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Showing posts with the label blind faith

Faith is a vector

The scientific process of hypothesis testing and experimentation to arrive at knowledge describes exactly the process of faith building, because faith is "the evidence of things not seen". Atheists and the like interpret Paul's words to mean somehow blind belief stands in for evidence, but that's just backwards from his plain meaning. The thing is that in this world there are some things so difficult to prove fully, even though there's plenty of evidence for them, that people can go a long way in their ongoing process of faithful experimentation before they are brought to a point where the evidence no longer supports their hypothesis. I daresay the vast majority of humankind has died without understanding basic truths about God, about His requirements for Celestial life, etc. LDS doctrine makes room for these. The Book of Mormon conceives of life as a testing period, just as the Bible obviously does. And it talks plainly of a waiting place, a time between death a...

Mountain Meadows and the Danger of Faith in Man

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...