Family First, Church Second

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This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

This is a principle that I have long suspected is true, but have not seen stated plainly very often. I think that’s because it’s an easy principle to misunderstand. God is the God of Nature. That’s true. But the idea that you can worship as easily in the woods as you can in the pews is false. It takes one true principle—God is the God of Nature—but forgets another—we are saved together and not alone. The important part of going to church is not the building or the pews.[ref]Anyone who has seen our pathologically ugly cinder-block meeting houses intuits this at once.[/ref] It is the other people sharing the building and the pews next to us.

Same basic idea here: the church exists to serve the family and not the other way around, but—perhaps—there’s a risk of the teaching being used as a rationalization to shirk responsibility that need not be shirked. In any case, I highlighted an awful lot of Elder H. Burke Peterson’s talk, with passages like this:

May I suggest that many of us have lost sight of one of the most important reasons for our holding the priesthood. To be an effective teachers quorum president, elders quorum president, bishop, or counselor is important—we spend many hours in training these officers. To perform the vital priesthood ordinances is essential. But even more important than all these is the need to learn how to use the priesthood to bless our families and homes.[Emphasis added. Then added some more.[/ref]

There’s always a risk of taking a single passage—or even a single talk—and making too much of it. One of the major reasons for this entire General Conference is precisely to avoid that. To see a large volume of prophetic preaching in context. But I don’t think I’m stretching too far because the centrality of the family is a central teaching across all the conferences we’ve read, even if it’s not always expressed in such start terms. Elder Peterson goes on:

If we live for it, ours can be a power given us from our Heavenly Father that will bring peace to a troubled household. Ours can be a power that will bless and comfort little children, that will bring sleep to tear-stained eyes in the wee hours of the morning. Ours can be the power that will bring happiness to a family home evening, the power to calm the unsettled nerves of a tired wife. Ours can be the power that will give direction to a confused and vulnerable teenager. Ours, the power to bless a daughter before she goes on her first date or before her temple marriage, or to bless a son before his departure for a mission or college.

Let me emphasize: these are not suggestion for auxiliary or optional exercise of priesthood power. This is it. Actions like these—the service of our family—is the whole point. It’s the rest—the Church and all its ordinances—that are appendages to the family, and not the other way around. Families are not God’s preferred method of raising new church members. The Church is an instrument by which God intends to reclaim His family. Or, as Elder Peterson puts it:

When we have the power to bless families in some of the ways mentioned, then we are using this God-given authority for its most exalted purpose—to bind family ties and perform priesthood ordinances that will endure through the eternities.[ref]Emphasis added.[/ref]

That—brothers and sisters—is what it’s all about. The whole point. I don’t think we get it. And I think the failure to grasp the correct priority, family then Church, is a major contributing factor leading to misunderstanding of so many of the moral issues where well-intentioned members are hoping for changes from the Church that, frankly, will never come.[ref]I have no grounds to make that claim authoritatively. I’m simply expressing my view of the implications of the theological primacy of the family in conjunction with the Church’s repeatedly-demonstrated willingness to fight and die on this particular hill.[/ref]

So, where does this lead? One more quote to leave on:

He who has developed the power and uses it to do the things we have mentioned will honestly consider the righteous desires of his family, even though they may not be exactly the same as his. He will listen to those in his home with the same attention he would give a priesthood leader. He will listen—even to the smallest child.

He will put his family’s welfare ahead of his own comfort.

He will learn to control himself. He will not use a quick temper as an excuse—he will rise above it. It needn’t always be with him.

He will understand that a soft answer turneth away wrath. His voice will never be heard in anger in his home; he will never punish in anger.

As one of his most significant attributes, he who has developed this priesthood power will not only by his thoughts but also by his actions give honor, respect, and dignity to the loveliest of the Lord’s creations—his daughters.

God knows I desperately wish my wife and my children could have a husband and father like the man described here. Since they’re stuck with me instead, it is my greatest desire to become that man.[ref]My second-greatest desire is for them to be able to forgive me for who I am in the meantime. My third-greatest desire is to be a world-famous author.[/ref]

I believe Jesus can fix what is broken, find what is lost, heal what is sick, and sanctify what is unholy. He has performed miracles with clay before. This is my faith: that He can do so again. If I can just learn how to let Him.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

An Upside to Trump?

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It’s no secret that I was, am, and will remain #NeverTrump. But two stories I saw today made me think of a possible upside to the Trump presidency.

Now, I’m not saying Coulter is turning on Trump because he endangers our relationships with allies by handing over intel that has been trusted to us to a third-party without permission[ref]And not just any third-party, but our strategic opponent in Syria![/ref]. She’s mad he hasn’t built that wall yet or what-not.

Still, the depth, breadth, and stunning intricacy of Trump’s incompetence is such that all those who backed him–the Ann Coulters and Sean Hannitys of the world–may take a serious, serious hit as Trump’s once bright star turns into a screaming, self-annihilating meteor crashing from the heavens.[ref]Let’s just hope it’s small enough not to take us all with it, yeah?[/ref]

This occurred to me today as I was driving around after 7pm when NPR has started playing weird jazz instead of news and talk, and so I flipped to AM radio and hear Sean Hannity. I’ve always disliked Hannity–even when I was at my right-wingiest–but tonight was different. I only caught a few minutes, but he was interviewing a guest about Hillary Clinton and (as far as I could tell) her emails.

Seriously. In 2017. With the election over. And Trump as president. And he was talking about Hilary. Clinton’s. Emails.

If that’s not the definition of sad irrelevance, I don’t know what is. The fever-swamp of paranoid right-wing alternative media conspiracy theory peddlers is a major reason we ended up with Trump. The idea that he takes a few of them down when he falls has a pleasing symmetry. Oh, I’m sure his hard core will praise him until the end, but their audiences will be much, much smaller.

Or so we can hope.

An Antidote for Smugness

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Suppose Frank and Joe get into a Facebook debate, and suppose Frank knows a lot more about the issue over which they’re disagreeing. Neither one of them is really an expert, but Frank has read a lot more and maybe even has some sort-of relevant background. The longer the discussion goes, the more he realizes that Joe doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.

Let’s give Frank the benefit of the doubt. He’s not just a victim of confirmation bias. Joe really doesn’t know that much about the issue, it’s evident in what he’s written, and Frank’s assessment on that score is accurate.

So, naturally, this can lead Frank to feel a little smug, and smugness is toxic. It’s a poison that clouds our thinking, alienates us from people who could be our friends, and fuels arrogance and pride.

Frank is self-aware enough to realize that he’s having this reaction, but–as it turns out–there’s more to good character than just being able to recognize your own bad behavior. It’s good to suppress an angry outburst, for example, but it’s even better to overcome the anger itself. Controlling behavior is nice, but shaping character is better. Unfortunately, character can’t be shaped directly. We have to come at it sideways and ambush our own bad character traits when they least suspect it. We have to–wherever possible–cheat.

So here’s an idea.

The reason that Frank knows more than Joe about this issue is that Frank took the time to research it. He read dozens of articles. Joe didn’t, and so Joe doesn’t know as much. Instead of attributing his superiority in this one realm to some kind of personal attribute, Frank should ask himself: “What was Joe doing with the time I used to study this issue?”

 

Maybe Joe is lazy, and Joe was just watching reality TV show reruns. Maybe Joe is actually very curious and diligent, and was using the same amount of time studying some totally unrelated topic which–if they discussed it–would quickly demonstrate to Frank what it feels like to be the one who doesn’t really get it. Or maybe Joe wasn’t  studying, but he uses his time volunteering to make his neighborhood a better place.

It doesn’t really matter, because–in practice–Frank will never know. The point of the question is to ask it, because asking it reframes the context of Frank’s smugness. It’s not about some kind of overall, general superiority of intellect. It’s about the simple fact that Frank spent time studying a particular issue, and Joe didn’t. This is a smugness antidote. On top of dispelling the person-to-person comparison, it raises questions for Frank, such as: Was studying this particular issue really that wise an expenditure of his finite time and energy? Maybe it was, but maybe it wasn’t, all things considered. This should make Frank a little uneasy. That’s healthy. Certainly fair healthier than smugness, at any rate.

I am not a very good person. This isn’t a statement of false humility. I suspect, all things considered, that I’m probably about average by most comparisons with others, although I’ll never really be sure.[ref]Assuming that I’m average seems a good rule of thumb, all things considered.[/ref] But that’s not the point. I don’t care about comparing myself with others; I care about the gap between who I am and who I’d like to be. And the person I’d like to be doesn’t have to devise strategies for decency or play tricks on himself to mimic virtue. That’s what I mean when I say I’m not a very good person.

But we don’t get to choose the kind of person we are. Not in an instant, anyway. We come into this world with a load of genetic and environmental baggage that, by the time we get around to being thinking, self-aware little human creatures, is already more than we could ever hope to sort through in a life time. All we can ever do is start where we are. Hopefully we make incremental steps in the right direction, but human character can’t be perfect in a life time. There’s the old expressions, “fake it ’till you make it.” We’re never going to make it. So we just have to keep faking it. Play-acting at being a good person–when it’s done out of a sincere desire to learn to be good–is the best we can hope for.

This is one technique I try to remind myself to use in that game, and I thought I’d share it.

The Economic Consequences of Political Partisanship

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I’ve mentioned the tribal nature of politics before and its tendency to make us mean and dumb. Now check out the findings from a new paper:

In the first experiment, carried out in a nationwide online labor market, we assess whether partisan congruence between employer and employee influences the willingness of the latter to work, as well as the quality of work they perform. We do so by tracking the wage proposals and task performance of freelance editors when the document they edit indicates whether their employers are co-partisans or supporters of the out-party. Study 2 examines whether partisan considerations also affect consumer behavior. Specifically, we explore whether people are less likely to pursue an attractive purchasing opportunity if the seller is affiliated with the out-party, and more likely to do so if the seller is a co-partisan. We conducted another field experiment that uses an online marketplace to study this question in a more naturalistic setting, albeit one that relies on ecological inferences. Finally, we replicate these patterns in the context of an incentivized, population-based survey experiment, where we find that fully three-quarters of respondents are willing to forego higher personal remuneration to avoid benefitting the opposing party.

Taken together, our studies offer substantial evidence that partisanship shapes real-world economic decisions. All four experiments offer evidence that partisanship influences economic behavior even when there are real pecuniary or professional costs. Although the effect sizes vary somewhat across contexts, in some situations, they are quite large. For example, the effect of partisanship on reservation wages in the labor market experiment is comparable to the effect of task-relevant skills such as education and experience. In the marketplace, consumers are much more likely—almost two times as likely—to engage in a transaction when their partisanship matches that of the seller. In our survey experiment, three quarters of all subjects forego a higher monetary payment to avoid helping the other party. We show that these effects of partisanship are at least as large as the effects of religion, another well-known and salient social cleavage. Even among weak or leaning partisans, fully two-thirds of them reject the partisan offer. In sum, partisanship’s effect on economic decisions is not only real but often also sizable, extending throughout the electorate.

…The results underscore the power of partisanship as a social identity in an era of polarized parties—partisanship can shape apolitical behavior, including economic transactions. The results also call for paying greater attention to potential discrimination based on partisan affiliation. To date, few social norms are in place to constrain it, as they are with respect to unequal treatment along other social divides (e.g., race and gender). Our analysis suggests that partisan-based discrimination may occur even in the most basic economic settings, and as such should be the subject of more systematic scrutiny (pgs. 3-5).

Hooligans in action.

Solving Conflict With Business

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From the World Economic Forum:

Last year, the World Bank revised its position on conflict – upgrading it from being one of many drivers of suffering and poverty, to being the primary driver. In Somalia, despite some political progress, the conflict has put more than half the population in need of assistance, with 363,000 children suffering acute malnutrition. In Nigeria, conflict with Boko Haram in the country’s northeast has left 1.8 million people still displaced, farmers unable to grow crops, and 4.8 million people in need of food assistance. In Yemen, an escalation in conflict since 2015 has worsened a situation already made dire by poor governance, poverty and weak rule of law. Now more than 14 million people need food aid.

Only if we understand conflict can we understand these hunger crises…Across the places we work, where people are facing starvation, the pattern is the same. Hunger is not some freak environmental event; it is human-made, the result of a deadly mix of conflict, marginalization, and weak governance…In South Sudan, as in Somalia, Nigeria and Yemen it is not generally a lack of food that has caused famine-like conditions to occur. The crises exist because of violence and conflict. They don’t need more food, they need investment into conflict prevention and the stability that brings.

Who do they turn to to help stabilize these conflict-prone regions? Businesses:

The World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Fragility, Violence and Conflict found that corporate partners can foster stable, inclusive and prosperous societies that respect the rule of law and benefit from accountable governance. Both local and multinational businesses can play an important role, often working alongside each other to support and grow local and national economies and, in the process, help support efforts undertaken by others to reduce fragility and conflict.

The WE Forum has highlighted the way businesses can foster peace before.[ref]You can find the referenced study here.[/ref] Business leaders should take note.

Death Note (2006-2007)

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This is part of What I’m Watching.

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Since I’ve been on an anime kick the last few months, I’ve been searching for various series and movies to gorge. My brother-in-law was recommended Death Note by a co-worker and he in turn suggested that we try it out. The premise is that a shinigami (god of death) drops his Death Note–a notebook that kills anyone whose name is written in it–in the human world to alleviate his boredom. The notebook is discovered by genius high school senior Light Yagami. Following the book’s instructions, Light tests the notebook on a few criminals and discovers it’s inherent power is legitimate. His handling of the notebook also allows him to see the shinigami who initially dropped it. Quickly developing a god complex, Light becomes determined to shape a new world free of crime and evil using the notebook, eventually gaining media infamy and the nickname Kira (derived from the Japanese pronunciation of “killer”). The mass murder of criminals via (largely) heart attacks leads the world organizations to turn to an anonymous super sleuth that goes solely by the alias L. The two engage in a increasingly complex game of cat-and-mouse as the two seek to bring about their conflicting views of justice.

The story alone intrigued me. That’s what kept me going after the first episode. But it was the introduction of L and his first confrontation with Kira/Light in Episode 2 that made me go all in. You can watch it below.

 

Watching the two attempt to outsmart each other was exciting, at times jaw-dropping, and occasionally absurd. In fact, I loved the unorthodoxy of L so much that I ended up with a T-shirt (much to my wife’s dismay). Unfortunately, the freshness of the series wears off in the last 1/3 with its attempts to be more and more clever and the introduction of new, but unoriginal characters. Furthermore, the emotional impact of the show is a bit stunted due to a lack of true connection with any of the major players (the exception for me being L). Nonetheless, I was satisfied overall. Definitely worth checking out.[ref]A less-than-stellar-looking Americanized movie version will be released later this year by Netflix.[/ref]

Failing Forward

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Jesus walks on water, by Ivan Aivazovsky (1888, Public Domain)

This post is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

I stopped reading the conference talks of the Saturday afternoon session when I got to Elder Maxwell’s talk, because I’ve learned that Maxwell talks are meant to be savored. His testimonies of Christ are always sincere, and are often frequently provocative in the best sense of the word. If you’re a Mormon adult, you’ve heard a lot of talks about Jesus. Like, a lot. So finding something new to say—without being trivial or silly—is hard. And also refreshing, when you find someone who can do it.

Of all the lines I highlighted from the talk—and there are a lot of them—here is the passage that meant the most to me:

I thank him now for the tender times, the jarring times, the perplexing times, and even for the times when my learning is so painfully public—lest in such moments to come I am too taxed to testify or too anguished to appreciate. [emphasis added]

I can’t fully explain why this passage means so much to me. I hope one day I can. For now, the best I can do is say that I love something about the idea that we recognize when our ideals outstrip our capacity, and we choose to fail forwards anyway. That is, I think, the quality I aspire to more than any other in life, and the one that affects me most deeply. It’s why I love the song, “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” with that line, “Bind my wandering heart to thee.” It’s why I love Peter jumping overboard to walk on water, and then nearly drown. It’s even why I love this seemingly incongruous quote from Kurt Vonnegut, the most meaningful literary quote of my life so far:

I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist, Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an A.H.A. memorial service for my predecessor I said, “Isaac is up in Heaven now.” That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass before something resembling solemnity could be restored.

I made that joke, of course, before my first near-death experience — the accidental one.

So when my own time comes to join the choir invisible or whatever, God forbid, I hope someone will say, “He’s up in Heaven now.” Who really knows? I could have dreamed all this.

My epitaph in any case? “Everything was beautiful. Nothing hurt.” I will have gotten off so light, whatever the heck it is that was going on

Let me give you just a little context for this Vonnegut quote. Vonnegut, as anyone who has read his books will know, was not a happy man. He was, in many ways, obsessed with the incomprehensible pain of life. That comes through in the quote a little bit, but maybe not enough if you’re not already familiar with Vonnegut. He is, after all, talking about laughing hysterically at a memorial service for a dead friend. He also mentions a near-death experience that was “the accidental one,” implying non-accidental near-death experiences. And there was one, he tried to kill himself in 1984. Other tragic experiences in his life include his World War II combat experience (his unit was overrun in the Battle of the Bulge with 500 KIA and 6,000 captured, on his to a prison camp his train was attacked by British planes killing 150 prisoners, and as a prisoner he was a witness to the aftermath of the firebombing of Dresden) and his mother committing suicide on Mother’s Day weekend when he was visiting on leave. Vonnegut was not a happy man, and yet his epitaph? “Everything was beautiful. Nothing hurt.”

This is failing forward. It is aspiration beyond capacity, and knowingly so. It is the same kind of devotion that Elder Maxwell is talking, the same commitment to an idealism we know we cannot accomplish. The only real difference is that in Vonnegut’s case the aspiration is somewhat abstract while in Maxwell’s case it is reified in the person of Jesus Christ. But the underlying motivation—the willingness to fail forward, to shoot for the moon even though you know you’ll go down in flames, to eek every ounce of idealism out of our exhausted and overwhelmed selves—is the same.

I don’t know if I’ll ever accomplish anything genuinely good or useful in my entire life, but I hope I can do that. I hope I can say—along with Vonnegut—that everything was beautiful. That nothing hurt. That I got off light.[ref]That part is true.[/ref] And I will strive to pray—along with Maxwell—in gratitude for even the experiences that hurt while I’m capable of doing so, knowing that because of my own weakness I might not always be able to form the words.

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Check out the other posts from the General Conference Odyssey this week and join our Facebook group to follow along!

An “Anthem of Appreciation”

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This is part of the General Conference Odyssey.

It’s been a long time since I’ve participated in the General Conference Odyssey, but I’ve decided to repent and attempt to get back in the habit. So what offerings do we have from April 1976 Saturday afternoon session? We have Boyd K. Packer’s famous “Spiritual Crocodiles” talk, which has likely been drilled into the head of every seminary student (or maybe just every seminary teacher’s kid) thanks to the CES video from the 1990s. We have the newly-called Elder Haight dismissing (unintentionally, I imagine) the missionary folklore that all modern apostles have seen Jesus: “I have not seen, but I know. I have always known, but now I have received a greater assurance and pray that I will always know that this is the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, that it has been restored in our day, that God is a reality” (italics mine). Instead, he emphasizes personal revelation: “I pray the divine spark will develop into a firm knowledge and conviction in all of us, and that through personal revelation we will know that Jesus is the son of the living God, that President Kimball is the only man on earth who holds and exercises in righteousness the keys of the kingdom and is the mouthpiece of God on earth.”

This emphasis seems to be further solidified by the following talk by S. Dilworth Young on “the still small voice.” What I find interesting in most discussions of revelation that employ D&C 9:8-9 as a model is that “study it out in your mind” is either glossed over (as is the case with Young’s talk) or given bare minimum attention. I’m reminded of an MTA presentation by independent historian Don Bradley in which he states,

Perhaps our approaches to the spiritual and temporal should reciprocally inform each other. Maybe instead of just transferring the simplicity with which we often approach spiritual problems to deal with temporal problems, we should transfer some of the complexity and rigor we’ve developed in dealing with temporal problems to how we engage spiritual problems. In temporal problem-solving we take for granted that we might need to learn methods and practice, practice, practice in order to hone skills. Yet, in spiritual problem-solving we seem to expect that God will do all the work except for the nominal “studying out” the problem in our mind, after which God is obligated to give us the right answer…We expect that calculus will be hard, but that gaining revelation from God Almighty will be easy. One implication of the intimate relationship of temporal and spiritual is that lessons learned in our temporal lives may have relevance for how we pursue our spiritual lives.

As for John H. Vandenberg, he dropped a nice quotable slogan: “A true principle discovered, properly applied, brings a correct result.” This followed an interesting story that could’ve been a case study by experimental psychologists like Dan Ariely. Readers of Theodore Burton’s talk on the Word of Wisdom would be better off reading some of the scholarship and historical research on the subject.

Now on to the good stuff by Elder Maxwell.

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I love the way Elder Maxwell speaks. Even though the topic isn’t anything new, he packs it with so many choice words and qualifying phrases that convey a deeper understanding of both the gospel and the world at large. The implications behind his words are powerful, at least to me. Here are a few highlights from what would otherwise be a run-of-the-mill chronological testimony of Jesus Christ:

  • Thus, foolishness, fear, and fashion have flattened the theology of many. For them, there is neither shelter nor landmark on the horizon: In 1972, the book Why Conservative Churches are Growing was published, arguing that theologically conservative churches were on the rise. Even recent research confirms this. Sociologist Rodney Stark blames the shift from mainline Protestant Mainline denominations to more conservative ones on “clergy disbelief in the essentials of Christianity, and their faith in radical politics.”[ref]Stark, The Triumph of Faith: Why the World Is More Religious Than Ever (Wilmington, DL: ISI Books, 2015), 196.[/ref]
  • This testimony involves my reason and my experience—the two limited but helping witnesses! Happily, there has been given to me the third witness of the Spirit—the unimpeachable and convincing witness! My only regret is that what follows is apt to be the verbal equivalent of a child’s enthusiastic finger painting—because my tongue cannot tell all I know: I’m not sure I would separate the Spirit from personal experience considering that the witness of the Spirit is an experience,[ref]Richard Swinburne has relied on “the principle of credulity” when it comes to religious experiences, while Alvin Plantinga has argued that belief in God can be properly basic.[/ref] but the point still stands: reason and lived experience should be coupled with–and enhanced by–the promptings of the Spirit. Our intellect should be refined by the Spirit, while our reason and experience should open wider channels of revelation.
  • He helped to prepare this planet for us and led—not pushed—us from our premortal post: Loving relationships are freely chosen. This is likely why Maxwell later states that Christ “reflected both an astonishing selflessness and a breathtaking commitment to freedom as a condition of our genuine growth” in the premortal realms. Or “his discerning way of knowing us without controlling us[.]”
  • I thank him, further, for not deserting those of us who are slow or stragglers: The Lord doesn’t leave you behind when you drag your feet and when shouldn’t leave others behind either.
  • I testify that he assisted in the creation and management not only of this planet, but other worlds. His grasp is galactic, yet he noticed the widow casting in her mite: Jesus as manager. Makes my heart sing. Stanford’s Robert Sutton has noted, ““Big picture only” leaders often make decisions without considering the constraints that affect the cost and time required to implement them, and even when evidence begins mounting that it is impossible or unwise to implement their grand ideas, they often choose to push forward anyway…[T]he worst senior executives use the distinction between leadership and management as an excuse to avoid the details they really have to master to see the big picture and select the right strategies. Therefore…let me propose a corollary: To do the right thing, a leader needs to understand what it takes to do things right, and to make sure they actually get done.” This is why Christ was “the Perfect Example and Leader,” according to Maxwell, “not asking us to do what he has not done, not asking us to endure what he has not endured.” His led by “divinely demonstrating directions—not just pointing.”
  • He who did not need to die himself was willing to be bound by the chains of death so he could break them for all mankind: I think we sometimes forget the victory and liberation of Christ’s resurrection.
  • I thank him for likewise not interceding on our behalf, even when we pray in faith and reasonable righteousness, for that which would not be right for us: We’re getting into problem of evil territory, but I think there is definitely room for prayers going unanswered because the request isn’t in our best interest eternally speaking.
  • …that program of progress—repentance, which beckons us to betterness: Repentance is so often seen as self-flagellation. But to see it as incremental progress is life-altering. It is a recognition that some things which are “known” are “beyond the border of [our] behavior[.]” And yet, Christ helps us “to advance that border, bit by bit. His relentless redemptiveness exceeds [our] recurring wrongs.”
  • …rising above his beginnings without renouncing them: This cuts to the heart of the shame too often associated with poverty. There is sometimes an embarrassment of one’s origins. But Jesus shows that one does not have to be ashamed of her background, her home life. One can rise above her original circumstances, but still recognize them as part of her story and identity.
  • I thank him for such repeated reachings out to mankind, whether in phenomenal power or in quiet conversation at a wellside: The ways for God to communicate are vast and multifaceted. I have no doubt that he can customize it for each and everyone of us.

So ends his “anthem of appreciation” for the Savior.

And that’s why I love Elder Maxwell.

 

God at War: Interview with Greg Boyd

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This is part of the DR Book Collection.

Image result for god at warA couple months ago, I gave a talk on “trials and their purpose“, which basically become a discussion of the problem of evil in Mormon thought. I read a number of books in preparation for it, including David B. Hart’s The Doors of the Sea, Michael Austin’s Re-reading Job, and N.T. Wright’s Evil & the Justice of God. Two books that I didn’t finish prior to the talk was Jon Levenson’s Creation and the Persistence of Evil and Gregory Boyd’s God at War: The Bible & Spiritual Conflict. The latter in particular I wish I had finished in time. Boyd, a Princeton-educated theologian and pastor, approaches the problem of evil from what he calls the warfare worldview: the perspective that this world is a battlefield between spiritual forces of good and evil. He argues that the

biblical authors generally assume the existence of intermediary spiritual or cosmic beings. These beings, variously termed “gods,” “angels,” “principalities and powers,” “demons,” or, in the earliest strata, “Leviathan” or some other cosmic monster, can and do wage war against God, wreak havoc on his creation and bring all manner of ills upon humanity. Whether portraying Yahweh as warring against Rahab and other cosmic monsters of chaos or depicting Jesus as casting out a legion of demons from the possessed Gerasene, the Bible as well as the early postapostolic church assumes that the creation is caught up in the crossfire of an age-old cosmic battle between good and evil. As in other warfare worldviews, the Bible assumes that the course of this warfare greatly affects life on earth (pg. 18).

Boyd traces God’s conflict with the forces of chaos and evil from the Old Testament (e.g., the hostile waters of creation, Leviathan, Rahab, the gods of Ps. 82, etc.) to the New Testament (e.g., Jesus’ exorcisms, Christus Victor atonement theology). According to Boyd, the evils of this world are not only caused by the free will of human beings, but the free will of demonic beings as well. The book is fascinating and certainly interesting for Mormons, whose own teachings and scriptures depict a pre-mortal “war in heaven” that continues today.[ref]Stephen Smoot has an excellent article in the Journal of the Book of Mormon and Other Restoration Scripture that explores some of these ancient motifs in the Book of Abraham.[/ref] Boyd’s analysis brings new meaning to Mormon’s words: “Wherefore, all things which are good cometh of God; and that which is evil cometh of the devil; for the devil is an enemy unto God, and fighteth against him continually, and inviteth and enticeth to sin, and to do that which is evil continually” (Moroni 7:12).

You can see an interview with Boyd below in which he discusses some of these ideas.

Post-Seculars: Science-Oriented, Religiously Inclined

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A fairly recent study by sociologists Timothy O’Brien and Shiri Noy looks at the relation between science, religion, and politics with interesting–and perhaps counter-intuitive–results.

“We were looking at the assumption that science and religion are conflicting sources of knowledge,” O’Brien said. “There is this assumption in the popular imagination that if you’re scientifically oriented you can’t be religious, and if you’re religious you can’t be scientifically oriented. What was found was that it is true to some extent. We found three big groups of Americans based on their attitudes about science, their knowledge about science, and their attitudes about religion.”

The author broke the survey data into three categories:

  1. Moderns: “those most familiar with and favorable toward science.”
  2. Traditionals: “the most religiously devout and the least familiar with science.”
  3. Post-seculars: “whose worldviews blend elements of both science and religion.”

“As you might expect,” O’Brien continues, “moderns tend to hold more liberal or progressive opinions and traditionalists tend to be more conservative or orthodox.” The post-seculars, however, were different from both groups. You can see how they compare to moderns and traditionals below:

  • Human Life: Post-seculars are “less supportive than moderns of making contraceptives accessible to teenagers. Postseculars and traditionals are also less likely than moderns to agree that it is acceptable for individuals to end their own lives and that patients with incurable diseases have a right to die…[P]ostseculars’ restrictive beliefs about abortion and other issues in this domain are evidence that appreciation and understanding of science do not necessarily lead to liberal social attitudes” (pg. 7).
  • Gender and Sexuality: “Results indicate that compared with each other group, moderns hold more progressive views of gender roles, sexuality, pornography, and sex education. There are no significant differences in postseculars’ and traditionals’ attitudes in this area, indicating that as with attitudes about human life, familiarity with science does not ensure liberal sociopolitical beliefs” (pg. 10).
  • Race and Civil Liberties: “Given their liberal views on gender and sexuality, it is perhaps surprising that moderns are less supportive than traditionals of affirmative action. Postseculars are even less supportive than moderns of affirmative action. Yet this pattern aligns with moderns’ and postseculars’ greater likelihood of agreeing that African Americans can overcome prejudice without favors. In addition, traditionals and postseculars are more likely than moderns to explain Black-White differences in terms of innate qualities, whereas moderns are more likely than traditionals to attribute race disparities to educational opportunities and discrimination…Moderns are more likely than traditionals to agree that atheists, communists, gays and lesbians, militarists, and racists should be able to place books in public libraries and to speak publically. Postseculars are also more supportive than traditionals of these civil liberties these groups” (pg. 10).
  • Government and Social Assistance: While “postseculars are more religious than traditionals, they are less supportive than traditionals of government efforts to reduce inequality” (pg. 10).
  • Criminal Justice: “Interestingly, although moderns are less likely than traditionals to approve of the police’s use of force in some situations, moderns are more likely than traditionals to approve of police force under other circumstances. Furthermore, compared with traditionals, moderns report that courts should deal with criminals more harshly. Postseculars’ opinions in this domain generally resemble moderns with one exception: despite moderns’ relatively tough-on-crime attitudes, they are more likely than each other group to support the decriminalization of marijuana” (pg. 10).
  • Children, Families, and School: “Postseculars share moderns’ emphasis on independent thinking but emphasize obedience more and social acceptance less than moderns. Furthermore, traditionals are more likely than moderns to view spanking as an acceptable form of punishment for children. Finally, consistent with the prominence of faith in the traditional and postsecular worldviews, these groups are each more likely than moderns to approve of prayer in public schools” (pg. 10).
  • Personal Well-being and Interpersonal Trust: “Postseculars…report more positive interpersonal attitudes compared with traditionals” (pg. 11).

In conclusion,

In most, but not all, domains, moderns’ beliefs are relatively liberal or inclusive, whereas traditionals’ are more conservative or exclusive. However, the postsecular perspective defies this binary. Individuals in this category, who are familiar with and appreciative of science and also deeply religious, are marked by sociopolitical attitudes that cannot be consistently labeled conservative or liberal (pg. 11).