harmony wrote:The ancients thought that's exactly what the sun was: God flying over the earth in his fiery chariot every day. Were they qualitatively different from us?
Yes, I think so. Just as Brigham Young was also.
"Who can tell us of the inhabitants of this little planet that shines of an evening, called the moon?...when you inquire about the inhabitants of that sphere you find that the most learned are as ignorant in regard to them as the ignorant of their fellows. So it is in regard to the inhabitants of the sun. Do you think it is inhabited? I rather think it is. Do you think there is any life there? No question of it; it was not made in vain." (Journal of Discourses, vol. 13, p. 271)
Sermon was given by Brigham Young in the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City on July 24, 1870
But we are different.Technology and science have changed the world.
To believe in a veil which separates us from an unseen reality that we may have come from and where we may go is much more of a stretch than it would have been for the ancients and even Brigham and his associates.
We come back to the question, however, as to whether or not a veil of forgetfulness would be integral to a plan in which God desires his children to become more like him and desire to return back to his presence. Can agency and choice be fully implemented if God makes himself known to everyone, everyday, with full disclosure? Or is there purpose/need and strategical maneuvering that pushes him to remain hidden to some degree or another from those who do not fully seek him with all their heart, mind, and strength?
Back to Hafen's talk:
Thus, in mortality we must learn capacities and skills, not merely gather information. There is something about forcing people to be righteous that interferes with, even prohibits, the process that righteousness in a free environment is designed to enable. Righteous living causes something to happen to people.
But we have to choose to do so in a situation where God orchestrates things so that He remains hidden
until we seek him consistently, faithfully, and with full purpose of heart and mind.
A prime example of someone who did this is B.H. Roberts. He spent nearly five decades researching and studying the Book of Mormon.
He said:
The Book of Mormon of necessity must submit to every test, to literary criticism, as well as to every other class of criticism; for our age is above all things critical, and especially critical of sacred literature, and we may not hope that the Book of Mormon will escape closest scrutiny; neither, indeed, is it desirable that it should escape.
then later in his life he testified:
"For many years, after a rather rigid analysis, as I think, of the evidence bearing upon the truth of the Book of Mormon, I have reached, through some stress and struggle, too, an absolute conviction of its truth."
Without a veil of forgetfulness B.H. Roberts would
likely not have had the motivation to do what he did in order to arrive where he did. By coming to a conviction of the truth of the Book of Mormon he
in turn came to a knowledge of God and the plan of salvation. And yes, I would suppose he then came to a fuller understanding of the veil of forgetfulness which separates us from God and the importance of exercising agency correctly and in accordance with God's will.
It required over forty years for him to come to the convictions that he did. He was a doubter in some respects. But he knew that ultimately the Book of Mormon was written for doubters and that's probably why he invested so much time and energy studying it inside and out.
By its own account, the Book of Mormon is for doubters. It announces on its title page a clear purpose for all the hard labor of preserving records: "To the convincing of the Jew and Gentile that Jesus is the Christ, the ETERNAL GOD." That statement presupposes that there would be serious and searing doubt in the world and that even religious readers, whatever their Messianic expectations, would not only raise questions about the historicity of this or that segment of the life of Jesus, but about the whole religious enterprise.
http://maxwellinstitute.BYU.edu/publica ... 1275#_edn5
I suppose that we all can take a lesson from B.H. Roberts and his Book of Mormon studies as we move along our own faith journeys in a world where we do not have any direct knowledge of what may or may not be beyond a veil/realm of our direct knowledge in which we rely most of the time upon sensory information that comes only through our five senses.
Regards,
MG