Phantom doctrine

[Anonymous]

I think tithing’s tangible. A membership fee just a high one. Having said that some people pay much higher ones for certain clubs. I don’t think about it spiritually.

In some other churches, they don’t make enough to cover their costs. And despite shopping malls etc, our overheads are high as a global churchh.

[Anonymous]

Cadence wrote:

SamBee wrote:

By the way Cadence, not sure what you mean by “phantom” here? Do you mean doctrine which is transient and everchanging? Or that has no physical substance?

More like no substance. If something does not exist how can you analyze it. As I have said in the past you can study the belief in leprechauns but you will never be able to study an actual leprechaun. You can parse Mormon doctrine all day but it is still just parsing the random thoughts of an individual for the most part. No real substance. It only has substance because people believe it to be so.

You could say the same thing about money; it was basically just an abstract idea people dreamed up and applied in real life and the main reason it has as much practical value as it currently does is mostly because so many people continue to play along with the idea that it means what they expect it to. Even if most LDS doctrines will probably never gain the level of popular acceptance and government support that money already has to back it up the effects of many of these doctrines are still very real (both good and bad) in terms of making a difference in the way many people think, feel, act, etc. So even if it is a trivial matter to determine that some of these claims the Church makes are either unknown or false that is quite often not the end of it but only the beginning of debating what to do about it for many members that need to deal with other members that still treat these doctrines as being extremely important.

Meanwhile practically no one takes leprechauns, unicorns, dragons, etc. seriously enough to make a meaningful difference in their lives so this isn’t necessarily a very good comparison and there is definitely more to what people are typically going to consider interesting and/or important than whether or not it can be directly verified as accurate. If an idea sounds good and makes sense to people at least based on a superficial understanding of it and/or there are reasons why they would want to believe it then that is already good enough for many of them to go ahead and accept it and these basic considerations generally apply to many LDS doctrines more than they ever will for things like leprechauns. That’s why trying to limit what we pay attention to and take seriously strictly to what can be proven to the satisfaction of skeptics mostly looks like an oversimplification resulting from impatience more than a very reasonable or helpful way of viewing many popular beliefs that aren’t going away anytime soon.

[Author]

Posts