... Let Them Worship How, Where or What They May

In the Articles of Fatih of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is this:

11 We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.

We are serious about this.

The fashions and vicissitudes and culture wars, etc. of human culture have altered, in the common context, the meanings of every meaningful word in the above, but we are still dead serious about this.

I have tried to invent a new way to talk about this, without using the words that have, in the vicissitudes of history, become offensive to many, where I substitute the word "cosmology" for "religion", and such, but it only moves the goalposts, and does not lead to mutual understanding. 

And mutual understanding is my real goal, to somehow invite you and your friends, and your enemies, to consider that we argue about it more about abstract definitions than substance -- arguing about choice of dictionaries, in effect.

Even the phrase, "article of faith":

Article: 

Of the definitions in the dictionaries, the one that probably came to mind when you read this word is 

written composition on a news or magazine site

or such.

But what we mean is closer to 

clause

-- particularly a clause of belief or faith rather than a clause of law. 

Speaking of faith,

Faith: 

The popularized definition of faith refers to religious belief, and has even been pushed towards 

system of superstition, and choice of favorite comic book or movie series or other mythologies and their heroes

But what we mean is closer to

fundamental beliefs and how those beliefs affect behavior and thinking and lives

-- but if we are not careful, even there, we can fall into the false trap of the false dichotomy between faith and works.(It's not just a Christian thing, or even "just a religious thing", that false dichotomy.)

For example, if you claim to be an atheist or agnostic, that is an assertion of one of your core beliefs and how it affects your thinking and behavior. 

Or, if you prefer not to be accused of believing something, or anything at all, you still have a choice in your approach to understanding. Or even whether you choose to approach understanding.

And we want to allow you that choice.

Sometimes it is even a valid choice to suspend the choice to understand, rather than to choose to claim understanding. And we want to allow you even that choice when you feel a need to. 

Heaven knows we have found that, at times, we have had to suspend understanding in order to let God teach us something we couldn't understand before.

Freedom of Religion is not about freedom of choice of favorite superheroes. Or, it is not just about that.

I mean, if you choose a favorite superhero, you are often using that as a metaphor to talk about something deeper about what you believe or what you understand, or what you want to understand, or something else important to you.

That's what freedom of religion was meant to be when the framers of the Constitution of the United States of America wrote the First Amendment to it -- the freedom to take your own approach to life, to the extent that it's possible to do so.

...

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... and if this were to go viral, it would be only a matter of moments before the popular meanings of the phrase "take your own approach" were changed to something I do not intend, and, to the extent that such changes in idiom result from people's attempts to understand, I guess I have to allow that, too.

Addictions and Morality

This is, of course,  not the only framework for discussing morality, probably not even the best, but it seems useful.

Are addictions automatically immoral?

Well, we can bring up the example of the pusher, but that's too controversial.

So we can look at hand-washing.

You've heard of people who wash their hands obsessively, I suppose? Some people develop an obsession with keeping their hands clean, to the point of damaging their skin and of being unable to participate in ordinary social functions.

And someone is going to accuse me of engaging in hate speech against hand-washers.

We all need to wash our hands on occasion.

How much hand-washing is bad?

I think we can guess that a plumber will need to wash his hands more often than a software engineer who spends all his time behind a desk. 

Don't distract me about software engineers who engineer plumbing systems. Or about computer users who never clean their keyboards. 

The point is that there is no good single rule about how many times an hour or a day you should wash your hands, and no more -- no single rule to cover everyone.

So how can you define when it becomes an unhealthy compulsion?

If you're at a social function, and someone keeps excusing herself to go wash her hands every fifteen minutes, can't you get after her for letting her OCDs get the better of her?

I suppose you can, but are you not engaging in a compulsion to gossip and criticize when you do?

This will upset people who have a compulsion to tell other people what to do, but the only answer is that it is between the individual and her conscience --

-- unless she's dragging you along and making you wash her hands for her, I suppose.

No, there are valid reasons for needing help washing your hands, too.

Ultimately, the question must be left up to the individual to decide, between her and God.

Wait. If I say God in the current political climate, the odds are that you will imagine a cartoon caricature, or some caricature from some movie that focused on a particular or supposed aspect.

But if I say conscience, I know there are so many purveyors of arcane rules of etiquette that only profit the purveyors thereof, and of other such ideal-mongering, that most people have trouble distinguishing their innate instincts of right and wrong.

Pushers.

Our society seems addicted to purveyance, but it should be possible to refer to the tendency to addiction when talking about morality.

It should be valid to bring up the tendency to addiction when discussing the necessity for regulating the production and access to a substance.

It should be valid to bring up the tendency to addiction when discussing the need for laws punishing and prohibiting rape and sexual abuse.

It should also be valid to bring up the tendency to addiction when discussing monopoly power over technology, among other things.

A Thought Experiment Including Fermi's Paradox and Religion

I lost my faith in a perfect church and a perfect Church at seven or so, and I was trying to rebel against God for making such an imperfect Church and an imperfect world -- all that stuff about the problem of evil.

 Dad pointed out to me that fighting from the inside was a better proposition than fighting from the outside.

 Mom suggested, if I didn't like God's plan, I should try to work up a better one, but it had to be workable. 

When trying to work out how a better plan could really work -- not just mash this ideal and that ideal and the other ideal all jumbled together, but actually work out something that would be functional, I found myself recreating the world we have -- including much of the stuff I didn't like -- arguments, wars, laws, poverty, crime, etc.

Concerning the "black" races and the priesthood --

Yeah. God allowed His Church to backslide on that --

For several reasons, some of which can be summarized as simply, the best people He had available to make His church/Church with weren't ready for what would have been required to pull that much of a social revolution off among the whites in the US, or in any other culture in any other country or group of countries. The assumption of national/cultural superiority was too much a part of pretty much every country's culture identity.

Any church that contradicted that would have face persecution that would make the persecution the Mormons faced because of polygamy look like a friendly debate.

Consider also the internal conflict the Church had over the issue, delayed as it was.

We are our own worst enemy.

Even those of us who understand that God's actual power looks nothing like the posturing of vain men, we tend to lean too much on the stuff that is easy to see.

I have mentioned this to others, and they have complained that an all-powerful God could have made it so that He would have had the necessary caliber of people. But that begs the question of whether we ourselves would be there or not. 

I don't think it would have left us ordinary creatures the means to be included -- means to be saved.

If the Pearl of Great Price can be trusted, think about how Enoch drew all the people of faith of his day except for Noah's grandparents away into the Zion of that time, so that there really were no people interested in being good people left, for Noah's preaching to have any effect. 

If I were to find fault with God, it would be to wonder why He would let Enoch draw all the good people away, but, then again, if He hadn't, this world would not be what we have now.

God is an engineer of the best sort. Because He makes stuff that seems imperfect to us, we have opportunities to learn and grow and change our natures to become more like Him, or less like Him, as we choose.

For the record, many who think they are saved in the church will be surprised at who they find waiting for them when they finally get into kingdoms of glory.

Why do I find it so easy to accept the existence of God?

At the age of seven, I still remembered bits and pieces of things from before I was born. In particular, I remembered my irritation at God for always being right, and for, as I saw it back then, using His power to make all the rules. 

This was something like the first time since I was about four that I had considered that maybe God was right for a reason, and that He wasn't just making up rules to show how much more powerful He was than everyone else.

So, yeah, I have a problem with eliminating God from my worldviews. Short version of the story is I've been carrying a running argument with Him since I was pretty young.

I am aware that many people cannot accept the internal discussions they have with themselves to include a Holy Spirit. But we all have some semblance of a conscience, and that is precisely the beginning of how the Holy Spirit manifests (Him/Her/It)self to us.

The fact that there are unholy spirits that influence us as well should not surprise us, nor should we conflate unholy spirits with holy. Unholy spirits will definitely claim to be holy in attempt to confuse us. But if we are honest with ourselves, we can tell a difference.

One of the differences is that unholy spirits will try to convince us to impose our own vanities on others. The Holy Spirit encourages us to be patient, instead.

Yeah, even that can become confusing when we let false humility become our vanity. I've been there, done that, it's hard to untangle. But if we believe and are patient with ourselves and God, we can even untangle that one. Takes a lot of talking things out with God, which is not an evil thing.

Mind you, I have been surprised at a number of things the church/Church teaches about God. Too many of us drag in strange ideas from the places we and our family, ancestors, and friends come from.

Let me propose a thought experiment.

For context, up until about twenty years ago, it was still sort-of current, both in religious and non-religious contexts, to talk about this world as unique in the universe, and about the human race as the only intelligent life in the known universe, and how precious our world and civilization was.

The James Webb telescope is finding lots of planetary companions to stellar objects close to us, and from the data it gives, we should expect practically every stellar-class object in the universe have planetary companions, many of them in what we call the habitable belt for their stellar primary.

Given what we think we know of the age of the universe, it is becoming more and more accepted that Fermi was correct in proposing his paradox:

Where is everyone else?

If we as a society survive the next hundred years without a total reset of the scale and type that scriptures assert in Noah's time, what directions should we expect our society to take? Is stagnation possible for us as a race?

What about technology? Should we not expect technology in the next thousand years to advance so far that it would be as indistinguishable from magic (See Clarke, et. al.) to us as much of what we have would have been indistinguishable from magic to people on our world living just a thousand years ago?

Breakover in Hydrogen fusion? Death? Poverty? The causes of war?

Extend that to ten thousand years -- a million years.

Where is everyone else? They have to be there somewhere. They have to be doing something to keep themselves occupied. What would that be? 

Where are they? What are they doing?

 

---

This was from a couple of replies I made to a FB friend's nicely done poem about some problems within the church.

Book of Mormon Personal Notes

I have decided to pursue a project I have been considering for a while -- I am going to be writing out some commentary on the Book of Mormon here.

I have no particular authority to do so, other than the permission to take my own notes and share them. These notes should not be considered authoritative or representative in any way. 

In particular, I'm sure that my understanding of anything that I write down will evolve. Even if it doesn't, there's neither time nor room to write down every understanding I have now. The Title Page alone would wear both me and the reader out, and that's no way to make progress on a project.

If it is of use to some others in their study of the Book of Mormon, well enough. 

If it is not useful to you, please set it aside. I don't want to put stumbling blocks up for you.

[Edit 20240406: Yes, this is another of those projects that isn't going anywhere. I may yet post "gems" from my personal studies or something like that, but no formal commentary level stuff.]

Sons of God in Genesis -- Superhuman?

This is from something I posted to a thread on eXTwitter:

If Genesis 6 is read as if it started at Genesis 6 and did not continue from Genesis 5, the wording of the first two verses of ch. 6 could be read as that the sons of God were not mortal humans, and many have so read it.

But chapter 6 is a continuation from ch. 5.

And chapter 5 is a continuation from ch. 4.

Chapter 4 tells about a division among the children of Adam.

Cain and Abel seem to have both started okay, but Abel received and accepted instruction from the Lord, and made his sacrifice accordingly. In contrast, from verse 7, we are given to understand that Cain, when he brought his sacrifice, did so at Lucifer's direction.

The Lord said, if you don't follow me, you won't get it right. And if you don't do right, you start into the path of sin. (If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door.)

And that's what Cain did. He ended up committing murder and he and his children left Adam and the rest, and no longer followed God. Some might ask why Cain was not subject to capital punishment. As I understand it, especially in the first generation of Adam's children, and since Cain did promise to refrain from further killing, God considered it better to let Cain continue to have children to populate the world.

When Seth was born, Eve expressed hope that this son would follow God, and v. 26 indicates that Seth and his children did follow God.

So we see that, among the children of Adam and Eve, some followed God and some didn't. In other words, some were children of God and some were not.

Chapter five is not much more than a listing of the lineage of Noah and his children – of interest to us among those who followed God because of Noah. These are not the only ones of the descendents of Adam who followed God, they are just those in the direct lineage of Noah.

Thus, when we get to verse 2 of chapter 6, we can see that what it is saying is that (unsurprisingly) some of the children of those who followed God (the sons of God) were seduced away into intermarrying and joining in with the children of those who did not follow God (the sons of men).

(I think we can safely assume that at least some of the intermarriage involved children of those who did not follow God going the other direction, joining with those who did follow God, even though it's not explicitly stated in Genesis.)

Looking back to chapter 4, those who did not follow God tended to focus on specialized (technological) skills instead of continuing to learn greater things from God. (See Jabal and Jubal and Tubal-cain.)

And we also see in both Cain and Lamech that Satan was already teaching people to do conspiracies. (This Lamech, of course, is a different person than Noah's grandfather.)

We do not need to doubt that God taught His followers – His children – all the things that the children of men learned in their specializations, and much more. Thus the children of the children of God knew more about nutrition, physics, etc. than the children of men, and were of great stature – men (and women) of great renown among them.

Great stature – knowing about nutrition and health, many of them would well have been of significant physically greater stature, much as better nutrition and health in the last century has led to a sudden generational increase in height and physical strength, with children towering over parents.

These children of the believers would had great knowledge from their parents, but, in many cases, not the ethics and morals to use that knowledge well and wisely.

We can see them constructing a society with all the evils that we have in our modern society. That's why it concerned God that theirs thoughts were continually evil.

And now we can begin to see why God might have found it necessary to send the a big slushball comet or asteroid to cause the floods, and start the world fresh again with Noah.

Is Over 900 an Unreasonable Age for Adam and Certain of His Posterity?

(This is from a reply to a FaceBook acquaintance's post.)

I once had this possibility suggested to my mind, that it would be reasonable to assume that the lifespans mentioned in the Bible for Adam and certain of his descendants made sense in month counts instead of years.

I considered it – for all of about the hour or two of reading that it took to ascertain that it does not fit with certain important details of the lives of the patriarchs.

I felt a certain kind of disappointment, because it would make the Book of Genesis more "reasonable", and provide a defense from friends who disparaged the scriptures for being "unreasonable". But friends who insist that the Bible is unreasonable will not be placated by merely making the lifespans fit better with our experience in the modern world.

The scriptures do not need to be that kind of reasonable. God is capable of doing things we don't understand. Nature herself does lots of things we only pretend to understand.

If we think about reasonability, we must think about what the world was like back then. The world would not have had all the pollutions society has imposed on it since men started building cities. Adam and Eve, if we can trust the scriptures at all, would have had nearly perfect genetic material, undamaged by pollutions or mutations. Long lifespans would, on the contrary, be reasonable.

We know that modern humans can live to over a hundred. Without disease, accident, or war and other such violence, we can easily well exceed a hundred. Japan, for example, has several tens of thousands of people over the age of 100, many of them still out working their farms.

Adam and his righteous descendants were taught many things from on high, it is only reasonable to expect that they were taught how to take care of their health. It is very reasonable to expect lifespans well over a hundred. Given the healthy conditions, it is not particularly reasonable to expect lifespans over 200. When we see things in such light, hundreds of years is not at all unreasonable, and nearly a thousand certainly isn't too much of a stretch.

Which God among the N-thousand?

It's a common question when discussing the reality of God --

Joe: Which God, of which religion? There are thousands of religions.

Bob: Uhh,

Joe: There are so many. Why is the Mormon God the only true God?

Jean: Well, for one thing, there is no Mormon God. The Book of Mormon teaches about Jesus Christ, His Father, and the Holy Ghost. We are Christian.

Joe: Then why the Christian God? What's wrong with, for instance, the Japanese or Greek Gods? 

Carrie: Every religion feels just as strongly about their God.

Bob: Can I quote one of our Articles of Faith?

Joe: Why?

Bob: It just might help.

Carrie: I guess I don't mind.

Joe: Will it explain why the Mormon God is the one true God?

Jean: Number Eleven?

Bob: That's the one I have in mind.

Jean: It's definitely relevant. 

Joe: Okay, if you insist, let's hear it.

Bob: It goes like this:

We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.

Joe: I don't get it. All that says is that you want to worship the God of your own invention.

Jean: I think you missed the last clause.

... let them worship how, where, or what they may.

Carrie: You don't mean that. 

Bob: No?

Carrie: You don't. Millie was telling me all about how all the other religions are wrong and just leading everyone to hell.

Jean: Unfortunately, some members of our Church don't seem to mean it, or don't seem to understand it.

Carrie: Millie said she wasn't sure you, in particular, understood God.

Bob: Unfortunately, some of our members are particularly unwilling to apply this to fellow members of the same Church. 

Jean: But this is an Article of Faith. It's official, published by the Church.

Let them worship how, where, or what they may.

Bob: Not limited to people who aren't members of the Church. All men. All human beings. Even in the Church. It says

We ... allow all men the same privilege, ...

Carrie: Privilege?

Jean: 

... the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience ...

Bob: And it's for everyone, so -- according to their conscience, according to your conscience.

Joe: But your Almighty God.

Jean: 

... how, where, or what they may.

Carrie: "Almighty God". That's your God.

Bob: You'd rather worship a weak God?

Jean: It's a description.

Carrie: Maybe I would prefer a weak God, that wouldn't be always sending me to hell. 

Jean: That's not what God does.

Joe: And you say there is only one God.

Carrie: Why do you send all those missionaries out?

Bob: There is only one God, but there are thousands of ways to view that God.

Jean: More like billions. One for every person on the planet.

Bob: And considering that our understandings evolve, I guess, more than billions.

Jean: Every one of us. It's what we do most of our lives.

Bob: It's probably the most human thing we do.

Carrie: What's the most human thing we do?

Bob: Try to understand God.

Jean: Try to figure out what our own highest priorities should be. 

Joe: What does figuring out priorities have to do with God?

Carrie: Isn't it bad enough you're trying to tell us we have to worship the God you made up? And now you're talking about priorities?

Bob: A person's set of priorities is what that person thinks is most important, right?

Carrie: Well, yeah. You don't get to tell me what I should think is most important.

Bob: Right. That's not my business.

Jean: ... let them worship how, where, or what they may. It's your job to set your own priorities.

Bob: You have to choose what's important to you, what is, in effect, the God that rules your life.

Joe: I ain't letting no God run my life.

Jean: But you choose what you think is important.

Joe: Damn sure.

Bob: Of course. What we're saying is that asserting all people's privilege of following their own conscience, as individuals, is the same thing as asserting all people's privilege of worshiping the God of their own choice. And that's the same thing as asserting the privilege that we all have of setting our own priorities, of choosing what's most important to us.

Joe: Then why do you have to call it God?

Bob: Because what you believe about how you and the world around were created, and about who is running things, is probably the biggest factor in how you set your priorities.

Jean: Although what you think is important also depends a lot on how you think you and the world came to be, and who is in charge.

Joe: Pretty soon, you're going to be saying the same thing Millie says, that evolution is my religion.

Jean: Isn't it a big part of what you have instead of religion?

Carrie: I don't have anything instead of religion.

Bob: Don't you have a philosophy about life?

Joe: Sure, but that's not a religion. I don't believe in any God.

Bob: There are religions that do not claim a God, you know.

Carrie: Such as?

Jean: Most branches of Buddhism claim not to have a God.

Joe: That's different.

Jean: Yes it is. But it's also the same. There was somebody in Japan that told me the short piece of really thick rope over his door was his Shintō Kami -- his God. It showed him how to be persistent.  

Carrie: And you told him that would lead him to hell, right?

Jean: No, I thought it seemed like a good metaphor and a good ideal, and I told him so.

Joe: But calling it God?

Jean: I felt an impression that it was his high priority, and Shintō allows changing Kami, changing priorities.

Bob: And when we claim the privilege of worshiping according to our own consciences, we also claim that everyone who doesn't call it worshiping or God or religion has the right to claim their own philosophies and priorities and stuff, according to what they believe is right.

Jean: I don't trust you. You send out missionaries.

Bob: I think the biggest failures of our missionary program is when a missionary hasn't figured out that each person has to follow his or her own conscience, I mean, ...

Carrie: His or her, I heard that. Pronouns are important!

Bob: So is grammar. It's hard for me to mix plural and singular forms without getting confused, and the only true neutrals for people in English are plurals. You're changing the subject.

Carrie: My privilege. I don't want to talk about this any more.

Jean: Okay, let's talk about something else. 

Joe: But why do you send missionaries out?

Jean: Well, our missionaries are supposed to be inviting people. 

Bob: And why do certain people publish books and lecture about how their version of God doesn't exist? People like to share what they think.

Joe: But it's irrational!

Jean: Humans are all a little crazy. It's okay. Sharing what we think about helps us all keep sane.