Another What's the Alternative Thread
Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2012 6:28 pm
Some time back I started a thread going with title, I think, "What's the Conscientious Alternative to the LDS Church?" I believe I was asking for ideas on which way I would go in my life in a direction other than devoting my life to the LDS Church, if I were to come to the conclusion that God didn't want me in the LDS Church.
Aristotle Smith complained that I wasn't really sincere, because in another thread I had declared my intent to investigate another approach, in that case Biblical Christianity, and yet I wasn't willing to follow his suggestion and attend a Biblical Christian group to find out by attending whether or not God might want me there.
My response was that I was willing to give Biblical Christianity a fair chance, but I didn't find it reasonable to give it more than a fair chance, and that therefore if I needed to attend a Biblical Christian group to find out if God might want me there, fairness would require me to attend every faith group in existence, and there are far too many of them to make such an approach feasible. It doesn't make any sense to attend one group in particular unless I have some reason to believe God might actually want me to be a part of that group, some metadata so to speak, some reason to believe there's something special about that group that would give me some reason to believe it was a better approach to finding out about God than the LDS Church was.
Furthermore, the approach of just attending a Biblical Church is kind of problematic in my own situation. My wife is an active Latter-day Saint, and is not willing to humor me in an active investigation of any Biblical Christian group. There's no way in the world she would condone me attending any such group. And it's hard to imagine me getting away with attending one without her knowing I was doing something, even if I had a desire to do something like that on the sly, which I really don't.
On the other hand, I would have no problem at all reading websites with information about other faith groups, provided that reading material isn't too huge, or reading persuasive e-mails favoring one group over another.
I also got a lot of responses from atheists and agnostics telling me the alternative to the LDS Church was simply to do nothing, to have no belief in anything at all.
The problem I had with that approach is that I am LDS because I have a firm belief that some good things must last forever. I see God as a being who knows how to preserve forever some good things and is actually acting to preserve forever some good things. If I were to stop believing in God, that would not take from me the need that some good things be preserved forever. My conscience requires me to work toward the preservation, forever, of some good things.
Some posters have contested that viewpoint, asking me why my conscience would be that demanding. But it seems to me that for my conscience to be otherwise there would have to be some statute of limitations, so to speak, of how long I was obligated to care for future generations of humanity. My conscience would perhaps require me to care for my children and my grandchildren, but my conscience would perhaps not require me to do anything for my great-grandchildren. Imposing that cut-off point, between my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren, just seems kind of arbitrary to me. I don't see how anyone can in clear conscience draw such a line between the generations of humanity they will care for and the generations of humanity they will not care for. It seems much more reasonable to conclude that one has the responsibility to care for all future generations of humanity.
I'm not talking about an all-consuming obsession here. All I'm saying is that a conscientious person owes it to future generations of humanity to take some time, even a few seconds a week or a month to think about what would be required to preserve some good things forever.
At any rate, for atheism or agnosticism to be a valid approach, such a way of thinking would have to include some way to work toward preserving some good things forever, and so far nobody has been able to explain how atheism or agnosticism would successfully do that.
So I ask you again, what alternative is there to the LDS Church for a conscientious person?
Aristotle Smith complained that I wasn't really sincere, because in another thread I had declared my intent to investigate another approach, in that case Biblical Christianity, and yet I wasn't willing to follow his suggestion and attend a Biblical Christian group to find out by attending whether or not God might want me there.
My response was that I was willing to give Biblical Christianity a fair chance, but I didn't find it reasonable to give it more than a fair chance, and that therefore if I needed to attend a Biblical Christian group to find out if God might want me there, fairness would require me to attend every faith group in existence, and there are far too many of them to make such an approach feasible. It doesn't make any sense to attend one group in particular unless I have some reason to believe God might actually want me to be a part of that group, some metadata so to speak, some reason to believe there's something special about that group that would give me some reason to believe it was a better approach to finding out about God than the LDS Church was.
Furthermore, the approach of just attending a Biblical Church is kind of problematic in my own situation. My wife is an active Latter-day Saint, and is not willing to humor me in an active investigation of any Biblical Christian group. There's no way in the world she would condone me attending any such group. And it's hard to imagine me getting away with attending one without her knowing I was doing something, even if I had a desire to do something like that on the sly, which I really don't.
On the other hand, I would have no problem at all reading websites with information about other faith groups, provided that reading material isn't too huge, or reading persuasive e-mails favoring one group over another.
I also got a lot of responses from atheists and agnostics telling me the alternative to the LDS Church was simply to do nothing, to have no belief in anything at all.
The problem I had with that approach is that I am LDS because I have a firm belief that some good things must last forever. I see God as a being who knows how to preserve forever some good things and is actually acting to preserve forever some good things. If I were to stop believing in God, that would not take from me the need that some good things be preserved forever. My conscience requires me to work toward the preservation, forever, of some good things.
Some posters have contested that viewpoint, asking me why my conscience would be that demanding. But it seems to me that for my conscience to be otherwise there would have to be some statute of limitations, so to speak, of how long I was obligated to care for future generations of humanity. My conscience would perhaps require me to care for my children and my grandchildren, but my conscience would perhaps not require me to do anything for my great-grandchildren. Imposing that cut-off point, between my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren, just seems kind of arbitrary to me. I don't see how anyone can in clear conscience draw such a line between the generations of humanity they will care for and the generations of humanity they will not care for. It seems much more reasonable to conclude that one has the responsibility to care for all future generations of humanity.
I'm not talking about an all-consuming obsession here. All I'm saying is that a conscientious person owes it to future generations of humanity to take some time, even a few seconds a week or a month to think about what would be required to preserve some good things forever.
At any rate, for atheism or agnosticism to be a valid approach, such a way of thinking would have to include some way to work toward preserving some good things forever, and so far nobody has been able to explain how atheism or agnosticism would successfully do that.
So I ask you again, what alternative is there to the LDS Church for a conscientious person?
