What are the options available to those who become disillusi

[_tld]

Over the past 2 months, my Dad had a heart attack, and I flew out to CA to take care of him. Thank God, he recovered, and is now home, after a 6 week stay at a physical therapy facility. During the time that I nearly lost him, my best friend died of a rare disease called MSA, which affects the cerebellum. My uncle, also just recently died of lung cancer.

My friend was not a member of the LDS Church. However, she did have a very strong belief in God, and was very religious.

My uncle was baptized, but extremely inactive, and later disavowed his association with the Church, claiming that Joseph Smith was a charlatan and a fraud.

I received peace and comfort with the passing of both of these people who I loved dearly. I received very clear visions of both my friend, and my uncle being hugged and greeted by family who had passed before them.

My personal feeling is that there is something on the other side, and there is a tremendous amount that we don't know, and won't know until we get there. The important thing is to love each other and treasure our relationships here.

Agree!

[Guest]

When did Fence Sitter become the determining authority?

When Kevin Sim decided to create a caricature of what I actually said in the "meet the Mormons after a month" thread here.

If it had actually been a documentary showing who the Mormons really are, it would also have included people who are inactive and apostate since they comprise the largest portion of membership.

To which Kevin replied

So do you agree with the LDS Church that the inactive are actually still Mormons, and therefore implicitly agree with the LDS Church when it says it has 15 million members?

The Church claims 15 million members. I do not agree with their inflated membership numbers at all, but that has nothing to do with my point about the documentary being scripted. Unless Kevin is willing to argue all 15 million members are active he has to explain how could the movie not have been scripted if all those shown were active? Based on the church membership numbers, not mine, a large proportion of members are not active.. Obviously those that were selected to be in the movie were chosen (scripted) because they were active. If the movie had not been scripted it would have some of the featured "members" who were inactive. It didn't, therefore it was scripted. Now if the church were only claiming active people in their membership count then there would be an argument for no scripting in the selection process, though, given the back story of those chosen to spear in the movie, it is also clear they were preselected for their uniqueness.

I stopped replying to him on that issue because this is so obvious that further discussion was pointless. Anyone reading the thread will see how bad his reasoning was, I didn't need to point it out.

[_Tim the Enchanter]

Look, when it comes to living my life, I am really no different than anyone else. I generally do not stop to ask the question, regarding what I am experiencing, whether it is subjective or objective. To me, it is all very real.

That's what I figured and that's my point. Whether objective validity is impossible or not, our lives feel very real. When we wake up in the morning and regain consciousness, we feel like we are in the real world where we objectively eat breakfast and go about our day. Even if we are living in some virtual reality, it makes little sense to live our lives in any other way than to treat the world around us as objectively real.

The only difference, if there is any, is that as I have tried to understand what the source of my conscious experiences might be it has made no sense that my brain, which is part of my conscious experience, could be the source of my conscious experience. And so I continue my search for the source. It could be that I am living in a virtual reality, and there is some advanced source that is in some way providing me with my experiences, or my consciousness may be generating it in some way. What is clear to me, at least right now, is that my experiences do not have as their source an objective material world. Most others, apparently, have figured all of this out differently.

You raise an interesting question about the source of our consciousness and it leads to a powerful paradox. To me, the logical conclusion of saying everything in our heads and in the universe is all a result of the laws of physics is the rejection of free will and morality. If it's physics all the way down, then the concept of justice and morality is meaningless and in our lives and in the universe there is no "should" but only "is" and "will be." In such a universe, how can anything be condemned or praised? How an anything be just or unjust? If our consciousness is just part of an incredibly complex supercomputer we call our brain and our brains do what they do solely as a result of the laws of physics, on a base level aren't we no different than an animal that can only do what they do?



But if we, unlike the snake, can make choices, that power to choose has to come from outside the physical laws of the universe. Doesn't it?

But what is that? And why does every explanation for it make no sense given even a rudimentary knowledge of the world and the universe we live in? It's like we are stuck between the paradoxical rock (denying free will and morality exists) and a hard place (accepting supernatural claims that make no sense).

How do we resolve the paradox?

I guess we could deny free will and morality exist, but that's difficult for many people to do. Raping a child, for example, sure as hell seems immoral. How can we look at things like that and say that's just the laws of physics at work and that the rapist had no more choice in the matter than a stone sinking in the ocean?

But if we don't want to reject free will, then we have to accept that something outside the physical laws of the universe exists. But then why does everything outside the physical laws of the universe seems ridiculous and contradictory?

It's almost like we are forced to choose between Team Evil and Team Ridiculous, when we'd all rather be neither. Is there any reconciliation that can be made? If anyone has a better idea than me, let me know, but the method to my madness is that I embrace the inconsistency of holding both propositions at once. I'd rather be inconsistent than evil or ridiculous. In reality, I'm probably a little bit of columns A, B, and C.

[_Themis]

What we have is people having the same experiences that cannot be changed just because we don't like them. They can be so consistent that we have many rules/laws that can have us predict them extremely accurately. We call this reality.

It is subjective reality, not objective reality.

Is the brain inside your skull a subjective brain or an objective brain?

Who cares? We go by what works and what doesn't. We have better reasons to believe what works is a more accurate representation of reality. This is the reason I linked to this site.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Validity_%28statistics%29

The paranormal does not rise to the level of your other examples or what we experience day to day. It is not ignored by the scientific community because they just don't want it to be true. They just don't have good evidence to give it this kind of validity. They do for medical research, physics, chemistry, etc. We can see the results and how much they have made our lives better. That doesn't mean some ideas of the paranormal could not be true.

[_tld]

Who cares? We go by what works and what doesn't. We have better reasons to believe what works is a more accurate representation of reality. This is the reason I linked to this site.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Validity_%28statistics%29

The paranormal does not rise to the level of your other examples or what we experience day to day. It is not ignored by the scientific community because they just don't want it to be true. They just don't have good evidence to give it this kind of validity. They do for medical research, physics, chemistry, etc. We can see the results and how much they have made our lives better. That doesn't mean some ideas of the paranormal could not be true.

From your link:

In science and statistics, validity is the extent to which a concept, conclusion or measurement is well-founded and corresponds accurately to the real world.

What is the real world? The only reality any one of us knows is what we consciously experience. This is our real world. All science and statistics must take place within conscious experience. No "real world" can be demonstrated to exist outside of conscious experience. Within the real world of conscious experience the study of the paranormal is just as valid as the study of science and statistics.

[_tld]

How do we resolve the paradox?

I guess we could deny free will and morality exist, but that's difficult for many people to do. Raping a child, for example, sure as hell seems immoral. How can we look at things like that and say that's just the laws of physics at work and that the rapist had no more choice in the matter than a stone sinking in the ocean?

But if we don't want to reject free will, then we have to accept that something outside the physical laws of the universe exists. But then why does everything outside the physical laws of the universe seems ridiculous and contradictory?

It's almost like we are forced to choose between Team Evil and Team Ridiculous, when we'd all rather be neither. Is there any reconciliation that can be made? If anyone has a better idea than me, let me know, but the method to my madness is that I embrace the inconsistency of holding both propositions at once. I'd rather be inconsistent than evil or ridiculous. In reality, I'm probably a little bit of columns A, B, and C.

I suspect that as long as you continue to function within the materialist/atheist paradigm the paradox will necessarily persist. Only when you move beyond that paradigm to a paradigm that allows for the existence of consciousness separate from brain function will the laws of physics no longer control consciousness and conscious experiences and free will will again be a possibility. The bonus of this will be that what now seems ridiculous within the materialist/atheist paradigm, will no longer appear that way. For example, consciousness, unrestricted by brain function, can continue to exist even after the subjective brain ceases to function.

[_Jesse Pinkman]

When did Fence Sitter become the determining authority?

When Kevin Sim decided to create a caricature of what I actually said in the "meet the Mormons after a month" thread here.

If it had actually been a documentary showing who the Mormons really are, it would also have included people who are inactive and apostate since they comprise the largest portion of membership.

To which Kevin replied

So do you agree with the LDS Church that the inactive are actually still Mormons, and therefore implicitly agree with the LDS Church when it says it has 15 million members?

The Church claims 15 million members. I do not agree with their inflated membership numbers at all, but that has nothing to do with my point about the documentary being scripted. Unless Kevin is willing to argue all 15 million members are active he has to explain how could the movie not have been scripted if all those shown were active? Based on the church membership numbers, not mine, a large proportion of members are not active.. Obviously those that were selected to be in the movie were chosen (scripted) because they were active. If the movie had not been scripted it would have some of the featured "members" who were inactive. It didn't, therefore it was scripted. Now if the church were only claiming active people in their membership count then there would be an argument for no scripting in the selection process, though, given the back story of those chosen to spear in the movie, it is also clear they were preselected for their uniqueness.

I stopped replying to him on that issue because this is so obvious that further discussion was pointless. Anyone reading the thread will see how bad his reasoning was, I didn't need to point it out.

I didn't participate in the other thread, so I'm a little lost about something. Maybe you can clarify for me? Why is it such a big deal to you that the documentary was scripted? Most documentaries I have watched both on PBS and HBO are scripted.

[_Fence Sitter]

I didn't participate in the other thread, so I'm a little lost about something. Maybe you can clarify for me? Why is it such a big deal to you that the documentary was scripted? Most documentaries I have watched both on PBS and HBO are scripted.

Good question. I agree with you about scripting and I do not think that is a big deal, in fact I think scripting is very necessary in a documentary so when Kevin said he didn't believe any of it was scripted, I found that strange.

I also think part of the difference between us was in the amount of control the church was exercising over the finished product. Kevin seems to think there was a lot more freedom given to the producers than I think is warranted.
in my opinion the church is not going to pay for a movie that they intend to show to guests at Temple Square with out controlling its outcome. They are not even going to invest in such a venture without assurances and control of how it would turn out, nor should they.

Here is Kevin's comment regarding the movie.

Haven't seen the movie yet, but from what I've heard about it I find it very hard to believe any of it is scripted. It sounds like the LDS Church had very little control over the movie.

[_Quasimodo]

Good question. I agree with you about scripting and I do not think that is a big deal, in fact I think scripting is very necessary in a documentary so when Kevin said he didn't believe any of it was scripted, I found that strange.

I think that scripting the statements from interviews is usually considered dishonest in a documentary. It's not really a documentary if the people you interview have been given the things you want them to say. It becomes just an advertisement for whatever point you are trying to make. This is the case with "Meet the Mormons".

Had it been an honest documentary, you would have heard unscripted statements from people on both sides of the issue.

"Meet the Mormons" is not a documentary. It's only a very long advertisement.

[_Jesse Pinkman]

Good question. I agree with you about scripting and I do not think that is a big deal, in fact I think scripting is very necessary in a documentary so when Kevin said he didn't believe any of it was scripted, I found that strange.

I think that scripting the statements from interviews is usually considered dishonest in a documentary. It's not really a documentary if the people you interview have been given the things you want them to say. It becomes just an advertisement for whatever point you are trying to make. This is the case with "Meet the Mormons".

Had it been an honest documentary, you would have heard unscripted statements from people on both sides of the issue.

"Meet the Mormons" is not a documentary. It's only a very long advertisement.

How can you be certain that the statements were scripted?

As far as honesty or dishonesty in a documentary goes....normally, the person writing/directing the documentary has a specific position they are trying to portray. Even when answers are spontaneously given, the film can be cut in such a way that it portrays what the producers want it to portray. I don't see anything wrong with a documentary portraying a particular message. This is done all the time. Michael Moore is one of the best at this. It doesn't make the message any less meaningful.

I don't think that it should be a surprise to anyone that the Church would hold on pretty tightly to the reins of ANY production it has funded and supports, and with good reason.

I suppose that the film could be categorized as a long infomercial for the Church. I just don't see anything wrong with it. That is what it was designed to be. It was designed as a missionary tool. Would anyone actually expect the film to portray Mormonism in a negative light?