Defense of Truth

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...

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...