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...

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...

Pres. Monson on Choice : "Although in our journey we will encounter forks and turnings in the road, we simply cannot afford the luxury of a detour from which we may never return." "I plead with you to make a determination right here, right now, not to deviate from the path which will lead to our goal: eternal life with our Father in Heaven." "Ye shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left. Ye shall walk in all the ways which the Lord your God hath commanded you." (citing Moses in Deuteronomy) Detours, deviations, turning to the right or left. The metaphor of the path chosen, and the consequences which inevitably accompany the choice can't be stressed enough. You pick up one end of a stick, you've also got the other end. The problem is that with the veil in place (LDS terminology for necessary forgetting an immortal spirit goes through as part of the process of its coming to a test in mortality) all paths are necessarily blind ones. ...

Dinesh D'Souza, fellow at the Hoover Institute and frequent columnist on conservative and religious topics, posts a recent article on Townhall.com in which he praises Stanley Fish, the widely cited literary critic, for taking atheists to task via deconstructionism. Fish tells the story of a man who seemingly abandons all (family, friends, who are beckoning him to return to more reasonable/knowable pursuits) to pursue a light which claims to be able to grant him eternal bliss. The deconstructive argument then shows how the atheist position is part of that narrative and depends on it, rather than standing outside it as it claims to be. I will give you one comment from an atheist and my reply: Atheist Comment: Dinesh writes "Fish comments, 'What this shows is that the objections Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens make to religious thinking are themselves part of religious thinking.'" Same old same old, Christians framing atheism in theistic terms that assumes the very con...

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 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...

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...