I had another dream, I had another life
With Ender’s Game due out in the US this week (and already showing elsewhere), I thought I’d return to the story once more. In this morning’s post, I talk about how the depiction of children in Ender’s Game resonates with my belief that, in certain very real ways, all of us living on this earth are children. Even if we are sometimes good at pretending, to ourselves and others, that we aren’t.
In this morning’s post for Times And Seasons, I introduce an attempt to find middle ground between simplistic metaphysical views of ordinances and mere symbolism. It’s an idea I’ve been working on for a long time, but I think this is the first time I’ve tried it out in public. I’m looking forward to getting some feedback.
Today’s post for Time And Seasons asks a simple question: does God help find lost car keys? It seems difficult to imagine a God who cares about such trivial concerns given the terrible evil and suffering that takes place in this life, but I explain why I think God might care about the little things, after all.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has two General Conferences every year (one in spring and one in fall) where the leadership of the Church address the members in a series of 2-hours sessions that are broadcast live around most of the world. In the most recent conference (just last week) Dieter F. Uchtdorf spoke with compassion and honesty about the struggles many Mormons have with doubts about their faith. Uchtdorf is the Second Counselor in the Church’s governing Presidency (sort of like a vice-vice-president), and his conciliatory tone has created a big reaction among the membership of the Church.
This NYT article discusses the impact of Uchtdorf’s words and quotes several Mormon scholars, including my parents Terryl and Fiona. The text of the speech, called “Come, Join Us” is available as here (or watch or listen to it here.)
My own impression: I like Uchtdorf’s comments quite a lot. I think they lend significant credibility (though no official support, of course) to my parents’ efforts at The Temple and Observatory Group, which is a non-profit focused on addressing the doubts and concerns of Mormons. I think it’s a mistake to see any grand change in policy, however. (Dallin H. Oaks’ rather hard-hitting No Other Gods, which was given the next day, makes that pretty clear.)
The tone reflects a response to the expectations and concerns of members, but there wasn’t a single word that was new doctrine. Many people have told me in the past that the Mormonism described by me or by my parents is one they would love, but not one they recognize from their own upbringing or congregation. Uchtdorf’s “talk” (that’s Mormon for “sermon”, basically) makes it much more prominent, but it’s always been there.
I had a conversation with my mum yesterday where I mentioned this idea of “aspirational obedience” that I’d been thinking about. She said it would make a good post, and I like to do what my momma tells me to do, so today’s post at Times And Seasons is on that topic. I also threw in some related concepts, like the idea that guilt is usually a symptom of pride and the relationship between goal-setting and humility.
Comments are off on this post, but y’all can contribute to the original post at T&S if you feel so inclined.
Yahoo News posted on an interesting archaeological discovery in Israel that continues to add evidence that monotheism in Judaism was a late development in its Biblical history, and that one of its most prominent deities was the “wife” or consort of Yahweh. This prominent Jewish goddess was named Ashera, who also had a place in the pantheons of older cultures as well, dating back to the ancient Sumerian and Ugaritic myths.
For those familiar with the work of Margaret Barker and other similar Biblical scholars, this is not breaking news. The worship of multiple (including female) deities, pre-dating the first temple period has been researched and written about for a long time. But the additional evidence, of course, does make it increasingly hard for those who want to claim the root of the monotheistic, Judeo-Christian thought reaches back to the dawn of time instead of the revisionary, Deuteronomist scribes in King Josiah’s day, will have difficulty contorting around this kind of information. As a Mormon who takes Joseph Smith’s teachings about a “Heavenly Mother” and his King Follett sermon seriously, this already synthesizes with my religious worldview.
Slate has an interesting article about the exclusivity of Mormon weddings. I thought I’d weigh in and share some experiences about the decisions my wife and I made.
The background is just a little complex, but here goes. First: Mormons believe that marriages can be “for time and all eternity” instead of “till death do you part.” This is based on a ritual Mormons call “a sealing” by which the husband and wife are “sealed” together for eternity.
Second, this sealing can only be performed in Mormon temples, which means that only adult Mormons in good standing can attend. If you are not a Mormon, not in good standing, or too young then you can’t come.
In theory, this is not a problem, because in theory a “sealing” and a “wedding” are not the same thing. In many countries that don’t recognize Mormon sealings as legally binding, Mormons have to get a civil marriage first and then they go to the temple to get sealed. But in the United States, a temple sealing is legally recognized as a marriage so you can just have the temple ceremony and that’s it.
If you make that choice, then friends and family who can’t enter the temple feel excluded. The logical choice, then, is to go ahead and continue to separate the sealing from the wedding, but the Church has discouraged this for the past few decades with a policy that says that if you get married civilly first (in the US, where that’s optional as opposed to a necessity) you must subsequently wait a full year to be sealed in the temple.
I’ve seen this post making the rounds, and I like it quite a lot so I’m sharing it. The general message is that love isn’t an emotion (e.g. Disney, every rom-com ever) but rather it’s about choices we make. And that’s a good message.
But there’s one line in the post that really stuck out to me in particular, which is this:
Through giving, through doing things for my wife, the emotion that I had been so desperately seeking naturally came about. It wasn’t something I could force, just something that would come about as a result of my giving. In other words, it was in the practicality that I found the love I was looking for. (emphasis original)
This resonates with what I’ve written in the past about the relationship between the sacred and the mundane, and also with what Walker has written with his co-author (and DR commenter) Allen. It’s a beautiful message that’s easy to understand but hard to live by. Beauty, love, and all the ideals that we care about are there around us in the world, but we have to reach out and seize them through mundane actions rather than wait around for a non-existent life soundtrack to inform us that meaning is being rained down upon us by some cosmic director of our lives.
Want to know one way to guarantee no comments on Times And Seasons? I decided to try “use lots of game theory” and see how that works. So far? Success. But if you think seeing the world as one giant, iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma sounds interesting, then maybe you should give it a read anyway.
I know I had fun writing it, and if I ever had the time, I’d love to actually formalize the model and try it out. Shifting from traditional economic models to complex systems was a major interest for me when I was studying at Michigan, and it would be great to scratch that itch again.
Rabbi Perry Tirschwell wrote an interesting comparison of Mormons and Jews in the Jewish Press yesterday. Ever since Orson Hyde dedicated the Holy Land and prophesied about the Zionist movement, Mormons have had a vested interest in witnessing the restoration of the Jews’ place in the world. It should be clear, though, that Latter-day Saint Church leaders are on record in expressing love for towards both Jews and Muslims, lest people think we’re taking a side in certain Middle-East conflict. The late Mormon president/prophet Howard W. Hunter said in his excellent 1979 address “All Are Alike Unto God”: