To Serve Man

[_SteelHead]

Why does god need Nephi to slay Laban to obtain the plates, rather than provide a copy by magic means like he did when he dropped the liahona on the tent door?

[_SteelHead]

Why are magic secret handshakes + a "true name" needed to enter into the presence of god?

[_Kent]

EA, we seem to be talking about different kinds of experience of divine love. I'm talking about what's taken to be a direct spiritual experience of God's love, not about being treated well by God. Some believe such experiences have self-evidence, but even supposing they could be faked by God, they would still call for some explanation of why he would bother. (Of course, one might explain the experience without reference to God at all.)

The view that God views us as ants, or as characters in a video game, as we might now suppose, is sensible enough on its face, but why he would want to deceive us about his love would still call for some explanation. We might hypothesize a lonely being, or one who enjoys deception, or whatever, and then we'd want some explanation of how that would fit with such power.

This is a stronger point than may first appear. A being with such power would be able to modify his psychology in pretty much any way he liked (as humans will be able to do if the species lasts long enough). The kinds of motives we might associate with deception of this kind all seem to involve some less than happy psychology on God's part, a problem for those hypotheses. (Similar problems arise for the way the Old Testament God is portrayed.)

If you're going to go along anyway with the demands of this being, cornered fear seems to be a much inferior basis for it than faith in the reality of the love offered, just from one's own perspective. Which life would be more satisfying?

Hume covered some of this in his Dialogues on Natural Religion, which I sadly haven't read.

[_huckelberry]

I would not do anything for God which I would not feel morally right doing in regard to my fellow man.

[_EAllusion]

If you want to argue that people have incorrigible experience of divine love such that it they have basic knowledge of God's trustworiness, the upshot is you have defeated this problem. The downside is that you have proposed far more than can be justified by the actual facts on the ground. You might as well just propose everyone has innate Cartesian knowledge of God and be done with it.

The view that God views us as ants, or as characters in a video game, as we might now suppose, is sensible enough on its face, but why he would want to deceive us about his love would still call for some explanation. We might hypothesize a lonely being, or one who enjoys deception, or whatever, and then we'd want some explanation of how that would fit with such power.

Given that there are actual believed religions in the history of humanity that involve trickster gods, I don't think this is something that is prima facie false. In order for this to be a more implausible explanation of an alien's psychology, you have to help yourself to assumptions about what that psychology would look like. My argument is that we lack a basis to do so once we stop projecting our inherited and learned ideas about human behavior onto an unknown being. Your posts have continued to argue from an assumed stance that gods behave like people do. So showing love while being malevolent calls out for explanation in your mind. But why? It might be odd for humans to show love and be malevolent for no apparent reason, but there's no reason to think gods have to be this way. Gods are capable of having any possible set of mental properties. One is no more unlikely than the other a priori. If you are being contacted by a god, your in a state of asymetrical information that makes it difficult to conclude much about the being you are in touch with.

We might be able to say God's deeds or love provides empirical support of some goodness on the part of that being. I'm iffy on that, but let's grant the point that we know the being is capable of at least some good acts. Doing so automatically removes your ability to use the unknown purposes defense against the problem of evil, which leaves you up a creek on that issue, but that's something, right? So we have some support of an alien's at least partial goodness just like ostensible evils would be some support of the alien's partial malevolence. By getting to this point, you've hit a deeper problem. This doesn't get you to the more exotic claim of perfect goodness, which is what theology hangs on. I don't see how it would even be enough to warrant not being skeptical about getting on his inter-planetary spaceship.

[_donbagley]

That's a great episode of TZ. People are presented with a book in an unknown language. They are convinced into following the leadership of those who hold the book. If they go along, they will be taken to a celestial paradise. Then they find out their new leaders are feeding off of them.

Good thing that couldn't happen to Mormons.

[_SteelHead]

I think this idea of how would we actually communicate and relate to alien species is of one the concepts Card covered well in the after Ender books. Vraeling, Vrasling, and Skrealing if I remember correctly.

[Guest]

Honorentheos, I don't think most LDS believe they have a complete view of God, or even very close. They recognize the difficulties based on the evidence at hand and the differences we're warned about in scripture. The experience of divine love I refer to is spiritual, but other kinds of experiences also matter, as you point out. The usual view of the gospel is that God gives everyone who asks (or just everyone) the greatest gifts, life, love, etc, and the snakes are of lesser importance, and also for our own ultimate good, as the experience of evil is essential to appreciating good, dealing with adversity builds our agency, etc. But it does all require a good deal of trust.

I don't know, Kent. I think it's dangerous to pretend to understand what any, let alone most, LDS believe they understand about God. To have gone through the temple ceremony and believed its symbolism is to imagine one has been shown the template for God's purposes and interactions with His children. What has been done on other worlds...with those words Lucifer is giving voice to a supposed truth held by every participant and on which trust in Elohim seems to be founded.

God's work and glory it to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man says the scriptures. Based on this, a believing LDS who accepts it seems to have more than sufficient knowledge of God that is complete in so far as defining why He should be trusted.

I think EA has more than adequately outlined why this is not necessarily justified even if the underlying mythology is accepted as fact.

The primary reason the sacrament prayers are given verbatim is probably that they're spelled out in scripture. But the practical advantages are great as well. Imagine the alternative. Where would one draw the line? It would be quite a different experience.

Having sat in the seat listening to men speak these words with the obligation to correct them and do it over for as little as a misplaced "and", I think there is a blurred boundary between the practical advantage of the prayers being recited so the content is conveyed and understood by the participants in the ordinance and the exactness of a conjurer offering an incantation. What you say doesn't make it clear why it needs to be exact. Regardless of speaking of a prayer being in scripture or a spell being in the Necronomicon, the requirement for exact wording should offer some insight in the mechanics of what is going on. Skeptically, it could be easy to see in ritual prayer something that ties modern religions to our pagan superstitious roots. More charitably, it is probably best understood as a necessary part of ritual as participatory myth. Our alien God may have no actual need for it, other than as a convenient tool formed from human nature to be used.

[_MrStakhanovite]

Excellent OP.

[_EAllusion]

There are a subgroup of people who do very much show overwhelming love towards people while also having malicious intent behind doing so. They suffer from one or more personality disorders.

Most people aren't like this, so we don't go around suspicious that a person has a personality disorder simply because they are loving towards us until further evidence materializes.

But that's entirely grounded in our knowledge of what human populations are like. For all we know, an alien race could entirely be like that. It's tempting to point out that if the God of the Bible exists, it sure looks more like someone with a personality disorder, but the important point here is once you lack justification to believe gods' mental world resemble people's, it's hard to read cues from their behavior towards you.