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Carburettor had shared this article on another thread. I felt like responding to the article but did not want to derail or create a tangent from the purpose of the main thread. In my response, I use a fair amount of sarcasm. If there is any doubt on when I use sarcasm or not then I would be happy to clarify. Carburettor wrote:
He shared an article written by a friend who examines the worldviews of two hypothetical LDS guys, James and Greg. Both James and Greg assert that “The teachings in the Proclamation on the Family are doctrine.” The article then expounds upon their worldviews, illustrating how Greg’s paradigm is undermined by his feelings of advocacy for his LGBT friends. The article was sufficiently long and highbrow to leave me wishing I wasn’t trying to digest it after a full day’s work. You can find it here:https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/conference/august-2021/worldview-apologetics
FAIR is an apologetics website. Apologetics is for defense. One critique of traditional apologetics is that it starts with the conclusion in mind and then searches for arguments to support that conclusion. I feel that this critique applies here.
It starts out with two guys (James & Greg) that both believe that the family proc is doctrine. Should it be doctrine? Where did it come from and what purpose does it serve? These questions are not addressed. Throughout the article it is illustrated that James’ unquestioning belief in the family proc. is the “gospel worldview.” This Gospel worldview is assumed to be correct and everything that distracts from or competes with this worldview is a false narrative or dead-end.
According to the gospel narrative, our time on earth is but a blip in eternity and our ability to live the gospel during this tiny lifetime will determine our state forevermore. According to this narrative, ANY mortal sacrifice would be a small price to pay.
Quote:If your hand or your foot causes you to sin cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire.
And if your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell.
This is a natural conclusion from this narrative. Nothing in mortal life matters except for qualifying for salvation/exaltation.
Perhaps the biggest assumption is that LDS church leaders accurately know about post earth life and have all the knowledge, keys, etc. to unlock that salvation/exaltation for their followers. In other words, to listen and follow the LDS prophet is salvation/exaltation. Anything less will eventually lead to damnation unless there is a course correction and repentance.
Quote:But from a Christian perspective, we are not always the expert on what human flourishing looks like for us. There is a higher power, a divine moral sovereign, who we trust more than the self to know what our eternal destiny looks like. … Genuine, lasting conversion… involves a change in our values and priorities, so that they more closely resemble God’s values and priorities.
Greg has some questions about the situation of LGBT individuals and foolishly feels that he should advocate for them to be more fully accepted. Why can’t Greg be more faithful like James?
Greg might not fully understand all the details of why the church leadership are hard on our LGBT brothers and sisters but if he is faithful then he will put his lack of understanding on a metaphorical shelf and believe that church leaders know better than he does. If Greg just keeps his head down and continues on the “covenant path” then he will be exalted and the wisdom of the entire plan will be plainly manifest in the end.
The article presents that Greg’s problem is that he only
professesto truly believe in the Family Proc. but in actuality his core conviction lies elsewhere.
Quote:both James and Greg share a confessional belief in the Church’s doctrines on the family, but Greg’s convictional beliefs may be informed by something else.
What’s that you say? Greg draws close to God and honors him with his heart but Greg’s heart if far from God? Wow, sounds serious. Maybe Greg is a wolf in sheep’s clothing or a false prophet unto himself or maybe just an “ark steadier.” Let’s hope that Greg repents soon before he is lost forever.Even though Greg is on a path of eternal destruction, he is mainly confused. He wrongly supplanted the gospel worldview and narrative with more worldly and humanistic narratives. According to these more worldly perspectives the demands of the church organization on these LGBT individuals are too great. Silly Greg, remember that the church leaders are only giving the true path to salvation and it would not be kindness to allow anyone to travel a path that doesn’t ultimately end in salvation without sufficiently warning them.
Seems strange that Greg is sacrificing his eternal destiny over his misplaced sympathy for the plight of his LGBT friends. Yeah, their situation is difficult and could perhaps be rightfully compared to cutting off their hand, food, or eye for the sake of entering heaven. Even though we know what the right answer would be if we were asked to make such a sacrifice, one could be forgiven for hesitating momentarily. Greg, though, has no such excuse. He is not being asked to make such sacrifices himself, only to avert his eyes while his LGBT friends are asked to make the sacrifice.
Another critique of traditional apologetics is that they are designed to preach to the choir. They do not seem intended to convert people who feel differently, but rather to pacify and comfort those named “James” and help insulate them from all the “Gregs” in their life. This critique applies here also. If a “Greg” were to read this article, I imagine that he would walk away not only with his questions unanswered but that he would also feel rather insulted. That is because “Greg” is not the target audience for this article. The target audience is “James.”
Quote:In a similar way, I believe that many Latter-day Saints today struggle with their faith not because they’ve learned about something Brigham Young said or did, or because they’ve discovered some nasty facts surrounding polygamy, or some of the eccentricities of Book of Mormon translation. Many think that their trials of faith center on these questions, and some of them may be right.
But it seems to me that many of those who struggle with these historical questions do so because they’ve first embraced unquestioningly, and often wittingly, other worldviews with stories that tilt them towards doubt. Having done so, the historical questions provide a pretext for a faith crisis that has been in the works long before they ever realized it. And the true reasons for the crisis are often beyond their ability to articulate — they are merely living out the story handed to them by their worldview.
The above quote is interesting. According to it, many people in faith crisis first allowed their worldview to shift away from the gospel perspective BEFORE those “nasty” historical details could have the power to trouble them. Even more interesting, the historical questions are just a pretext or excuse and the “true reasons” are “beyond their ability to articulate.”
This feels like gas lighting and patronizing to me. It suggests that I might
thinkthat I know the cause of my faith crisis but I would be wrong. I do not have the ability to correctly articulate the deeper truth … that I allowed worldly and humanistic worldviews to compete in my heart with the gospel worldview. Supposedly, if I had kept the primacy of the gospel worldview then it wouldn’t bother me if BY was a flaming racist and ran the church like a tyrant, or if JS abused his position in order to receive “revelations” that would allow him to bed multiple women, or if evidence for the historical accuracy of the BoM was flimsy. I remember when I was in the depths of my faith crisis and my EQP visited and showed concern for my “struggling.” I said that I didn’t feel like I was struggling, in many ways I felt like I was learning and growing (although painfully). My EQP told me that despite my discomfort with the word, he could clearly see that I was indeed “struggling.” He would continue to use the word to describe me even after I had objected to it.
I see a similar effect happening in the refusal to allow Gay LDS members to label themselves as Gay. Instead, insisting that the person is a child of God first … that maybe is “struggling” (there that word is again) with SSA.
Telling people that their own story, their own journey, and their own truth and worldview cannot be trusted but instead should be supplanted with my worldview is textbook gas lighting.
Quote:[Gaslighting is] making someone seem or feel unstable, irrational and not credible, making them feel like what they’re seeing or experiencing isn’t real, that they’re making it up, that no one else will believe them
I do believe that we live in a world of competing worldviews and it might be quite fascinating to read about this from a more psychological or sociological perspective that could treat all worldviews as relatively valid. Each and every one of us live in a sea of overlapping worldviews. Americans tend to value individualism and democracy. There are also worldviews that roughly align with the more progressive and conservative political parties. People live with these overlapping and competing worldviews. I dare say that almost nobody lives with just one worldview and if they did they would seem very extreme to most moderate people. I feel like the FAIR article took the reality of competing worldviews and ran it through a funhouse mirror in order to achieve the purpose of 1) defending the church and 2) pacifying and comforting everyone that identifies with “James” and feels suspicious of “Greg.”
However, that’s pretty much what I have come to expect from traditional apologetics. Humans are gonna human and apologists are going to apologize… (pun intended
Roy wrote:
Another critique of traditional apologetics is that they are designed to preach to the choir. They do not seem intended to convert people who feel differently, but rather to pacify and comfort those named “James” and help insulate them from all the “Gregs” in their life. This critique applies here also.If a “Greg” were to read this article, I imagine that he would walk away not only with his questions unanswered but that he would also feel rather insulted. That is because “Greg” is not the target audience for this article. The target audience is “James.”.
Right. I think it’s written to the James’ of the world that they fear may become a Greg without their guidance.
Roy wrote:
This Gospel worldview is assumed to be correct and everything that distracts from or competes with this worldview is a false narrative or dead-end.…
He wrongly supplanted the gospel worldview and narrative with more worldly and humanistic narratives.
When a person starts believing differently the dominant culture has a natural tendency to jump to the conclusion that the person has departed from the “gospel.” What if the gospel was allowed to grow to encompass more compassionate or empathetic beliefs instead of resisting any and all change?
A few quotes:
Joseph F. Smith wrote:We believe in all truth, no matter to what subject it may refer. No sect or religious denomination in the world possesses a single principle of truth that we do not accept or that we will reject. We are willing to receive all truth, from whatever source it may come; for truth will stand, truth will endure
Letter from Joseph Smith to Isaac Galland, Mar. 22, 1839, Liberty Jail, Liberty, Missouri, published in Times and Seasons, Feb. 1840, pp. 53–54; spelling and grammar modernized:
Joseph Smith wrote:Mormonism is truth; and every man who embraces it feels himself at liberty to embrace every truth: consequently the shackles of superstition, bigotry, ignorance, and priestcraft, fall at once from his neck; and his eyes are opened to see the truth, and truth greatly prevails over priestcraft. …
“… Mormonism is truth, in other words the doctrine of the Latter-day Saints, is truth. … The first and fundamental principle of our holy religion is, that we believe that we have a right to embrace all, and every item of truth, without limitation or without being circumscribed or prohibited by the creeds or superstitious notions of men, or by the dominations of one another, when that truth is clearly demonstrated to our minds, and we have the highest degree of evidence of the same.
History of the Church, 5:215 & History of the Church, 6:57:
Joseph Smith wrote:In January 1843, Joseph Smith had a conversation with some people who were not members of the Church: “I stated that the most prominent difference in sentiment between the Latter-day Saints and sectarians was, that the latter were all circumscribed by some peculiar creed, which deprived its members the privilege of believing anything not contained therein, whereas the Latter-day Saints … are ready to believe all true principles that exist, as they are made manifest from time to time.”6
“I cannot believe in any of the creeds of the different denominations, because they all have some things in them I cannot subscribe to, though all of them have some truth. I want to come up into the presence of God, and learn all things; but the creeds set up stakes [limits], and say, ‘Hitherto shalt thou come, and no further’ [Job 38:11]; which I cannot subscribe to.”
I think the “gospel” has grown over the years. Not from year to year, more like decade to decade, so slowly that it’s harder to perceive. In the year 1977 I’m sure there were apologists that stood up for the priesthood ban. People that stood up strong against the tides of the world (or humanists or whatever boogeyman suits you) to say, “No, black people should not have the priesthood. It is a departure from the gospel. If you think they should, you’re playing with fire.”
But the gospel grew. It had to fight against people that were locked in on their particular definition of the gospel but the gospel eventually grew. Like a tree root breaking through pavement. The James’ eventually gave way to the Gregs.
Some (not all) of the apologetics of our day is extremely similar to the priesthood ban example. Apologetics is a force that resists change/revelation. If the change is a good one, the change will eventually overpower the apologetics.
I think another wrinkle in all of this is the source of the change. It’s a matter of what you perceive to be authoritative sources. If the change/revelation is coming from the world or a humanist it can’t be trusted. If the change/revelation is coming from the prophet, trust is grandfathered in by the authority already vested in the prophet.
The quotes in the previous post seemed less concerned with the source of the truth and more concerned with the truth itself. That could have all been lip service but modern Mormonism is a little more creedish than the Mormonism of the past. Modern Mormonism is full of people saying, “Hitherto shalt thou come, and no further.” Apologia is more interested in defending creed than exploring possibilities.
nibbler wrote:
Like a tree root breaking through pavement.
Amen! As Old Timer is fond of saying, “May there be a road.”
Roy wrote:
nibbler wrote:
Like a tree root breaking through pavement.
Amen! As Old Timer is fond of saying, “May there be a road.”
With a big crack in it.
:angel:
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