an amazing complexity compared with what I had always assumed was the almost binary choice of cohabitating couples in Western cultures (marry, or live together, with few other socially sanctioned arrangements possible), and yet there seemed to be no confusion. If there was any confusion, it didn't come from the culture, but rather from recent successive changes in the state's legal definition of marriage. As with many African nations there existed a long history of traditional marriage...

Please excuse me the incredible hubris of deigning to disagree with René Descartes: the heart of science is NOT doubt, it is doubt's opposite--faith. The scientific method describes the process of learning any empirical truth as beginning with enough curiosity to ask a question, then to doubt your own intuitions or the established "truth" enough to force yourself to experiment and prove whether your hypothesis is correct or incorrect. It's the self-doubt, or doubt of intuition, or even previous explanations (doubt of which leads to curiosity) that is meant when scientists talk about scientific skepticism. The problem, for me, is that I think it is falsely labeling the desire to find out for certain if something is true as a doubt, rather than as a form of faith. Is faith not the evidence of things not seen, the substance of things hoped for? If you hope to know something, and invest thought and effort into designing an experiment that would reveal your hypothesis as e...

Have you ever played 20 questions with one of those "stories with holes"? I remember as a kid I had a teacher pull some of us aside to challenge us with these while the rest of the class worked on something we had already mastered. The idea was to tell a story with seemingly neutral facts and with a key part of the narrative missing so that by asking 20 or less yes/no questions you could deduce the key to the narrative. Almost always, the seemingly neutral description contained a critical clue that triggered the game-players' assumptions in a way that led them down a false path, and hindered their deductive process until they could hone in on the assumption, question it, and break out of the consequences of the assumption. Maybe a few concrete examples, if I can remember some: A man is driving in his car and is killed by a gunshot, but there's no hole in his vehicle. Most people start asking about whether the windows were open (nope, all closed up), and about passenge...

I've been promising part 2 on polygamy for a long time, but it's such an in depth topic that I postpone thought on it so I can give it it's full due in time and treatment. And today's no exception: I need an easy one. PBS's modus operandi for the entire 4-hour documentary "The Mormons" is to frame elements of LDS belief and practice as controversial, then proceed to give an accurate, but cursory glance at what Mormons believe followed by an extended critique or contrary view. In the case of the legions of young missionaries in the field today, the controversy was more contrived and less sinister than most other issues, in my view. Essentially, PBS was following the tack that so many people sacrificing so much of their youth, time, freedom, and money, were obviously numb of mind and victims of a controlling leadership, whose effectiveness at creating such a deep social pressure to conform bordered on Stalinist. OK, maybe I'm exaggerating a little there,...

I've got to confess, with the Mountain Meadows Massacre I'm close to factless. I know the general context of the tragedy, and it wasn't too unfairly presented in the PBS series the Mormons. The upshot is that a group of Mormons responded to their local leader (I think he was a Stake President?) when he got spooked for no good reason about a caravan of peaceful settlers who were guilty by association from the accident of having come from Arkansas where a prominent church leader had been recently assassinated. The leader ordered an armed conflict that was apparently carefully premeditated to involve a local Indian population so as to make it seem like it wasn't his own barbarism attacking them. When it was revealed that it wasn't ONLY Indians attacking them, the LDS leaders devised a way to wipe out witnesses, won the skirmish, captured the settlers, and then ordered all but children younger than 8 years old to be massacred. Granted this was the wild, wild West at the...

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 mantra of most investigative methods is: follow the money. Economics purports to be the science of human decision-making, and sheds powerful explanatory light on many individual and group motivations. A passing mention of communal living in the early days of the Restoration of the Church is given in the PBS special, but the opposition of the Church's neighbors to the Church is more commonly couched in terms of irreconcilable theological differences. To my way of thinking, relegating the socio-economic to the background and foregrounding religious motivations for opposition to the church is entirely cart-before-the-horse. I grew up in an area of Canada where Hutterite colonies were fairly common. The Hutterites are a branch of Mennonite Protestants similar in religious and social philosophy and practice to the Amish of Eastern Pennsylvania. They dress in plain clothing they sew themselves in 19th Century styles and patterns. They limit their contact with non-believers, and consu...

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...

Okay, we're going to have to hit this polygamy issue several times to really put it to rest. Again, I have NOT thought this one all the way through yet, but my preliminary hypothesis goes something like this: Whatever God says is right, therefore, if He commands it, polygamy must be not only acceptable, but true, right, and good as a principle of eternal happiness. However, my understanding of HOW it might make one happy in the sense of bringing a durable, eternal joy, is severely lacking. I can demonstrate to you how the principle of love, marriage, and having children can bring joy, but I'm at a loss as soon as another wife steps into the picture. It is a principle that I am not just relieved, but ecstatic to know is not currently a principle mortals need concern themselves with. I've seen my share of polygamous families in Africa, and to the extent that such families are even functional (providing all individuals involved with the love and support it takes to fulfill the...

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...