SeN takes a cheap shot at Jehovah's Witnesses

[_Symmachus]

Not just straw, but Utah straw. No wonder Thomas never wrote more.

Duns Supreme Court was understandably discouraged as well, I would guess.

It kept changing s-c-o-t-us to "Supreme Court" once I clicked "submit," so I deleted it, but now I wish I hadn't.

[_Physics Guy]

I don't remember so clearly how I found this board. I found Jeff Lindsay's "Mormanity" blog first, perhaps just through typing "Morm-a-n" by mistake into Google. Jeff and his commenters were impressively reasonable and respectful, and that part fit with my default assumption that Mormonism was probably more or less as reasonable and legitimate as any other religion. In my Scientology phase Mormonism had been among my examples of a recently founded but genuine religion, in contrast to the obviously predatory scam of Scientology.

But the more I learned about Joseph Smith the more he seemed just like L. Ron Hubbard, a slimy cult leader who only believed his own line in the easy way that a narcissistic leader can believe himself to be a special person who is entitled to everything. So I became interested in how smart and decent people could devoutly follow a slimy guy's transparent fraud.

That was the theme that had interested me in Scientology as well. I was and am interested in the psychological and philosophical mechanisms that let people see the world in very different ways---the blue or red pills that we all take, as it were. The interest is a spin-off from one of my physics interests, namely metastability. Sometimes a highly excited state can be stable against small perturbations, and it takes a large enough kick to reveal its true instability. It can also decay, suddenly and unpredictably, through quantum tunneling. There is in principle always a chance that the universe as we know it is in such a metastable state now. Everything could go Boom, any time. Nice to know.

Anyway I justified my initial interest in learning about Scientology with the notion that I was using the stability and collapse of world views as a sort of intuition pump that might give me new ideas about the physics of metastability. I don't think that has paid off so far, but the topic has become interesting for its own sake.

I think that after Jeff's blog I found a few others, including Times and Seasons and maybe the old New Order Mormon board. At some point I think some Google search or other turned up a post by Symmachus that I found concise and informative, and I decided to look more at this board.

Side remarks about metastability because this is my thing:

They actually worry about how "everything could go Boom" whenever they turn on a new particle accelerator. Could the unprecedentedly high-energy events that it will start to produce be just what it takes to seed the transition out of false vacuum? They decide to flip the switch when they can conclude that similarly high-energy events must have occurred many times through cosmic rays, so if the universe were going to go Boom this way it would have gone Boom already.

It's an odd corner of risk analysis, to be sure. It's obviously extremely implausible that a single collision between subatomic particles could unravel the whole fabric of reality. The severity of the conceivably possible consequences is so great, however, that you kind of have to take the question seriously, and unfortunately we have no idea how to quantify the risk. We have no evidence that the risk is non-zero, but that's just it—we wouldn't have any evidence until too late. The cosmic ray argument is a good way to cut that Gordian knot by confidently setting an empirical upper bound on the risk that is sufficiently low.

I'm not actually worried about the universe collapsing like that; I just like to mention the possibility as the most spectacular example of why metastability could be important. Decay of metastable states is also interesting in lots of non-disastrous scenarios where we know it does occur, including most if not all of the detectors that make quantum measurements. That's why I care about metastability.

[_Analytics]

I think it's fair to say that the culture of Mormonism encourages education and worldly achievement--that is why there are in fact many highly educated Mormons. But that is different than saying that Mormonism has an "intellectual system to nourish a great intellect.”

It seems to me that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were both really creative in making up and co-opting novel theological ideas that addressed the things they thought about. Their musings in turn provided a lot for subsequent thinkers to chew on. I'm not in a position to judge whether any of this was truly intellectual, but from my seat in the peanut gallery, it seems like it was headed that way.

Things fundamentally changed in 1922. That is the year that B.H. Roberts had a series of meetings with the Church's hierarchy with his discovery that the Book of Mormon wasn't actually true. The point isn't so much that B.H. Roberts had the final say on these issues, but rather two things: first, by 1922 it was becoming apparent to people who researched it deeply that the keystone of the religion wasn't sound. Second, B.H. Roberts was so naïve that he thought this was news.

Since then, the Church has been backpedaling on the truthfulness of Mormonism's interesting theological concepts, e.g. the conversation changed from whether it was true that God was once a mortal man to whether this was a doctrine that you were required to believe in order to be counted as a faithful member of the Church. The Church has retrenched to a very basic set of beliefs that are considered requirements, leaving out a whole set of fascinating doctrines that are considered optional. The problem that a would-be Mormon intellectual faces in this landscape is that his hands are tied--he can't really say what he thinks about deep doctrine because whatever he says, it will offend somebody within the group of faithful Saints.

This is just a particular instance of a broader phenomenon of the place that religious thought has in the world of modern intellectualism. Revealed religion is interesting in terms of psychology, sociology and history, but does it have anything of value to say in terms of describing reality?

As Peterson's bane put it:

These mighty scholars [Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Newman] may have written many evil things or many foolish things, and been laughably ignorant of the germ theory of disease or the place of the terrestrial globe in the solar system, let alone the universe, and this is the plain reason why there are no more of them today, and why there will be no more of them tomorrow. Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago: either that or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism, as did, say, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brave Lutheran pastor hanged by the Nazis for his refusal to collude with them. We shall have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness.

While some religious apology is magnificent in its limited way—one might cite Pascal—and some of it is dreary and absurd—here one cannot avoid naming C. S. Lewis—both styles have something in common, namely the appalling load of strain that they have to bear. How much effort it takes to affirm the incredible!

Hitchens, Christopher. god Is Not Great (pp. 12-13).

[_Dr Moore]

I think it could just be a case of mistaken intent. As a point of fact, Mormons and JWs do have different views on education. For that matter, almost EVERY religion takes a different view on education than the JWs. So I would say, at worst, it's a false dichotomy between JWs and Mormons, because in fact it's a wide gap between JWs and "everyone."

See here, for the JW view on school and education:
https://www.jw.org/en/jehovahs-witnesse ... on-school/

Higher education can lead to moral and spiritual dangers

A Bible proverb says: “The shrewd one sees the danger and conceals himself.” (Proverbs 22:3) Jehovah’s Witnesses feel that the environment in some universities or similar centers of higher learning can pose moral and spiritual dangers. For that reason, many Witnesses choose not to immerse themselves or their children in such an environment. They feel that in centers of higher learning, mistaken ideas such as the following are often promoted:

I bet the rank and file membership takes quotes like these at face value. On the margin, this will lead to fewer families choosing to send their kids to college.

And indeed, this NPR article points to a Pew study (pre-2017) in which only 9% of JWs earn college degrees, the lowest of any faith group in the survey, and well below the national average of 30.4%.

[_huckelberry]

I read Mr Cahill's book some time ago. I do not remember any indepth considerations of what is necessary for a good soil for intellectual systems. He was quick to toss off clever observations. Considering what he may have had in mind it may be thought that some cosmological systems have internal problems of a sort which do not invite deeper investigation. Pronouncements by authority run a risk of that I think.
An example of this perhaps more extreme:
I heard, by way of Utube, a chief southern Baptist leader explain that the universe looks old to science even though very young because God carefully made it to look old. I doubt that this revelatory insight will be a jumpoff point for either much science or reflection on the character of God.

[_moksha]

Too bad the apologist did not point to the story of How Mormonism Saved Civilization with the vast genealogical library and catalog of DNA samples in its Ancestry.com or at least until Ancestry.com was sold to a multinational corporation with offices in Manhattan and China for $4.7 billion.

Wait, you mean all that ancestral data painstakingly gathered by the Saints and digitalized by Utah prisoners has been taken over by a multinational corporation as a for-profit enterprise?

[_Gadianton]

What book produced by the FARMSians looks like it might have that kind of impact within Mormonism? Come to think of it, what books have they actually published since Nibley? Sorenson and Skousen are the only ones who come to mind. I find it revealing that Peterson focuses on the Mormon presence in institutions, as if mere membership in a club constitutes intellectual contribution.

A terribly critical point. The apologists have a problem of mistaking "quoting" for "being quoted". The apologists follow Nibley's lead of having lots and lots of citations for their essays. What matters is who is quoting them, not who they are quoting. The apologists produce "link farms" -- they support each others stuff but nobody outside of Mopologetics does.

[_Gadianton]

I think it's fair to say that the culture of Mormonism encourages education and worldly achievement--that is why there are in fact many highly educated Mormons. But that is different than saying that Mormonism has an "intellectual system to nourish a great intellect.

Dead on. But anyway, who cares? Does it not matter enough that the Church is the only true Church on the face of the earth, and the apologists are off to get their own planets when they "walk through the exit door" to this world? Why do they have to be the only true church on the face of the earth with dictates straight from God himself, AND also be a fashionably academic; getting high praise from worldly intellectuals?

[_Gadianton]

I read Mr Cahill's book some time ago. I do not remember any indepth considerations of what is necessary for a good soil for intellectual systems. He was quick to toss off clever observations.

This explains a lot. Of course DCP aches to belong to the club of "clever intellectuals" who pat each other on the back and make wise cracks at the commoner. It hurts like hell, that despite all his attempts to read books, go to concerts and travel the world, his faith is seen as a backwater cult by the intellectual in-crowd he wishes to belong to.

[_Gadianton]

The proprietor once again flees the battle he's in the middle of to swoosh his sword at an imaginary enemy.

Nobody ever said that JW's don't question higher education.

At issue was this remark:

"All three, he said, are shallow and superficial faiths, “full of assertions . . . but yield[ing] no intellectual system to nourish a great intellect.”"

All the higher education in the world Mormons obtain does nothing per se to advance an "intellectual system" within Mormonism.