"Prophets of Doom." History Channel, 2011.
As I prepare to hunt for a job puttering around like most academics, it is interesting to take a look at the big picture of what is going on in society. The world as we know it is crashing, as it always has, only it is bigger now, so it falls harder. I hope I can prepare myself to live in a world without all the things I depend on subconsciously.
I wish universities studied this stuff. I feel like this is really what I am interested in. What I really want to learn is how to live happily like the people in "less developed" economies, which are more sustainable than the cancerous, obese behemoth that is the imploding First World. My research into antiquity is an attempt to get back to something better than modern civilization, without making the same mistakes that were made. I want to return to the Bronze Age (or earlier), without being stupid the same way my ancestors were back then.
My journey into the past is also a journey into the future. It is not a "restoration" (in the Mormon sense) really; it is more of a cautious reformation. There is no Eden to return to. But there is a purgatory before the modern hell, and right now that purgatory is looking like the place to build if you want to last.
Showing posts with label heresy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label heresy. Show all posts
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Thursday, November 24, 2011
My Religion
I composed this statement in response to a series of questions posed by a Christian on one of the Mormon sites I frequent.
I see religion as a kind of poetry, an expression of human life that takes its form in gestures aimed at creating and preserving meaning. For me, there is really no hard distinction between religion and other systems of culture that encompass entire lives: religion includes politics, economics, and all kinds of culture. What is more, people are born into religions the same way they are born into language. You can learn a new language, and you can take up a new religion, but traces of the old one will be with you always (even if you don't like it: I cannot get away from the fact that I was born into twentieth-century American English; in the same way, I cannot escape the fact that I was born and raised into twentieth-century Mormonism). I think every religion, like every language, contains means for expressing human reality: as a medium of human expression, Mormonism is no truer or falser than Catholicism or Buddhism, just as English is no truer or falser than Spanish or Chinese. They are different tools for accomplishing the same purpose. Some languages come easier to some people than others, and some people prefer one to another: this is natural and good, and there is really nothing to be done about it. That said, I don't think the world would be better (or even fundamentally different) if we all spoke the same language, or professed the same religion. People would still be people, which means that some of us would use religion to express things that others would find offensive, and vice versa. The world would be a lot more boring, too, in the same way that international airports are (with endless iterations of the same stores selling the same merchandise, muting the idiosyncratic at the expense of the universal as much as possible). So I am actually glad that there are many different religions out there in the world: the ones I fear the most are those that see their mission as wiping out others. That is like wanting to cut down the rainforest in order to plant lots of soybeans: it might be profitable short-term, but in the long run everybody loses.
With that in mind, let me offer my answers to your questions.
(1) Do you see yourself living Joseph Smith's restored Christianity? Yes and no. First for the negative. After many years spent investigating early Christianity, I do not believe Smith (or any of the reformers over the centuries) has restored it. More than that, I do not believe that it is something that can be restored. I see Christianity as a bundle of competing movements that was never really united under one banner: historically, all of us claim Christ, but none of us owns him.
Now for the positive. I grew up Mormon, which means that I grew up praying (alone and with my family), singing hymns, and reading the Bible (which I read through several times on my own as an adolescent, along with the additional holy books recognized by Mormons: the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, and the Doctrine and Covenants). When I was about eleven years old, I had a powerful experience reading the Book of Mormon: I finished reading it the first time, prayed to know whether it was true or not, and had a strong inner witness: to me, this confirmed that Jesus was the Christ, and Joseph Smith was his prophet. Since this experience, I have had a few more (including two years as a missionary in northern Spain) which have led me to conclude that my emotional witness was not indicative of objective reality. Subjectively, though, it gave me moral strength to make decisions that have improved my life, while at the same time leaving me vulnerable to some bad decisions too (like the decision to hate sexuality, and to think that confessing every sexual experience to my local bishop would help me erase this indelible part of my human character).
As a result of my experiences with Mormonism and religion in general--the good, the bad, and the ugly--I do not think that any one religion is as good as its most fanatical followers claim. I don't believe in absolute truth as something that can be expressed by human beings: we can allude to it, we can dance around it, but the moment any of us tries to define it, "amen to the priesthood or authority of that man" (from Doctrine and Covenants 121, one of my favorite Mormon scriptures). But I do believe in "continuing revelation" (as Mormons say): I think that it is important to leave oneself open to new insight, no matter what its source. Part of my personal experience growing up Mormon was embracing this aspect of the faith wholeheartedly: for me, Mormonism was never entirely restricted to the correlated, soul-destroying mush produced by LDS church headquarters. If it had been, I would probably be more of an atheist than I currently am. But the Mormons I grew up with were better than their leaders: they intuited the difference between rigid obedience to leaders and thoughtful membership in a faith community that nobody owns. (Mormonism is free from corporate ownership the same way French is: despite attempts by controlling bodies to own and define the language, it exists organically outside definition.) Also, I think there is something to the old Mormon doctrine that Lorenzo Snow expressed more or less as follows: "as man is, God once was, and as God is, man may yet become." My study of religion has led me to conclude (with Xenophanes, the Greek philosopher-poet) that we all paint God in our own image (even when we try not to). Others will disagree, and that is fine: I learn from their disagreement (and am enriched by it). Since I still embrace these (and a few other) core principles of my early Mormonism, I still feel comfortable calling myself a Mormon.
(2) Is restored Christianity important to you? Yes. I have family and friends deep inside Mormonism ("died in the wool, true blue through and through"), and at all stages of disaffection. The former see themselves as "restorationist Christians" and are quite committed to that position. I don't want to cut them entirely (as I would if at this point I decided to sever formally all ties with the church). More important, I still see myself as the same person who received a testimony of Joseph Smith at eleven years old. I don't want my family to think that I am reneging on my commitment to them, and to the values that I learned from them and shared with them, in a very Mormon context. And, to top things off, I still "speak" Mormon. My instinctive way of looking at the world is Mormon, informed by experiences with other faiths that I am still assimilating (the way I am still learning Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Arabic), but Mormon nonetheless. What is more, the Mormon I "speak" is (on my reading) an historical dialect of Christianity, in the restorationist tradition (which includes more movements than just Mormonism).
(3) Is restored Christianity important to the Mormon movement? It is important to my family and friends. This is a Mormon movement that matters to me. I am not sure how important it is to the LDS church. I used to think it was important, but then I went on a mission, attended BYU, and started understanding more things in General Conference. Today, I see the LDS church leadership as ambiguous enemies: they haven't attacked me personally yet, but they certainly could, and they assault every ideological position of mine that they can (maligning me to my family as an evil apostate). There was a time when I feared excommunication, but I have moved past that: if it happens, then I will do my best Martin Luther impression.
(4) Do you regard the Bible as just another phase that someone else went through, or is it something that you consider yourself to be answerable to? This strikes me as an unfairly loaded question, setting up a false dichotomy. The Bible for me is a collection of mythology. As a source of personal ethics, some of it is really good, like Ecclesiastes (which is my personal favorite). Some of it is OK, like the gospels (though I don't believe in miracles such as Jesus is supposed to have performed). Some of it is pure crap, like Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, and the more violent among the prophets. As a window onto the human soul, it is all valuable, and we are all answerable for what we carry inside us, including the part of us that imagines and carries out crimes while giving God the "glory." Thus, in my opinion, the Bible is really only as useful as the people who read it. In the hands of literalistic, legalistic folk (such as currently rule at LDS church headquarters), it is dangerous. In the hands of more sensitive folk, it is harmless and may even be helpful (just like other holy books, including the Book of Mormon, the Koran, the Dhammapada, etc.).
(5) Do you aspire to bringing yourself into alignment with the perspective of the New Testament, or is that phase of thinking something that is better left in the past? I see the NT as containing different perspectives, with Peter disagreeing with Paul, and other writers taking mutually opposed stances whose harmonization is a later historical development. How do I bring myself into harmony with something that lacks harmony? Putting the question in context with some analogues, how would I bring myself into harmony with Shakespeare's Hamlet? I could read it a lot, write essays about it, study it, and know a great deal about it, but in general the more I do these things the less I see the work as a univocal thing. It is like the original draft of the US Constitution, full of compromises and unresolved tensions, which are interesting without being fundamentally harmonious (the way I use the word: Heraclitus would call it harmony).
(6) Have you got a rationale or philosophy or theology that you use to validate your position? My philosophy is that I am open to anything that people want to share with me. If I can understand and apply it with good results, then I make it a part of my life. The paradigm through which I view truth is that of an ancient skeptic (think Sextus Empiricus), or cynic (Diogenes of Sinope). Modern thinkers I like include David Hume and Nassim Taleb. I am all about doubt. I think the best insights come to those least married to presuppositions about the nature of reality.
(7) Do you consider your personal outlook to be compatible with the larger Mormon outlook and official teaching? I think it could be: modern Mormonism is largely incoherent, and could evolve in many directions, some of which might comfortably contain ideological positions like mine. Right now, however, leadership is most definitely opposed to people like me. Members are ambiguous, with some tolerant or even sympathetic toward positions like mine, and others decidedly hostile. Others yet have never noticed that people like me exist.
I see religion as a kind of poetry, an expression of human life that takes its form in gestures aimed at creating and preserving meaning. For me, there is really no hard distinction between religion and other systems of culture that encompass entire lives: religion includes politics, economics, and all kinds of culture. What is more, people are born into religions the same way they are born into language. You can learn a new language, and you can take up a new religion, but traces of the old one will be with you always (even if you don't like it: I cannot get away from the fact that I was born into twentieth-century American English; in the same way, I cannot escape the fact that I was born and raised into twentieth-century Mormonism). I think every religion, like every language, contains means for expressing human reality: as a medium of human expression, Mormonism is no truer or falser than Catholicism or Buddhism, just as English is no truer or falser than Spanish or Chinese. They are different tools for accomplishing the same purpose. Some languages come easier to some people than others, and some people prefer one to another: this is natural and good, and there is really nothing to be done about it. That said, I don't think the world would be better (or even fundamentally different) if we all spoke the same language, or professed the same religion. People would still be people, which means that some of us would use religion to express things that others would find offensive, and vice versa. The world would be a lot more boring, too, in the same way that international airports are (with endless iterations of the same stores selling the same merchandise, muting the idiosyncratic at the expense of the universal as much as possible). So I am actually glad that there are many different religions out there in the world: the ones I fear the most are those that see their mission as wiping out others. That is like wanting to cut down the rainforest in order to plant lots of soybeans: it might be profitable short-term, but in the long run everybody loses.
With that in mind, let me offer my answers to your questions.
(1) Do you see yourself living Joseph Smith's restored Christianity? Yes and no. First for the negative. After many years spent investigating early Christianity, I do not believe Smith (or any of the reformers over the centuries) has restored it. More than that, I do not believe that it is something that can be restored. I see Christianity as a bundle of competing movements that was never really united under one banner: historically, all of us claim Christ, but none of us owns him.
Now for the positive. I grew up Mormon, which means that I grew up praying (alone and with my family), singing hymns, and reading the Bible (which I read through several times on my own as an adolescent, along with the additional holy books recognized by Mormons: the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, and the Doctrine and Covenants). When I was about eleven years old, I had a powerful experience reading the Book of Mormon: I finished reading it the first time, prayed to know whether it was true or not, and had a strong inner witness: to me, this confirmed that Jesus was the Christ, and Joseph Smith was his prophet. Since this experience, I have had a few more (including two years as a missionary in northern Spain) which have led me to conclude that my emotional witness was not indicative of objective reality. Subjectively, though, it gave me moral strength to make decisions that have improved my life, while at the same time leaving me vulnerable to some bad decisions too (like the decision to hate sexuality, and to think that confessing every sexual experience to my local bishop would help me erase this indelible part of my human character).
As a result of my experiences with Mormonism and religion in general--the good, the bad, and the ugly--I do not think that any one religion is as good as its most fanatical followers claim. I don't believe in absolute truth as something that can be expressed by human beings: we can allude to it, we can dance around it, but the moment any of us tries to define it, "amen to the priesthood or authority of that man" (from Doctrine and Covenants 121, one of my favorite Mormon scriptures). But I do believe in "continuing revelation" (as Mormons say): I think that it is important to leave oneself open to new insight, no matter what its source. Part of my personal experience growing up Mormon was embracing this aspect of the faith wholeheartedly: for me, Mormonism was never entirely restricted to the correlated, soul-destroying mush produced by LDS church headquarters. If it had been, I would probably be more of an atheist than I currently am. But the Mormons I grew up with were better than their leaders: they intuited the difference between rigid obedience to leaders and thoughtful membership in a faith community that nobody owns. (Mormonism is free from corporate ownership the same way French is: despite attempts by controlling bodies to own and define the language, it exists organically outside definition.) Also, I think there is something to the old Mormon doctrine that Lorenzo Snow expressed more or less as follows: "as man is, God once was, and as God is, man may yet become." My study of religion has led me to conclude (with Xenophanes, the Greek philosopher-poet) that we all paint God in our own image (even when we try not to). Others will disagree, and that is fine: I learn from their disagreement (and am enriched by it). Since I still embrace these (and a few other) core principles of my early Mormonism, I still feel comfortable calling myself a Mormon.
(2) Is restored Christianity important to you? Yes. I have family and friends deep inside Mormonism ("died in the wool, true blue through and through"), and at all stages of disaffection. The former see themselves as "restorationist Christians" and are quite committed to that position. I don't want to cut them entirely (as I would if at this point I decided to sever formally all ties with the church). More important, I still see myself as the same person who received a testimony of Joseph Smith at eleven years old. I don't want my family to think that I am reneging on my commitment to them, and to the values that I learned from them and shared with them, in a very Mormon context. And, to top things off, I still "speak" Mormon. My instinctive way of looking at the world is Mormon, informed by experiences with other faiths that I am still assimilating (the way I am still learning Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Arabic), but Mormon nonetheless. What is more, the Mormon I "speak" is (on my reading) an historical dialect of Christianity, in the restorationist tradition (which includes more movements than just Mormonism).
(3) Is restored Christianity important to the Mormon movement? It is important to my family and friends. This is a Mormon movement that matters to me. I am not sure how important it is to the LDS church. I used to think it was important, but then I went on a mission, attended BYU, and started understanding more things in General Conference. Today, I see the LDS church leadership as ambiguous enemies: they haven't attacked me personally yet, but they certainly could, and they assault every ideological position of mine that they can (maligning me to my family as an evil apostate). There was a time when I feared excommunication, but I have moved past that: if it happens, then I will do my best Martin Luther impression.
(4) Do you regard the Bible as just another phase that someone else went through, or is it something that you consider yourself to be answerable to? This strikes me as an unfairly loaded question, setting up a false dichotomy. The Bible for me is a collection of mythology. As a source of personal ethics, some of it is really good, like Ecclesiastes (which is my personal favorite). Some of it is OK, like the gospels (though I don't believe in miracles such as Jesus is supposed to have performed). Some of it is pure crap, like Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, and the more violent among the prophets. As a window onto the human soul, it is all valuable, and we are all answerable for what we carry inside us, including the part of us that imagines and carries out crimes while giving God the "glory." Thus, in my opinion, the Bible is really only as useful as the people who read it. In the hands of literalistic, legalistic folk (such as currently rule at LDS church headquarters), it is dangerous. In the hands of more sensitive folk, it is harmless and may even be helpful (just like other holy books, including the Book of Mormon, the Koran, the Dhammapada, etc.).
(5) Do you aspire to bringing yourself into alignment with the perspective of the New Testament, or is that phase of thinking something that is better left in the past? I see the NT as containing different perspectives, with Peter disagreeing with Paul, and other writers taking mutually opposed stances whose harmonization is a later historical development. How do I bring myself into harmony with something that lacks harmony? Putting the question in context with some analogues, how would I bring myself into harmony with Shakespeare's Hamlet? I could read it a lot, write essays about it, study it, and know a great deal about it, but in general the more I do these things the less I see the work as a univocal thing. It is like the original draft of the US Constitution, full of compromises and unresolved tensions, which are interesting without being fundamentally harmonious (the way I use the word: Heraclitus would call it harmony).
(6) Have you got a rationale or philosophy or theology that you use to validate your position? My philosophy is that I am open to anything that people want to share with me. If I can understand and apply it with good results, then I make it a part of my life. The paradigm through which I view truth is that of an ancient skeptic (think Sextus Empiricus), or cynic (Diogenes of Sinope). Modern thinkers I like include David Hume and Nassim Taleb. I am all about doubt. I think the best insights come to those least married to presuppositions about the nature of reality.
(7) Do you consider your personal outlook to be compatible with the larger Mormon outlook and official teaching? I think it could be: modern Mormonism is largely incoherent, and could evolve in many directions, some of which might comfortably contain ideological positions like mine. Right now, however, leadership is most definitely opposed to people like me. Members are ambiguous, with some tolerant or even sympathetic toward positions like mine, and others decidedly hostile. Others yet have never noticed that people like me exist.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Useless Truth
Philip Jenkins. The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died. New York: Harper Collins, 2008. ISBN: 9780061472800.
While at BYU, I noted a peculiar fascination with Greek Orthodoxy among some of the faculty with interest in early Christianity. One of my professors in particular mentioned that if he were not Mormon, he would be Orthodox. The Orthodox tradition was attractive for its connection to ancient Greek Christianity (or better, Christianities), the closest thing(s) to authentic primitive Christianity that objective-minded historians can find.
Jenkins tells the story of the Greek Christians, and of other Christians outside the western European tradition (though he refers freely to that tradition to illustrate his narrative). Here you will find the story of ancient Christians in Syria, Egypt, Persia, India, and China, not to mention Asia Minor (modern Turkey). You will find Nestorians, Monophysites alongside more exotic (and independent) heretics, like the Manichaeans and (inevitably) the Muslims. You will learn how the Christians conquered the East, and lost it all. You will be forced to confront how the prosperity gospel (expressed in scriptures like Deuteronomy 28 and Mosiah 2:22) does not work, as you see covenant people suffer the almost complete dissolution of their culture--in spite of every promise, in spite of every revelation, in spite of every miracle. You will find stories of religious genocide, occurring still in relatively modern times (e.g. the annihilation of millions of Greeks and Armenians by Turks in the early twentieth century). You will see the best faces of religion (the scholar, the humanitarian, the pillar of society), and the worst (the holy warrior, the sectarian, the scourge of God). You will see the power of chance, which offered the eastern Christians safety (with the possibility of a Mongol alliance against the Muslim powers) and then snatched it away, perhaps forever (when powerful Mongol chieftains converted to Islam). Notice that persecution of the Other is a non-denominational doctrine: Christians brought it to the Muslims, and vice versa. Religion knows how to be kind, and how to be cruel, regardless of who is in charge or what they claim to believe.
The best part of the book, from my perspective, is the very end, where Jenkins talks about the need in contemporary Christian thought for a theology of defeat, failure, and disaster. How do we deal with the failure of God? How do we process divine indifference to prayer, to sacrifice, to basic human decency? Historically, we tend to ignore it, an ignorance that impoverishes our perspective on reality, and cheapens our faith (leaving people like me loathe to believe anything any religious leader may say). We dismiss the losers as apostates, has-beens, divine rejects. Their stories go untold. Their thoughts are forgotten. Their experiences, the good and the bitter, teach us nothing. Jenkins calls us to repentance (pp. 261-262):
In a nutshell, modern, western Christianity suffers from the same problem that plagues modern LDS Mormonism: an inability to deal productively with its faith history, a history which is full of what Boyd K. Packer might call useless truth. But that truth is not useless. That truth is what points us toward new revelation, showing us problems that we have failed to address adequately. That truth is what keeps us humble, showing us that we do not know the mind of God, that we are (in fact) extremely ignorant of any guiding principle at the helm of the universe. We have to preserve that truth, telling the "faith-destroying" stories of heartbreak and disaster (like what really happened at Mountain Meadows, or the Council of Nicaea, or the Battle of Ankara, or the Latin sack of Constantinople, or the modern Turkish "cleansing" of Smyrna). We cannot pretend that uncomfortable truth does not exist without endangering our souls, the souls of our children, and the very heart and soul of our entire community. Whether you are Mormon, Christian, both, or something else, lying for the Lord is bad. Ignoring for the Lord is bad, too. I cannot lie, and I will not ignore. To do so would be to go against everything that I stand for as a moral human being, as a Mormon and a Christian.
Truth is healing. "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (John 8:32). It sets us free from pretending, free from the fear that something unknown "out there" may take away the inner strength that keeps us sane. We ignore and abjure it at our peril, especially when it tells us things that we do not want to know, showing us where our puny efforts to control reality break down. The more we harden ourselves against useless truth today, the worse we are going to feel tomorrow, when it is inevitably shouted down at us from the housetops. I cannot resist it any more, and that is why I am what I am--estranged from my faith community, without a secure job that I might have had, and generally disillusioned with "faithful" attempts by some religious to obfuscate and deny real suffering (my own and that of other people). Like better men before me, I come to you now, Internet world, "from the back of a broken dream," simultaneously shattered and inspired by my personal encounter with useless truth.
While at BYU, I noted a peculiar fascination with Greek Orthodoxy among some of the faculty with interest in early Christianity. One of my professors in particular mentioned that if he were not Mormon, he would be Orthodox. The Orthodox tradition was attractive for its connection to ancient Greek Christianity (or better, Christianities), the closest thing(s) to authentic primitive Christianity that objective-minded historians can find.
Jenkins tells the story of the Greek Christians, and of other Christians outside the western European tradition (though he refers freely to that tradition to illustrate his narrative). Here you will find the story of ancient Christians in Syria, Egypt, Persia, India, and China, not to mention Asia Minor (modern Turkey). You will find Nestorians, Monophysites alongside more exotic (and independent) heretics, like the Manichaeans and (inevitably) the Muslims. You will learn how the Christians conquered the East, and lost it all. You will be forced to confront how the prosperity gospel (expressed in scriptures like Deuteronomy 28 and Mosiah 2:22) does not work, as you see covenant people suffer the almost complete dissolution of their culture--in spite of every promise, in spite of every revelation, in spite of every miracle. You will find stories of religious genocide, occurring still in relatively modern times (e.g. the annihilation of millions of Greeks and Armenians by Turks in the early twentieth century). You will see the best faces of religion (the scholar, the humanitarian, the pillar of society), and the worst (the holy warrior, the sectarian, the scourge of God). You will see the power of chance, which offered the eastern Christians safety (with the possibility of a Mongol alliance against the Muslim powers) and then snatched it away, perhaps forever (when powerful Mongol chieftains converted to Islam). Notice that persecution of the Other is a non-denominational doctrine: Christians brought it to the Muslims, and vice versa. Religion knows how to be kind, and how to be cruel, regardless of who is in charge or what they claim to believe.
The best part of the book, from my perspective, is the very end, where Jenkins talks about the need in contemporary Christian thought for a theology of defeat, failure, and disaster. How do we deal with the failure of God? How do we process divine indifference to prayer, to sacrifice, to basic human decency? Historically, we tend to ignore it, an ignorance that impoverishes our perspective on reality, and cheapens our faith (leaving people like me loathe to believe anything any religious leader may say). We dismiss the losers as apostates, has-beens, divine rejects. Their stories go untold. Their thoughts are forgotten. Their experiences, the good and the bitter, teach us nothing. Jenkins calls us to repentance (pp. 261-262):
Christians believe that God speaks through history; and only by knowing that history can we hope to interpret momentous events like the Japanese persecutions [which annihilated Catholicism in early modern Japan] and the fall of the Asian churches. Yet Christians have systematically forgotten or ignored so very much of their own history that it is scarcely surprising that they encounter only a deafening silence. Losing the ancient churches is one thing, but losing their memory and experience so utterly is a disaster scarcely less damaging. To break the silence, we need to recover those memories, to restore that history. To borrow the title of one of Charles Olson's great poems: the chain of memory is resurrection.
In a nutshell, modern, western Christianity suffers from the same problem that plagues modern LDS Mormonism: an inability to deal productively with its faith history, a history which is full of what Boyd K. Packer might call useless truth. But that truth is not useless. That truth is what points us toward new revelation, showing us problems that we have failed to address adequately. That truth is what keeps us humble, showing us that we do not know the mind of God, that we are (in fact) extremely ignorant of any guiding principle at the helm of the universe. We have to preserve that truth, telling the "faith-destroying" stories of heartbreak and disaster (like what really happened at Mountain Meadows, or the Council of Nicaea, or the Battle of Ankara, or the Latin sack of Constantinople, or the modern Turkish "cleansing" of Smyrna). We cannot pretend that uncomfortable truth does not exist without endangering our souls, the souls of our children, and the very heart and soul of our entire community. Whether you are Mormon, Christian, both, or something else, lying for the Lord is bad. Ignoring for the Lord is bad, too. I cannot lie, and I will not ignore. To do so would be to go against everything that I stand for as a moral human being, as a Mormon and a Christian.
Truth is healing. "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (John 8:32). It sets us free from pretending, free from the fear that something unknown "out there" may take away the inner strength that keeps us sane. We ignore and abjure it at our peril, especially when it tells us things that we do not want to know, showing us where our puny efforts to control reality break down. The more we harden ourselves against useless truth today, the worse we are going to feel tomorrow, when it is inevitably shouted down at us from the housetops. I cannot resist it any more, and that is why I am what I am--estranged from my faith community, without a secure job that I might have had, and generally disillusioned with "faithful" attempts by some religious to obfuscate and deny real suffering (my own and that of other people). Like better men before me, I come to you now, Internet world, "from the back of a broken dream," simultaneously shattered and inspired by my personal encounter with useless truth.
Monday, October 24, 2011
My Heretical Testimony
I know that I do not know very much, and that I doubt pretty much everything I think I know.
I know that absolute truth is dangerous, and that it makes no sense to me.
I know that reality is out there, that it is larger and more complicated than I can ever perfectly understand. I don't know if it has a name by which it refers to itself. I doubt that it does.
I know that theory without practice is bad, and faith without works is dead. I believe in continuing revelation.
I know that myth is a permanent fixture in the human landscape: we all tell stories, all the time. I know that I cannot believe in the absolute, literal truth of any one of our stories. By the same token, I do not think that any of them is absolutely false.
I know that Jesus Christ is as real as Santa Claus (or Saint Nicholas). I know that Joseph Smith spoke for God as much as Martin Luther did.
I know that organized religion does a lot of good in the world. I know that it also does a lot of bad. I know that I cannot put complete trust in any group of people: every corporation is a mafia; every mafia makes some really terrible decisions. Some mafias are better than others, but that does not mean that any of them deserves uncritical loyalty. I respect them (and myself) too much to give them what they do not deserve.
I know that I was born a Mormon, and that I remain a Mormon (even if I choose to add prefixes or caveats: these just confirm the fact that the leopard cannot change his spots). As I cannot delete or deny my Mormonness by word play, so the authorities of the LDS church cannot: after twenty years, I am a member of the flock whether the shepherds want me or not. I wish they did not feel threatened by people like me. I wish I did not feel threatened by them. Maybe one day we can all get along.
I know that absolute truth is dangerous, and that it makes no sense to me.
I know that reality is out there, that it is larger and more complicated than I can ever perfectly understand. I don't know if it has a name by which it refers to itself. I doubt that it does.
I know that theory without practice is bad, and faith without works is dead. I believe in continuing revelation.
I know that myth is a permanent fixture in the human landscape: we all tell stories, all the time. I know that I cannot believe in the absolute, literal truth of any one of our stories. By the same token, I do not think that any of them is absolutely false.
I know that Jesus Christ is as real as Santa Claus (or Saint Nicholas). I know that Joseph Smith spoke for God as much as Martin Luther did.
I know that organized religion does a lot of good in the world. I know that it also does a lot of bad. I know that I cannot put complete trust in any group of people: every corporation is a mafia; every mafia makes some really terrible decisions. Some mafias are better than others, but that does not mean that any of them deserves uncritical loyalty. I respect them (and myself) too much to give them what they do not deserve.
I know that I was born a Mormon, and that I remain a Mormon (even if I choose to add prefixes or caveats: these just confirm the fact that the leopard cannot change his spots). As I cannot delete or deny my Mormonness by word play, so the authorities of the LDS church cannot: after twenty years, I am a member of the flock whether the shepherds want me or not. I wish they did not feel threatened by people like me. I wish I did not feel threatened by them. Maybe one day we can all get along.
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