Posts by Bruce:
- History is a collection of facts demanding interpretation before we can process them.
- Thus all history is mostly narrative fallacy.
Could Life be Inherently Just? The Significance of the Parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man
April 8th, 2009
It seems like a silly question. We all know life isn’t fair. Its cliché, isn’t it?
There is a long time “proof” that God does not exist that goes like this: “If there is a God, how could there be such injustice and evil in the world?” What they really mean is that they can’t rationally fathom the possibility that all the evil and injustice in the world could somehow be part of a greater justice or morality. Without this further explanation, the “proof” is meaningless.
Read the rest of this entry “
Trying to Understand Creedal Trinitarianism – An Analogy
December 22nd, 2008In my last post I, in great detail, demonstrated why I believe the Trinity doctrine itself is not a contradiction but that creedal Christians have been trained to use it in a contradictory way.
I did it using predict logic, tons of examples, and examples from real life conversations with creedal Christians. So that means no one will read it.
It would seem that being precise with your language makes it difficult to read and comprehend. (A fact all programmers know.) Sometimes it’s easier to just use an example, which is less precise but more understandable. So here is an example that covers everything I said in my last post via an analogy. Read the rest of this entry “
Is the Trinity Doctrine a Contradiction?
December 20th, 2008Several times in discussions on Mormon Matters I’ve made the comment that the Trinity doctrine is a contraction. Actually, technically I was not correct when I said that. I wish to explain my self further, partially backtracking on, or at least nuancing, those comments.
The Trinity doctrine itself doesn’t have to be a contradiction – indeed, I grow more convinced all the time that the Trinity doctrine, at it’s root, is what I believe. What I should have said is that creedal Christians honestly seem to me to be making a choice to interpret or use the Trinity doctrine in a contradictory way. Read the rest of this entry “
The Problem of History – First a Fake Example
November 24th, 2008In my past posts I discussed the impossibility of knowing what really happened in history as well as the problem that, believe or disbelieve, we all have much riding on how Mormon history is interpreted. Either way, it’s your personal religion at stake.
The problem with me saying that is that, well, we all know it’s true — for other people. But due to the narrative fallacy, we think we’re the exception not the rule.
To prove that, at times, we’re all the rule, I am forced to start with a fake example because it is the only way to not derail the conversation immediately. Read the rest of this entry “
History as Narrative Fallacy aka What Type of Apologist Are You?
November 18th, 2008“History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history. There is a fundamental incompleteness in your grasp of such events, since you do not see what’s inside the box, how the mechanisms work. …the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds. You are very likely to be fooled about their intentions.” (The Black Swan, P. 8 )
In a previous post I discussed the realities of The Black Swan, those improbable events that rule our lives but we pretend don’t and can’t happen. I also discussed how in actuality “randomness” is really just incomplete information. And finally I discussed how we feel the need to reverse engineer explanation for historical events — even though it’s impossible — and how, once we do, we have a really hard time realizing that there is more than one viable explanation for the same event. [1]
Which brings me to how this all directly relates to the LDS Church and specifically to the intolerance we show each other on the Bloggernacle at times. It is all directly related to two facts:
The Biology of Irrationality
November 16th, 2008In my previous post, I discussed my introduction to the science behind the rationality problems all humans suffer from. I later found another book, this one called Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend, that introduced me to the biology behind our emotional – and sometimes irrational — thinking.
This time, I’m going to mostly just go with quotes from the book, as they say it all: Read the rest of this entry “
What is a Black Swan? A Book Review
November 15th, 2008In my last post I talked about how God helped me develop a more realistic, though uncomfortable, world view that excluded faith in myself. As it turns out, there is scientific backing for this view. The first book that introduced me to that science is called The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (from here on I’ll abbreviate NNT). Read the rest of this entry “
In Whom Can I Trust?: How I Lost My Faith
November 8th, 2008It’s a familiar story: I read a book (or part of a book anyhow) about Mormon History and began to doubt my faith in the LDS Church.
Your life lays on the floor, shattered before you. Are there any pieces worth salvaging, or is none of it worth a darn? Is there even a God? Does life have meaning?
You aren’t sure what to do or where to go from here. You want to believe in God still, because there was so much joy in it, but you can’t just will it to happen over what your brain tells you the truth is. And you feel all alone because there is no one within the LDS Church you can really talk to about your doubts in a meaningful way. Read the rest of this entry “
The Book of Mormon’s Doctrine of Deity
October 11th, 2008I am fascinated by the Book of Mormon’s teachings (i.e. doctrines) about deity. I am almost equally fascinated with the many scholarly attempts to force fit it into pre-existing categories to make it seem safe. [1]
There is a danger in trying to force fit the Book of Mormon into a pre-existing theological doctrine of deity. It is the same danger that exists in trying to force the Bible into a pre-existing theological doctrine of deity.
Scripture — whether the Book of Mormon or the Bible — supplies us points of data. They do not supply us a specific theology. Theology is how we interpret or put those points together into a coherent whole for ourselves. Read the rest of this entry “
Bloggernacle Thought: Brainwashing
September 15th, 2008This comment is from SilverRain. I found it here.
“Brainwashed” is probably ranked with the weakest possible arguments. If I say you’re brainwashed, I can ignore the chance that someone might be able to disagree with me and have a valid point. If I can relegate you to a pat little category, I don’t have to listen. A little wake-up call, folks: it could be easily said that we are all brainwashed. We are all products of our environment. Quit name-calling and try—just try—to understand another person’s point of view for once. You might find yourself stretching and growing. You might even find yourself becoming wise.
Two related comments: Read the rest of this entry “
Bloggernacle Thought: The Slippery Slope of Unbelief
September 8th, 2008I found this comment out on the bloggernacle from someone named Christopher Smith:
Most people don’t want to believe less. They want to believe more. People who do make the decision to believe less tend to be skeptical types, and not infrequently end up at the bottom of the slippery slope. This is why Whitmerites and RLDS end up as Protestants, and liberal Protestants end up as atheists, whereas fundamentalists and messianic sects continue to thrive and multiply.
Discuss.
What is Tolerance?
September 5th, 2008I wrote an article explaining how I become converted to “political correctness”. I was really talking about “tolerance.”
Tolerance: I hear that word a lot. Words are funny things because they often mean different things to different people. And sometimes (often? usually?) other people have little incentive to bridge any communication gap. Read the rest of this entry “
Alma 36
September 1st, 2008In Sunday School I was assigned to teach Alma 36-39. I decided to concentrate on Alma 36.
I refused to use the word “Chiasmus” during the lesson. I’m not an expert in ancient Hebrew poetry, so I thought I’d leave such arguments to others. And really, I don’t care. What I did want to emphasize was the structure of Alma’s thoughts about his own redemption. Alma has structured his thoughts beautifully and very creatively.
Alma 36 uses a series of thoughts that lead up to Jesus Christ, and then reverse back out, often with the reverse thought. For example, first his limbs get paralyzed then after he turns to Jesus they can move again. First he tries to destroy the Church, then he wants to build it up. Etc. You get the picture. It’s stunningly beautiful. Read the rest of this entry “
A Remarkable Story – But is it Exaggerated?
August 29th, 2008While reading History of the Church I came across an incredible story as told by Elder Theodore Turley which I wish to share. Read the rest of this entry “
Political Correctness as a Gospel Principle
August 23rd, 2008When I started attending school at BYU, political correctness was still recently taking hold in American culture. In high school my English teacher, Mrs. Summers, specifically taught us that if the gender was unknown, we were to use “he” or “his” as the pronoun as these signified both genders. For example:
“Each student in the class opened his book to the page specified.”
And back then we spoke of mailmen, chairmen, policemen, garbage men, etc. A person with a below average IQ was “mentally retarded” and someone that was overweight was “fat.” It was just the way things were.
Old habits die hard. Read the rest of this entry “
The Case for Marriage
July 8th, 2008I’ve enjoyed a book by Linda J. Waite and Maggie Gallagher called The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier, and Better Off Financially.
This book is, in large measure, a response to earlier research done by sociologists and family scientists, like Jesse Bernard, that wrote influential books “proving” that marriage was good for men and bad for women.
It makes an interesting read to see how one set of “evidence” that seems so overwhelming suddenly appears to be dicey at best and dangerously wrong at worst through a simple re-slice and reapplication of the same set of data. It is things like this have gone a long way towards convincing me that we know so much less than we think we do.
But what I found the most interesting was their carefully thought out definition of marriage and their well expressed concerns with our ongoing attempts to redefine marriage out of existence. Read the rest of this entry “
True Religion: Why There Can Be At Most One
July 4th, 2008aka Why Our Personal Beliefs Really Do Matter and Matter A Lot
aka Why We All Believe This Even if We Claim We Don’t
Overheard on the Bloggernacle, or in the office, or just about everywhere:
All religions contain overlapping ideas and in this overlap exists the real voice of God. Read the rest of this entry “
On Three Almighties, One Moral Will, and Why This Post is a Complete Waste of Time
June 25th, 2008The Match
Prepare for the ultimate philosophical smack down between a David and a Goliath! In one corner we have our champ Craig L. Blomberg who I have been told is one of the foremost New Testament scholars in the world. Simply put, he’s brilliant.
Our contender is my former missionary companion who was never anything but a junior companion.
Craig Blomberg comes out of his corner swinging, in How Wide the Divide? His upper-cut is the logical impossibility of the Mormon concept of becoming divine and having more than one Omnipotent “being.” He says,
Even simple logic should suggest that it is contradictory to have more than one omnipotent being; otherwise, for example, not only would God be able to judge me but I would be able to judge God. Both of us could theoretically destroy each other, and then there would be no eternally existing God. (How Wide the Divide? p. 212)
The Book of Mormon: Would You Regularly Study Inspired Fiction?
June 10th, 2008I’m intrigued by those on the bloggernacle that see The Book of Mormon as fiction but inspired by God. It’s common to hear someone that holds that belief say that it doesn’t really matter if The Book of Mormon is historical or not. Read the rest of this entry “
Breaking News: Texas State Court Says Children Improperly Seized
May 22nd, 2008John Nilsson just mentioned this in his post, but I wanted to start a separate thread for this news. Also, John Dehlin suggested to our panel that it would be a good idea to try to keep up with current events.
So first of all, let me say that I don’t have a very strong opinion about this case and don’t claim to understand it. As I explained to the guy I car pool with, I suspect the FLDS is breaking laws but I also suspect that there is little chance of a fair trial for the FLDS, so we may never know if things were handled properly or not. Apparently I was wrong.
Offenders for a Word, Part 2 – Do Mormons Worship Jesus?
May 17th, 2008In my last post I wrote about how we are all forced to take a thought and translate it into words and that this is a sloppy and imperfect process. To make matters worse, the person that has to take those words and decode them back into a thought will fail to do so correctly in many cases because they’ll get stuck on the words used, either because they don’t realize words have many meanings or because they have incentive to misunderstand.
In this post, I want to apply what we’ve discussed to a real life situation: Bruce R. McConkie’s talk on worshipping Jesus.
Case Study 2: Do Mormons Worship Jesus?
The word-offense in question comes from Bruce R. McConkie’s now famous (infamous?) talk entitled “Our Relationship with the Lord” where McConkie states that Mormons do not worship Jesus. Read the rest of this entry “
James Madison on the Inadequateness of Language
May 12th, 2008I deeply apologize for having three posts nearly in a row, but while doing research for my “Offenders for a Word” series, I came across this incredible quote from the Federalist Papers but couldn’t realistically include it in my posting. So I wanted to post it separately because it’s so good. Read the rest of this entry “
Offenders for a Word – Part 1 – Is Jesus God?
May 10th, 2008I love words – I love to read, write, talk – but I think words leave out almost everything. That [is] frustrat[ing]… feeling that what we can share with other people is so much more limited than what we actually experience… (link)– Jaron Lanier
Oh, Lord, deliver us in due time from the little, narrow prison, almost as it were, total darkness of paper, pen, and ink; – and a crooked, broken, scattered and imperfect language. — Joseph Smith (History of the Church 1:299)
I’ve thought a lot about the confines of language in the last several years. Having a thought and expressing that thought such that another person understands it perfectly are two very different things. Read the rest of this entry “
A Jewish Rabbi Defines Monotheism
May 9th, 2008Only months into my mission we stopped to meet a man that had grown up Mormon but had left the Church and was now attending a Method Church with his wife and family. He was very interested in his forgotten Mormon heritage and enjoyed having us stop by to talk religion. Read the rest of this entry “
The Parable of the Merciful Judge
April 27th, 2008I came up with the following parable to explain to a Born Again Christian friend why I felt his belief that our actions plays no role in salvation at all was setting up a false dichotomy between influence and merit. It floated like a lead balloon, of course. He didn’t even bother to comment back to me. I later reused it with a carpool of Mormons that all seemed to enjoy it quite a bit more. In case you are wondering, yes, it’s a true story too. (Note: because I’m getting questions about this, I’ll add this – this is not a parable about the atonement nor is the judge here meant to represent Christ. This parable, as with all parables, is limited in scope with the point it makes.) Read the rest of this entry “
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