How long/intensely did you believe in the historicity of the Book of Mormon?

[Res Ipsa]

Pretty intense story Res.

He gave me a copy of that year’s institute study guide, which was on the Book of Mormon.

Ha ha. How bad is your position when you know the last thing you can do is even broach the question? Merely uttering the words of the question is so damaging that the quality of any conceivable answer is moot.

Your bishop wasn't wrong, however. He knew there aren't good answers, and even if such a thing as FAIR had existed back then, he wouldn't have gone there either. He did the right thing. He maintained character. "Here son, here's the official party line..." The very best play that he had was to show that he was aware problem but yet stayed the course. Basically, you had to make the choice of whether to do your duty and play your role or move on.

My bishop was similar. I never brought up concerns, but he knew I was into FARMS, and he told me a story of a friend of his who was very intellectual and a devout member, a student of Nibley and had an impressive library. He reached a certain point where he slowed on his studies, and then one by one, gave all his books away. This same bishop was famous for terminating any conversation going anywhere and insisting on "faith and repentance". He was also a very loved seminary teacher. I learned shortly before my father passed that my dad had gone to this (former) bishop as I was slipping into inactivity, and begged this bishop to talk to me. He utterly refused.

I'd always kind of scoffed at this bishop and his superficiality, but years later, I came to realize that he was dead right. To be a good Mormon, you must live in an information silo. And if you don't, it's just way too much work to maintain the virtualized silo that folks like DCP live in.

It was a pretty intense life for a while. I didn’t know it at the time, but the request I made of the Bishop was the equivalent of the Kobayashi Maru: there was no written response to the Tanners’ book. The internet was years away. The church’s response was to direct the members to avoid anti-Mormon literature. Nibley had written his silly response to Brodie, but there was no organized attempt to respond.

I was asking the “wrong” questions, so was left to struggle on my own.

[MG 2.0]

I was asking the “wrong” questions, so was left to struggle on my own.

So I take it you never met with Elder Oaks? If you don’t mind me asking, why?

Regards,
MG

[Res Ipsa]

I was asking the “wrong” questions, so was left to struggle on my own.

So I take it you never met with Elder Oaks? If you don’t mind me asking, why?

Regards,
MG

It wasn’t like Oaks invited me to a meeting. I heard about the discussion second hand. I was in California, and the meeting assumed I’d continue to go to school at BYU. So, it wasn’t that I turned down an invitation from Oaks, it was that I decided not to go back to BYU, which would have allowed a meeting to happen.

It was also the way the offer was described. The purpose of the meeting was to help me overcome the problems I had with the church so I could go back to being a faithful Mormon. I was more focused on trying to understand what the church was than trying to make the church more palatable to me.

Finally, I had also been subjected to some pretty heavy duty ecclesiastical abuse by my mission President in my last conversation with him. He was a general authority, and I was pretty gun shy about putting myself in a position where that could happen again.

[Physics Guy]

I'm really only trying to hold up one of those sparring pads, here, and not actually defend Mormon ideas of pre-existence choice.

Planning every single person's country of origin and ethnicity would require absolute predestination.

What if God rolls all the dice and generates a script for how the universe will unfold, and then calls for volunteers to play each role? So many heroes, so many torture victims, submit your forms with ranked choices. Then when everyone gets their assigned role, they get to put their sticker on that particular spacetime 4-volume of atom world lines: this will be me. I move that token onto my player-pad.

My own feeling is that this could conceivably work, if each 4-volume of world lines that constituted an intelligent brain somehow included enough bits, isolated from cause and effect in the rest of the universe, to point to a unique player identity. I find that possibility bizarre and dubious, so I don't really mean to defend it, but I'm curious as to whether it can really be ruled out.

Assuming an omnipotent God, it would be trivial to imagine a world where far greater good is done for the average person than this one.

This is more seriously less clear to me. Greater good here and now, sure, but if our universe is really just a backstory for eternity then it seems hard to say what the greater good really is. Within this world a lot of people can recall experiences that seemed bad at the time but that were valuable in retrospect. There are a lot of experiences so bad that no earthly future could redeem them, but an eternal future might.

I think it's ridiculous to believe the highest levels of 'goodness' require animals to be confined, farmed, and slaughtered brutally in order for humans to have easy lives. But even if we imagine future tech that allows us to work around hurting animals, the idea of goodness in the abstract still reduces to preserving the ultimate invasive species, which is just silly.

I think about this whenever—or more accurately, a while before—I pull the trigger on a deer. Animals behaving naturally look more robotic than they appear even in nature documentaries, where the clips that are selected to look most interesting to humans tend to show animals looking more humanly purposeful than they usually do. I'm quite sure that humans are on a continuum with animals, but I really think that where we are along it is past some kind of threshold.

I admit that I wouldn't like my own life to depend on how sure a hunter of another species was about me. I look forward to artificial meat that doesn't need to grow the animals' brains. Still the principle seems to me to be consistent. I see nothing wrong in eating a kernel of corn. It's just a bunch of atoms. I'm also just a bunch of atoms. Some atoms are steam and some are ice, however. My bunch of atoms may be different from other bunches.

[Gadianton]

What if God rolls all the dice and generates a script for how the universe will unfold, and then calls for volunteers to play each role?

A deeper question would be the compatibility of foreknowledge and free-agency. Remember, Mormons are constrained to libertarian free will, not compatibilism. A well-known idea that floats around the pews is the idea that everyone picked their families in the pre-existence. Impossible. Sure, God could do it your way. After everyone picks their families, God figures out a story of rising and falling civilizations over 7,000 years with all kinds of plots and subplots and natural and human-created disasters that works out just right so that every one of these precisely defined family units will transpire. Perhaps there are thousands of such stories, and God discusses the scenarios for billions of years with his children until each "family" agrees to a single timeline. But each of these scenarios leave no room for agency as the scenario unfolds. We're just changing the definition of agency to be the freedom to pick a determined scenario in advance.

Greater good here and now, sure, but if our universe is really just a backstory for eternity then it seems hard to say what the greater good really is

Well yes, that's exactly the point I went on to make.

I see nothing wrong in eating a kernel of corn. It's just a bunch of atoms

Once you rule out pain to other species, it's hard to see anything wrong with an invasive species eternally securing itself in materialistic terms. However, it's also hard to see anything admirable about it. I'm all for colonizing Mars and other planets if we can figure out how to do it, and especially if we can figure out how to do it treating all life forms with relative decency, but to believe this human conquest is literally the definition of "the Good" is obviously just the naturalistic fallacy, and it's pretty silly.

In Mormonism, the great moral lesson is Eternal Progression. Humans becoming immortal and endlessly populating worlds such that all flora and fauna work to the glorification of the human terraformers.

[Marcus]

...Within this world a lot of people can recall experiences that seemed bad at the time but that were valuable in retrospect. There are a lot of experiences so bad that no earthly future could redeem them, but an eternal future might...

i agree, and it seems to me that that is how the hope for "an eternal future" is borne, as a way to mitigate the pain of actual experiences.

I seem to recall drW making a very strong case for the creation of the concept of eternal life, along with a belief in godlike entities, for exactly this type of reason.

[canpakes]

I'm really only trying to hold up one of those sparring pads, here, and not actually defend Mormon ideas of pre-existence choice.

Planning every single person's country of origin and ethnicity would require absolute predestination.

What if God rolls all the dice and generates a script for how the universe will unfold, and then calls for volunteers to play each role? So many heroes, so many torture victims, submit your forms with ranked choices. Then when everyone gets their assigned role, they get to put their sticker on that particular spacetime 4-volume of atom world lines: this will be me. I move that token onto my player-pad.

What were they basing their selections upon? None of the terrestrial scenarios that they’d be choosing from would be anything that they’re familiar with.

But if so, apparently ‘disease’ and ‘poverty’ were pitched enthusiastically during that premortal role selection period, given how many folks the world over made that choice.

[Physics Guy]

We're just changing the definition of agency to be the freedom to pick a determined scenario in advance.

Hmmm. My scenario of the pre-existence as a casting call may indeed conflict with the Mormon concept of agency. Or maybe not completely. If I were pressed, I might be able to cook up a reconciliation, for instance by pointing out that the universe's script, however it was generated, ends up obeying causality. It might have been post-selected after billions of years of development pre-hell, but in the finally hammered out deal, every little Jimmy's choosing the right—or the wrong—has its immediate consequence.

I'm not going to play that hand out, though, because I'm not convinced that the Mormon concept of agency was ever really serious enough to warrant the trouble. Maybe if I were Mormon, I would be so convinced, but as it is my impression is that this kind of criticism undermines Mormon doctrine badly, even if it doesn't outright disprove it, by just making it look like an amateur effort.

In Mormonism, the great moral lesson is Eternal Progression. Humans becoming immortal and endlessly populating worlds such that all flora and fauna work to the glorification of the human terraformers.

That seems like a message that would resonate well with homesteaders, but is going to sound awfully primitive for people living around the sustainability ceiling as we do today. And if humans ever do spread out to terraform other worlds, I don't think the process is going to be much like the European expansion into the Americas. I think it's going to start with long journeys through space that will make today's eco-struggles look like nap time in kindergarten. Even if humans do then colonise other worlds, replacing millions of years of co-evolution with a few hundred years of high-tech terraforming will still be a matter of careful balance, I think.

Life beyond Earth is just never going to be the carefree slash-and-burn that we once knew. We have cast ourselves out from that smokey Eden and we can never go back, no matter how far we go.

[Physics Guy]

What were they basing their selections upon? None of the terrestrial scenarios that they’d be choosing from would be anything that they’re familiar with.

Perhaps there were test drives? Try out the Black Death for a weekend?

[A]pparently ‘disease’ and ‘poverty’ were pitched enthusiastically during that premortal role selection period, given how many folks the world over made that choice.

Perhaps the pay-off was just so hard to turn down that most people went for the premium version. Or perhaps God's ethics review was weak on informed consent.

[Dr Moore]

Perhaps the pay-off was just so hard to turn down that most people went for the premium version. Or perhaps God's ethics review was weak on informed consent.

PG, you have nailed the reality of this doctrine. "Pre-mortal informed consent" is a Swiss Army knife of doctrinal optionality. I've heard it used to explain why some people agreed to be born in abject circumstances (they knew and still chose a body!), and also to compel young men to serve missions (they knew the terms of their privilege and promised to serve!). Like other blind assertions to be accepted as fact, it's among the most valuable go-to thought-stopping arguments in Mormonism.