Mormonism Obsessed with Christ

Christus Statue - Temple Square

Mocking Mormonism is one of the last frontiers of verbal lawlessness to be untouched by the vigilante powers of political correctness. What other group is ridiculed equally by Christians and secularists—and not just any kind of Christian or secularist but the most fervent and hard core? Fervent Christians see in Mormonism a mirror distorting their own faith, reflecting an image strangely recognizable yet recognizably strange. Hard-core secularists think Mormonism is the best example of the strangeness and danger inherent in all religious belief. Deriding Mormonism pulls off the neat trick of making the devout and the godless feel as if they are on the same side.

I too used to think of Mormonism as little more than an exotic and abnormal addition to Christianity. When I taught Mormon history to my students, I emphasized its remarkable spirit of endurance, its organizational savvy, and the sheer scope of its religious imagination. Yet I regret to say that I did not try to hide my condescension.

I have come to repent of this view, and not just because I came to my senses about how wrong it is to be rude toward somebody else’s faith. I changed my mind because I came to realize just how deeply Christ-centered Mormonism is. Mormonism is more than Christianity, of course—most obviously by adding the Book of Mormon to the Bible—and that makes it much less than Christianity as well. Nevertheless, the fact that Mormonism adds to the traditional Christian story does not necessarily mean that it detracts from Christianity to the point of denying it altogether.

After all, what gives Christianity its identity is its commitment to the divinity of Jesus Christ. And on that ground Mormons are more Christian than many mainstream Christians who do not take seriously the astounding claim that Jesus is the Son of God.

Mormonism is obsessed with Christ, and everything that it teaches is meant to awaken, encourage, and expand faith in him. It adds to the plural but coherent portrait of Jesus that emerges from the four gospels in a way, I am convinced, that does not significantly damage or deface that portrait.

I came to this conclusion when I read through the Book of Mormon for the first time. I already knew the basic outline: that it recounts the journey of a people God led from Jerusalem to the Americas six hundred years before the birth of Christ. In America, they split into two groups, the good guys (the Nephites) and the bad guys (the Lamanites), who battled each other until there were no good guys left—except for Moroni (Mormon’s son), who buried the chronicles of their wars and then, in 1823, told a farm boy from upstate New York where to find them.

When I actually read this book, however, I was utterly surprised. I was not moved, mind you. The Book of Mormon has to be one of the most lackluster of all the great works of literature that have inspired enduring religious movements. Yet it is dull precisely because it is all about Jesus. There are many characters in this book, but they change as little as the plot. Nobody stands out but him. “And we talk of Christ, we rejoice in Christ, we preach of Christ, we prophesy of Christ, and we write according to our prophecies, that our children may know to what source they may look for a remission of their sins” (2 Nephi 25:26). And not just Jesus: A whole gospel in all of its theological details—right down to debates about baptism, the relationship of law to grace, and the problem of divine foreknowledge—is taught to the people of the New World centuries before Jesus was even born.

Christians have long interpreted the Old Testament in terms of the New—reading Christ between the lines, so to speak—but Smith went one big step further. He replaced the figurative with the figure himself. The truth of Jesus is eternal, Smith thought, so it should not be surprising to learn that Christ was made known in times and places beyond our imagination.

Long before his birth in Bethlehem, Jesus was eager to reveal the most specific details of his future life and ministry. Nephi, for example, who is said to have written the first two books of the Book of Mormon and to have been part of the migration from Jerusalem, already knew all about Jesus: “For according to the words of the prophets, the Messiah cometh in six hundred years from the time that my father left Jerusalem; and according to the words of the prophets, and also the word of the angel of God, his name shall be Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (2 Nephi 25:19). Likewise, a Nephite king named Benjamin declared around 124 b.c., “And lo, he shall suffer temptations, and pain of body, hunger, thirst, and fatigue, even more than man can suffer, except it be unto death; for behold, blood cometh from every pore, so great shall be his anguish for the wickedness and the abominations of his people. And he shall be called Jesus Christ” (Mosiah 3:7–8).

Every page of the book prepares the way for its stunning climax, which is a literal appearance of Jesus to the ancient peoples of America. For Joseph Smith, the ascension of Christ after the resurrection makes possible his descent into the Americas.

Non-Mormons, of course, do not believe that Jesus visited the Americas, but why should they be troubled if Mormons tell stories about Jesus that seem far-fetched? Imagine the following scenario. Your family gathers at the funeral of your dearly beloved grandfather, a world traveler. Your relatives begin telling the familiar stories about his great adventures. Soon, however, you notice another group of mourners at the other end of the room. As you eavesdrop on them, you realize they are talking about your grandfather as if they knew him well, yet you have never heard some of the stories they are telling. These new stories are not insulting to his memory, though some ring more true than others. Indeed, this group seems to have as high an opinion of your grandfather as you do. What do you do?

Do you invite them over to meet your family? That is a tough call. Many of your relatives will dispute the credibility of these stories, and some might make a scene. Others who think the stories are true will feel left out—why didn’t Grandfather tell us? The funny thing is, though, that this other group knows all of the stories your family likes to tell about the deceased, and the stories they add to the mix sound more like mythic embellishments of his character than outright lies. Clearly, the two groups have a lot to talk about!

However you decide to handle the situation, there is no need for you to change your love for your grandfather. There is also no need for you to react to this other group’s love for your grandfather as if they are intentionally threatening or dishonest. Whether or not you decide to expand your family to include this group, you can still welcome them as promoters of your grandfather’s memory. And the more you love your grandfather, the more you will be drawn to discover for yourself whether these new stories make any sense.

Of course, Jesus Christ is not your grandfather, and the stories we tell about him are grounded in Scripture, not family lore. Still, the Book of Mormon raises a question for Christians. Can you believe too much about Jesus? Can you go too far in conceiving his glory? Let me answer that question by posing another. Isn’t the whole point of affirming his divinity the idea that one can never say enough about him? And if Smith’s stories are not true, aren’t they more like exaggerations or embellishments than outright slander and deceit?

I am not denying that the Mormon Jesus is different from the Jesus of traditional Christianity. Mormons connect the atonement more with the Garden of Gethsemane than with the cross, since they think that is where his greatest agony took place (Luke 22:44). The Book of Mormon places the birth of Jesus in Jerusalem, much to the delight of biblical fundamentalists who use such discrepancies to score debating points.

The most significant difference is that Mormons believe that Jesus Christ was never purely immaterial. Smith developed his materialistic interpretation of the spiritual realm mainly after the Book of Mormon, but it is anticipated in that book’s most extraordinary scene. In an appearance to the unnamed brother of Jared, Jesus is so sensitive to the overwhelming impression of his corporeal form that he reveals only his little finger. Jared’s brother says, “I saw the finger of the Lord, and I feared lest he should smite me; for I knew not that the Lord had flesh and blood” (Ether 3:8). Later Jesus shows Jared’s brother his whole body, which, it turns out, is a pre-mortal spirit body, comprised of a finer material substance than anything known on earth.

Christianity has always affirmed the goodness of matter and the integrity of the human body, but Mormonism offers that Christian dogma gone mad. For Smith, Christ’s pre-existent form was as physically real as we are today. Christianity teaches that the incarnation happened in a particular place and time, but for Smith, taking Hebrews 13:8 (“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever”) very literally, the Son has always been Jesus. The body of Jesus Christ is the eternal image of all bodies, spiritual and physical alike. The incarnation is a specification (or material intensification) of his body, not the first and only time that God and matter unite.

The eternal embodiment of the divine is metaphysically audacious, and it explains why Mormonism is so inventive. Mormon metaphysics is Christian metaphysics minus Origen and Augustine—in other words, Christianity divorced from Plato. Mormons are so materialistic that they insist that the same unchanging laws govern both the natural and the supernatural. They also deny the virgin birth, since their materialism leads them to speculate that Jesus is literally begotten by the immortal Father rather than conceived by the Holy Spirit.

By treating the spiritual as a dimension of the material, Smith overcomes every trace of dualism between this world and the next. Matter is perfectible because it is one of the perfections of the divine. Even heaven is merely another kind of galaxy, far away but not radically different from planet earth. For Mormons, our natural loyalties and loves have an eternal significance, which is why marriages will be preserved in heaven. Our bodies are literally temples of the divine, which is why Mormons wear sacred garments underneath regular clothing.

This should not be taken lightly. The Mormon metaphysic calls for the revision of nearly every Christian belief. Still, not all heresies are equally perilous. If Gnosticism is the paradigmatic modern temptation—spiritualizing Jesus by turning him into a subjective experience—Mormonism runs in the exact opposite direction. If you had to choose between a Jesus whose body is eternal and a Jesus whose divinity is trivial (as in many modern theological portraits), I hope it would be an easy choice.

Stephen H. Webb is professor of religion and philosophy at Wabash College.

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2012/01/mormonism-obsessed-with-christ

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ironrodart/4799321854/

The Church in the Wilderness (see Revelation 12:6)

"Slough of Despond" from John Bunyans',
The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come

And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, ...

...that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days. (Revelation 12:5-6)

"I have heard some people say—“If God revealed himself to men in other days, why not reveal himself to us?”

•  I say, why not, indeed, to us?

 Why should not men in this day be put in possession of the same light, truth and intelligence, and the same means of acquiring a knowledge of God as men in other ages and eras have enjoyed?

• Why should they not?
• Who can answer the question?
• Who can solve the problem? 

Who can tell why these things should not exist today, as much as in any other day?

• If God is God and men are men, 
• if God has a design in relation to the earth on which we live, and 
• in relation to the eternities that are to come;

if men have had a knowledge of God in days past,

• why not in this day? 
• What good reason is there why it should not be so? 

Say some—“Oh, we are so enlightened and intelligent now. In former ages, when the people were degraded and in darkness, it was necessary that he should communicate intelligence to the human family; but we live in the blaze of Gospel day, in an age of light and intelligence.”

Perhaps we do; .....
                      ......I rather doubt it.

I have a great many misgivings about the intelligence that men boast so much of in this enlightened day.

• There were men in those dark ages who could commune with God, and who, by the power of faith, could draw aside the curtain of eternity and gaze upon the invisible world. 
• There were men who could tell the destiny of the human family, and the events which would transpire throughout every subsequent period of time until the final winding-up scene. 
• There were men who could gaze upon the face of God, have the ministering of angels, and unfold the future destinies of the world.

If those were dark ages

• I pray God to give me a little darkness, .....
• .....and deliver me from the light and intelligence that prevail in our day;

for as a rational, intelligent, immortal being who has to do with time and eternity,  ...

• ....I consider it one of the greatest acquirements for men 
• to become acquainted with their God 
•  and with their future destiny.

 These are my thoughts and reflections in relation to these matters."

Old and New Tabernacles S.L.C Utah

Discourse by Elder John Taylor, 

delivered in the New Tabernacle, 

Salt Lake City,

 Sunday Afternoon,

 Sept. 7, 1873.

On the circle; and the Cross

Cross-in -circle grave marker, 875-925

Set in a niche in the west wall of Hexham Abbey

"….For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller.  But the cross though it has it at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without changing.  The circle returns up its self and is bound.  The cross opens its arms its arms to the four winds; it is a sign post for free travelers."

(G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy page 50)

John Taylor, on ancient men and the light they offered

I have heard some people say—“If God revealed himself to men in other days, why not reveal himself to us?” I say, why not, indeed, to us? Why should not men in this day be put in possession of the same light, truth and intelligence, and the same means of acquiring a knowledge of God as men in other ages and eras have enjoyed? Why should they not? Who can answer the question? Who can solve the problem? Who can tell why these things should not exist today, as much as in any other day? If God is God and men are men, if God has a design in relation to the earth on which we live, and in relation to the eternities that are to come; if men have had a knowledge of God in days past, why not in this day? What good reason is there why it should not be so? Say some—“Oh, we are so enlightened and intelligent now. In former ages, when the people were degraded and in darkness, it was necessary that he should communicate intelligence to the human family; but we live in the blaze of Gospel day, in an age of light and intelligence.” Perhaps we do; I rather doubt it. I have a great many misgivings about the intelligence that men boast so much of in this enlightened day. There were men in those dark ages who could commune with God, and who, by the power of faith, could draw aside the curtain of eternity and gaze upon the invisible world. There were men who could tell the destiny of the human family, and the events which would transpire throughout every subsequent period of time until the final winding-up scene. There were men who could gaze upon the face of God, have the ministering of angels, and unfold the future destinies of the world. If those were dark ages I pray God to give me a little darkness, and deliver me from the light and intelligence that prevail in our day; for as a rational, intelligent, immortal being who has to do with time and eternity, I consider it one of the greatest acquirements for men to become acquainted with their God and with their future destiny. These are my thoughts and reflections in relation to these matters.

Discourse by Elder John Taylor, delivered in the New Tabernacle, Salt Lake City, Sunday

Discourse by Elder John Taylor, delivered in the New Tabernacle, Salt Lake City, Sunday Afternoon, Sept. 7, 1873.

Reported by David W. Evans.

On the Independence of truth

 Truth, independent in it own sphere.

I have faith  I can discern or recover truth. 

Both Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin had the faith that they could construct a repeatable standard model of the world.  They calibrated their model.as they gathered more data. This is the scientific method.

Truth is independent of organized religion.

The word religion come from the Latin root "religio" or the proper way to worship. Its polar opposite is "superstitio". These words under the Roman form of worship refer not to an individual act but to an attitude towards that act. "religio" is proper and "superstitio" is improper.

Adjust the model to meet the facts. 

Both science and religion require adjustment to the standard model as more truth is discerned.

Static or Orthodox models can lead to "superstitio".

Static models do not adjust to meet new revealed truth.  Truth revealed to another is not truth revealed to me. I maintain "religio" and avoid "superstitio" by opening communications with the source of revealed truth. (See Thomas Paine).

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=religion
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=superstitious&allowed_in_frame=0
http://steven-bassett.blogspot.com/2012/08/on-infidelity-and-authority-of-reason.html

On a testimony of doubt

If I have a spiritual gift it is perhaps an immense capacity for doubt. I have long lived in the Mormon Diaspora, growing up in Jerry Falwell’s Lynchburg, Virginia. My closest colleagues for twenty years have been a devout Catholic, an observant Jew, a seminary student turned Buddhist, and a born again Episcopalian. My wife Fiona is a lapsed Catholic, lover of the temple and all things beautiful, and fervent disciple of the weeping God of Enoch. I have, in other words, spent my life in intimate association with devout believers from myriad religious traditions; I hear my own professions of faith through their ears, and examine my own religious presuppositions with an eye to theirs.

In the course of my spiritual pilgrimage, my innate capacity for doubt led me to the insight that faith is a choice. That the call to faith is a summons to engage the heart, to attune it to resonate in sympathy with principles and values and ideals that we devoutly hope are true, and have reasonable but not certain grounds for believing to be true. I am convinced that there must be grounds for doubt as well as belief, for only in these conditions of equilibrium and balance, equally “enticed by the one or the other,” is my heart truly free to choose belief or cynicism, faith or faithlessness. Under these conditions, what I choose to embrace, to be responsive to, is the purest reflection of who I am and what I love. I choose to affirm that truthfulness of the Restored Gospel for five principal reasons.

1. Joseph Smith revealed the God I am most irresistibly drawn to worship.
2. He gave the only account of moral agency that to my mind can justify the horrific costs of our mortal probation.
3. He provided a story of the soul’s origin and destiny that resonates with the truth and the appeal of cosmic poetry.
4. The fruits of the gospel are real and discernible.
5. The restoration is generous in its embrace.

My two literary heroes are Dostoevsky’s Ivan from The Brothers Karamazov, and Mark Twain’s Huck Finn. Confronted with the God of their contemporaries, they chose to renounce the ticket rather than bow to the cruelty or the injustice of an omnipotent God.

I could never worship or adore a God who recoils in jealous insecurity because “man has become as one of us.” I could never desire to emulate the divine nature of a sovereign who does not save all of those who are in his power to save. And I could never love a God “without body, parts, or passions,” who does not himself feel love, or grief, or joy, or gladness. Christianity gave us the only God who was willing to die on behalf of his creation, as my wife has taught me. Joseph Smith added to that conception a God who intends our full participation in “the divine nature,” who will bestow upon every single one of his children all that they “are willing to receive,” and who made himself vulnerable enough to weep at our pain and misery. That is a God I am powerfully drawn to and gladly worship.

To say that without moral independence “there is no existence” is to make agency the essential constituent of our human identity. To my understanding, this means that God’s intervention in our personal and collective destiny is self-circumscribed by his reverence for that fact. And any gift he gives us which we do not choose to receive is an abrogation of that agency. This is the only theodicy or beginning to a theory of human salvation that makes any sense to me.

I sense, but do not know for certain, that the spiritual part of my being has an eternal past. As an explanatory paradigm, this view has awesome power. It provides a compelling reason for the intuitive sense of right and wrong, the familiar ring of myriad truths, friendships that erupt full-blown, hunger for a God we have not known in mortality, and a hundred moments of déjà vu in the presence of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. And I cannot begin to fathom what it means to “become like God,” but Enoch gave us a glimpse. It means to love with infinite cost, to have a heart that “swells wide as eternity” in order to be filled with joy and sorrow alike. It is a prospect that sobers more than excites, but it is a prospect nonetheless that the pilgrimage of parenthood affirms and foreshadows.

The gospel works. I have seen its power to transform human life. I can affirm, as Gerard Manley Hopkins did, that “Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes, not his, to the Father, through the features of men’s faces.” New converts and returned missionaries, who in their testimonies unexpectedly speak “with the tongues of angels,” a simple eloquence not of their own resources. Parting words of a beloved friend near death, before whom the veil grew suddenly thin to transparency. Lives redirected and imbued with sudden beauty, to rival anything narrated by a Dickens or a Hugo (whose stories of redemption resonate with their own transcendent power and familiarity).

Finally, the restored gospel is a gospel of liberality and generosity. It took my former-Catholic wife Fiona to teach me that the church John saw did not disappear; it retreated into the wilderness. Joseph Smith saw the Restoration as a bringing of that church back out of the wilderness, a restoration of the “ancient palace” now reduced to ruins, a reassembling of all the good and beautiful in the world and in the Christian tradition, that had been lost or corrupted from Eden forward. The church I love has invisible borders, and reminds me of what was written of Spinoza, that “he rejected the orthodoxy of his day not because he believed less, but because he believed more.” Or as Joseph wrote, “it feels so good not to be trammeled.”

For myriad reasons, but these five principally, I choose and affirm this path in order better to live as what Elder Uchtdorf calls “a disciple of the gentle Christ.”

http://mormonscholarstestify.org/1904/terryl-l-givens

on being human and divine

Completely Human

When a bookstore owner told me a woman had stomped into his shop, angry, slamming one of my books on the counter, I knew exactly what he was talking about.  I wrote that Jesus may have had pimples.  He may have had bony knees.  But I said, “One thing’s for sure, he was, while completely divine, completely human.”

There’s something safe about a God who never had calluses. There’s something majestic about a God who never scraped his elbow.  But there’s also something cold about a God who cannot relate to what you and I feel.

Rejection?  He felt it.  Temptation?  He knew it.  Loneliness?  He experienced it.  Death?  He tasted it.  And stress?  He could write a best-selling book about it.

Why did he do it?  One reason.  So that when you hurt, you’ll go to him and let him heal you!

“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Hebrews 4:15.”

(Max Lucado,  In the Eye of the Storm)

On the right to be wrong.

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.  ….. If a man has a right to vote, has he not the right to vote wrong?  If a man has the right to choose his wife, has he not the right to choose wrong?  I have a right to express the opinion which I am now setting down; but I should hesitate to make the controversial clam that this proves the opinion to be right.

(The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Volume 20, page 505)

On a catholic ideal unrealized

The task of modern idealists indeed is made much too easy for them by the fact that they are always taught that if a thing has been defeated it has been disproved. Logically, the case is quite clearly the other way. The lost causes are exactly those which might have saved the world. If a man says that the Young Pretender would have made England happy, it is hard to answer him. If anyone says that the Georges made England happy, I hope we all know what to answer. That which was prevented is always impregnable; and the only perfect King of England was he who was smothered. Exactly because Jacobitism failed we cannot call it a failure. Precisely because the Commune collapsed as a rebellion we cannot say that it collapsed as a system. But such outbursts were brief or incidental. Few people realize how many of the largest efforts, the facts that will fill history, were frustrated in their full design and come down to us as gigantic cripples. I have only space to allude to the two largest facts of modern history: the Catholic Church and that modern growth rooted in the French Revolution.

When four knights scattered the blood and brains of St. Thomas of Canterbury, it was not only a sign of anger but of a sort of black admiration. They wished for his blood, but they wished even more for his brains. Such a blow will remain forever unintelligible unless we realise what the brains of St. Thomas were thinking about just before they were distributed over the floor. They were thinking about the great mediaeval conception that the church is the judge of the world. Becket objected to a priest being tried even by the Lord Chief Justice. And his reason was simple: because the Lord Chief Justice was being tried by the priest. The judiciary was itself sub judice. The kings were themselves in the dock. The idea was to create an invisible kingdom, without armies or prisons, but with complete freedom to condemn publicly all the kingdoms of the earth. Whether such a supreme church would have cured society we cannot affirm definitely; because the church never was a supreme church. We only know that in England at any rate the princes conquered the saints. What the world wanted we see before us; and some of us call it a failure. But we cannot call what the church wanted a failure, simply because the church failed. Tracy struck a little too soon. England had not yet made the great Protestant discovery that the king can do no wrong. The king was whipped in the cathedral*; a performance which I recommend to those who regret the unpopularity of church-going. But the discovery was made; and Henry VIII scattered Becket's bones as easily as Tracy had scattered his brains.

Of course, I mean that Catholicism was not tried; ...

 ... plenty of Catholics were tried, and found guilty. 

My point is that the world did not tire of the church's ideal, ...

  ...but of its reality. 

Monasteries were impugned not for the chastity of monks, ...

 ...but for the unchastity of monks. 

Christianity was unpopular not because of the humility, ...

 ...but of the arrogance of Christians. ... 

... Certainly, if the church failed it was largely through the churchmen. But at the same time hostile elements had certainly begun to end it long before it could have done its work. In the nature of things it needed a common scheme of life and thought in Europe. Yet the mediaeval system began to be broken to pieces intellectually, long before it showed the slightest hint of falling to pieces morally. ....

... But I have only taken this as the first and most evident case of the general truth:...

... that the great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived),  .....

 ....but by not being lived enough. 

 Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. ...

...Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. .....

...The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting.

 It has been found difficult; and left untried.

(G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World, V. THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE)

*Refers to Henry II whose knights murdered Thomas Beckett
Tracy = William de Tracy

on the reading of goods books

Dionysius Alexandrinus was about the year 240, a person of great name in the Church for piety and learning, who had wont to avail himself much against hereticks by being conversant in their Books; untill a certain Presbyter laid it scrupulously to his conscience, how he durst venture himselfe among those defiling volumes. The worthy man loath to give offence fell into a new debate with himselfe what was to be thought; when suddenly a vision sent from God, it is his own Epistle that so averrs it, confirm'd him in these words: Read any books what ever come to thy hands, for thou art sufficient both to judge aright, and to examine each matter. To this revelation he assented the sooner, as he confesses, because it was answerable to that of the Apostle to the Thessalonians, Prove all things, hold fast that which is good. And he might have added another remarkable saying of the same Author; To the pure, all things are pure, not only meats and drinks, but all kinde of knowledge whether of good or evill; the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defil'd. For books are as meats and viands are; some of good, some of evill substance; and yet God in that unapocryphall vision, said without exception, Rise Peter, kill and eat, leaving the choice to each mans discretion. Wholesome meats to a vitiated stomack differ little or nothing from unwholesome; and best books to a naughty mind are not unappliable to occasions of evill. Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious Reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate.

       (John Milton, AREOPAGITICA; part 2)

On infidelity and authority of reason

"But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

    It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. He takes up the trade of a priest for the sake of gain, and in order to qualify himself for that trade, he begins with a perjury. Can we
conceive any thing more destructive to morality than this?"


 "As it is necessary to affix right ideas to words, I will, before I proceed further into the subject, offer some other observations on the word revelation. Revelation, when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man.

    No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it.

    It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication- after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself  obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him."

  (Thomas Paine, Age of Reason)

To argue with a person who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt,  is like administrering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an athiest by scripture.  --  It is the prerogative of animals.  And no man will envy you those honors, in which a savage only can be your rival, and a bear your master.

(Thomas Paine letter to Sir William Howell)

on loss of self government

Oliver Cromwell

…. “Free government is only for nations that deserve it; and they lose all right to it by licentiousness, no less than by servility.  If a nation cannot govern itself, it make comparatively little difference whether its inability springs from a slavish and craven distrust of its own power, or from a seer incapacity on the part of its citizens to exercise self-control and to act together.  Self-governing freemen must have the power to accept necessary compromises, to make necessary concessions, each sacrificing somewhat of prejudice and even of principle, and every group must show the necessary subordination of its particular interest to the interests of the community as a whole.  When the people will not or cannot work together; when they permit groups of extremists to decline to accept anything that does not coincide with their own extreme views; or when they let power slip from their hands through sheer supine indifference; then they have themselves chiefly to blame if the power is grasped by stronger hands.” ...(Biography of Oliver Cromwell, Theodore Roosevelt. P.189)

Theodore Roosevelt

This biography was published while he was Governor of New York. He later became 26th President of the United States, after the assassination of William McKinley.

Theodore Roosevelt is here commenting on the closer of the Long Parliament. 

A people who will not govern their own appetites.  
A people who will not recognize the truth of the opposing parties position.  
A people who will not self govern, ...
   ........ may lose their representative government.

When we are so convinced of the correctness of our own position and fail to see the truths in the opposing position we fail to come to a central position.  This central position can be the compromise sought.  This failure to compromise may lead to inaction. This inaction may allow stronger hands, like those of Cromwell, to grasp power.

The real tragedy at the death of the Long Parliament is Oliver Cromwell did seek for power , not for self aggrandizement,  but to build a a body of saints.  He sought to create a Christian Republic, a new Jerusalem.  He instead imposed a Puritan Empire,  an empire that did not last even half a generation.  

He name and cause remain an anathema to this day.

on the root cause of evil

However absurd the statement may appear to one who has not yet discovered the fact for himself,

the cause of every man's discomfort is

evil,

moral evil

• first of all, 
• evil in himself, his own sin, 
• his own wrongness, 
• his own unrightness; and then, 
• evil in those he loves:  (with this latter I have not now to deal;)

•  the only way to get rid of it,
•  is for the man to get rid of his own sin. 

No special sin may be recognizable as having caused this or that special physical discomfort (which may indeed have originated with some ancestor);

but evil in ourselves is the cause of its continuance,
the source of its necessity,
and the preventive of that patience which would soon take from it,

or at least blunt its sting.

........

 Foolish is the man, and there are many such men, who would rid himself or his fellows of discomfort by setting the world right, by waging war on the evils around him, while he neglects that integral part of the world where lies his business, his first business--namely, his own character and conduct. 


Were it possible (an absurd supposition) that the world should thus be righted from the outside, it would yet be impossible for the man who had contributed to the work, remaining what he was, ever to enjoy the perfection of the result; himself not in tune with the organ he had tuned, he must imagine it still a distracted, jarring instrument. 


The philanthropist who regards the wrong as in the race, forgetting that the race is made up of conscious and wrong individuals, forgets also that wrong is always generated in and done by an individual;

George MacDonald

that the wrongness exists in the individual, 

and by him is passed over, 

as tendency, to the race; 

and that no evil can be cured in the race, 

except by its being cured in its individuals:

tendency is not absolute evil; 

it is there that it may be resisted, 

not yielded to.

There is no way of making three men right 
but by making right each one of the three;

but a cure in one man who repents and turns, 

is a beginning of the cure of the whole human race.

(George MacDonald, Hope of the Gospel)

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/14453/pg14453.txt

William James on Faith

Now, there is one element of our active nature which the Christian religion has emphatically recognized, but which philosophers as a rule have with great insincerity tried to huddle out of sight in their pretension to found systems of absolute certainty.  ... 

..... I mean the element of faith.  Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible; ...

...and as the test of belief is willingness to act, one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance. ...

... It is in fact the same moral quality which we call courage in practical affairs; 

William James, "The Will to Believe"

On being an Obama Lover

To all of those who cannot seam to disagree without being disagreeable.  Black and white or blue and gray or red and blue thinking is by its nature polarizing.  

Polarizing thinking has lead to a civil war and race riots and the  murder of a civil rights leader and even the assassination of a presidential candidate.

 "For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with -- be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.

But we have to make an effort in the United States. We have to make an effort to understand, to get beyond, or go beyond these rather difficult times.

My favorite poem, my -- my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote:

Even in our sleep,

pain which cannot forget

falls drop by drop upon the heart,

until, in our own despair,

against our will,

comes wisdom

through the awful grace of God.

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black."

(Robert F. Kennedy, Remarks on the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered 4 April 1968, Indianapolis, IN)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6mxL2cqxrA

Would to god, that I might be considered  more like that deity to whom I claim to worship. 

 He hung on a cross to bring an atonement to the soldiers who placed him on that cross.  

"Father forgive them for they know not what they do." (Luke 23:34)

Would that I could follow the advice of Rodney King. This man was beaten by a pack of policemen.  This beating lead to a race riot.  And still he ask the question. 

"Can't we all just get along."

If I were....

... then I could become both 

an Obama lover and 

a Romney lover. 

Let us all tone down the rhetoric a little and remember we are all American's who love our country though we may have different aspirations for her.

" With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." (Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, Saturday, March 4, 1865)

Lee in a Union Uniform

I am pretty certain Lincoln was referring to both 

blue and gray widows and orphans, 

That we might also be ,
Obama lovers and 
Romney lovers.

Must we always be red and blue states 

as they were blue and grey.

My thoughts on Mitt Romney

I have to ask myself what evidence I have seen that Mr Romney has taken a unpopular a stance on a position.  He is good at changeing his views to meet his audience.  That is a thing all politicians since time immemorial have done.  I cannot fault him for that.  I am sure George Washington pandered to a few audiences in his time.  I just wish to see him stand for something he really believed.  He was pro-life when he was a L.D.S Bishop and Counselor in the Boston Stake of The Church Of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints;  He was pro-choice when he ran for office in Massachusetts. Now is the presumptive Republican Nominee he is pro-life again.  

His father George Romney was not afraid to promote what he believed.    He stood with and supported Martin Luther King Jr., in a time when that position angered an apostle of his church,  the  L.D.S. church.  He received a letter from Elder Delbert L. Stapley advising him not to pursue a civil rights agenda.   Elder  Stapley  even implied in his letter to George Romney that God might destroy him for his support of civil rights.

‘When I reflect upon the Prophet's statement and remember what happened to three of our nation's presidents who were very active in the Negro cause, I am sobered by their demise.  They went  contrary to the teachings of the Prophet  Joseph Smith—unwittingly , no doubt, but nevertheless, the prophecy of Joseph Smith ,  “… those who are determined to pursue a course, which shows an opposition, and a feverish restlessness against  the decrees of the Lord, will learn, when perhaps it is too late their own good, that God can do His work, without the aid of those who are dictated by His council, “ has and will be fulfilled.’  (Delbert L. Stapley letter to George Romney , January 23, 1964)  ...

.... I think time has shown that George Romney was right is taking his stand with Martin Luther King Jr.  

I would just like to see Mitt Romney to take a similar stand on something.  He  appears to be  unable or unwilling to take a stand that could risk his prominent position.

I here admit to a point of personal bias.  I did vote for Barack Obama in the last election.  I can remember standing in the voting booth and just staring at the ballot for the longest time.  I did not feel a strong inclination to vote for either candidate.  I  made my choice  hoping that Barack Obama would be able to reach across party lines.  Sadly my hopes were not realized.  I have seen no real leadership from the candidate I supported.

Is it too late for Mr. Romney to take a real stance for what he believes?  Does he now have too much to risk and lose?

Can I hope again that if Mr. Romney is elected, he may grow in office, into a man of real convictions.


As a side note Elder Stapley was wrong his is views on Joseph Smith.  Current historical studies show Joseph Smith supported the ordination of Negroes to the priesthood. 

http://www.boston.com/news/daily/24/delbert_stapley.pdf

http://reflectionsofashallowpond.blogspot.com/ ,THURSDAY, JULY 12, 2012

on being a sixpence richer

Then comes another discovery.

Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God.

If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already.

So that when we talk of a man doing anything for God or giving anything to God,

I will tell you what it is really like.

 It is like a small child going to its father and saying, “Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present.” Of course, the father does, and he is pleased with the child’s present. It is all very nice 
and proper,…

 …but only an idiot would think that the father is sixpence to the good on the transaction.

When a man has made these two discoveries God can really get to work. It is after this that real life begins. The man is awake now. We can now go on to talk of Faith in the second sense.

 (Mere Christianity Chapter 11, C.S. Lewis)

On being a small boy

I won't forget when Peter Pan came to my house, took my hand

I said I was a boy; I'm glad he didn't check.

I learned to fly, I learned to fight

I lived a whole life in one night

We saved each other's lives out on the pirate's deck.

And I remember that night

When I'm leaving a late night with some friends

And I hear somebody tell me it's not safe,

someone should help me

I need to find a nice man to walk me home.

When I was a boy, I scared the pants off of my mom,

Climbed what I could climb upon

And I don't know how I survived,

I guess I knew the tricks that all boys knew.

And you can walk me home, but I was a boy, too.

I was a kid that you would like, just a small boy on her bike

Riding topless, yeah, I never cared who saw.

My neighbor come outside to say, "Get your shirt,"

I said "No way, it's the last time I'm not breaking any law."

And now I'm in this clothing store, and the signs say less is more

More that's tight means more to see, more for them, not more for me

That can't help me climb a tree in ten seconds flat

When I was a boy, See that picture? That was me

Grass-stained shirt and dusty knees

And I know things have gotta change,

They got pills to sell, they've got implants to put in,

they've got implants to remove

But I am not forgetting...that I was a boy too

And like the woods where I would creep, it's a secret I can keep

Except when I'm tired, 'cept when I'm being caught off guard

And I've had a lonesome awful day, the conversation finds its way

To catching fire-flies out in the backyard.

And so I tell the man I'm with about the other life I lived

And I say, "Now you're top gun, I have lost and you have won"

And he says, "Oh no, no, can't you see

When I was a girl, my mom and I we always talked

And I picked flowers everywhere that I walked.

And I could always cry, now even when I'm alone I seldom do

And I have lost some kindness

But I was a girl too.

And you were just like me, and I was just like you"

"When I Was a Boy" as written by Dar Williams

Lyrics © BUG MUSIC

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE5YzRr9yPo&feature=related

I remember Logan Jr. High in 1977 when small boys where not permitted to take Home Economics ...
 ... so I was assigned to a Wood Shop Class.

I had an uncle who loved to watch football while wearing a moo moo
 and knitting a pot holder. I use to laugh at him......

   ... now I wish I was a little more like him. 
He was a big man and was built like a football player
 but he never permitted the little girl in him to die.
 He worked as an orderly in a nursing home
 and all of the patients loved him.

Here is to all of the l little boys and girls in us.