Casting a wider net on faith and blessings

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malkie
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Re: Casting a wider net on faith and blessings

Post by malkie »

JohnW wrote:
Wed Mar 22, 2023 11:59 pm
malkie wrote:
Wed Mar 22, 2023 1:49 am
To me, this idea of the benevolent god of Mormonism is one of these things that cannot be proven true, but can be proven false, and clearly has been. Unless, of course, the promise is solely about unverifiable events.
It would be interesting to hear more of your thoughts on this. I agree that the idea of God (benevolent or otherwise) cannot be proven true, but I also think the idea of God cannot be proven false either. In my opinion, it all comes down to the assumptions we make about God. We humans usually aren't careful with our assumptions.
My thoughts come from the D&C - just above the part of my comment that you have quoted here.
malkie wrote:
Wed Mar 22, 2023 1:49 am
...

Even when god apparently promises that he is bound to do what we need, it's pretty clear that this promise is not true.
D&C 82:10 wrote:I, the Lord, am bound when ye do what I say; but when ye do not what I say, ye have no promise.
To me, this idea of the benevolent god of Mormonism is one of these things that cannot be proven true, but can be proven false, and clearly has been. Unless, of course, the promise is solely about unverifiable events.
We are told that a function of the power of the priesthood is to heal the sick.
Elder Dallin H. Oaks Of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles wrote: For this audience—adults who hold the Melchizedek Priesthood and young men who will soon receive this power—I will concentrate my remarks on healing blessings involving the power of the priesthood. We have this priesthood power, and we should all be prepared to use it properly. Current increases in natural disasters and financial challenges show that we will need this power even more in the future than in the past.

Many scriptures teach that the servants of the Lord “shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover” (Mark 16:18). Miracles happen when the authority of the priesthood is used to bless the sick. I have experienced these miracles. As a boy and as a man I have seen healings as miraculous as any recorded in the scriptures, and so have many of you.
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/stu ... k?lang=eng

Any number of successes does not prove the promise to be true. Agreed?

But how many failures would you say it takes to prove it false?

And how many failures has each of us here, who has ever been an active priesthood holder, seen and participated in?

Either on this board, or perhaps somewhere else, I told of an all-ward-priesthood blessing led by the Stake President, being pronounced on a member with a degenerative condition, and how ward members were on a high afterwards, fully expecting the healing to take place. After a little while people stopped talking about it, because the person's condition continued to deteriorate according to the medical prognosis - the blessing as pronounced simply failed. The scriptural promise was not fulfilled.

Here are the five elements that Elder Oaks, in the same talk, lists as essential parts of the blessing:
(1) the anointing,
(2) the sealing of the anointing,
(3) faith,
(4) the words of the blessing, and
(5) the will of the Lord

I don't expect anyone to seriously challenge (1) or (2), but in any case surely if there were a slip by the Elder in either of these a benevolent god would not allow the sick person to not be healed, or possibly to die, as a result.

Similarly for (4), though perhaps there's a bit more wiggle room here. But still, how badly does the priesthood holder have to mess up for god to say that he has good reason to ignore the blessing? And how often would you expect that to happen?

I think that the requirement for faith is almost certain to be satisfied in the vast majority of cases. And I absolutely hate the idea of people who are begging for a healing blessing, or a blessing of comfort, being told that they will not receive it, or did not receive it, because their faith fails to meet some unknown and possibly arbitrary threshold. How cruel does god have to be to not honour the blessing?

As for (5), if "the Lord" does not will it, for reasons known to neither man nor beast, do we really need to go through the whole process when it it going to fail anyway? And if it is a hopeless case due to god not wanting it to take place, why would he not tell the priesthood holders, or someone in authority, that they are wasting their time? Why raise false hopes? Simply tell the person that they will not receive a blessing because it is god's will that it fail.

I may be going out on a limb here, but if the promises of the scriptures have any reality and truth, I really cannot see how it is possible that large numbers of blessings apparently have none of the promised effects. Especially when they are compared with the number of genuine no-other-explanation-possible miracle healings as a result of priesthood blessings.

But lets say, for the sake of argument, that there was some deficiency in every case of a blessing that did not have the effect that was apparently promised. Why, in the name of whatever god exists, would we not be clear about it? Why not say that, although unfortunately we don't understand why, the priesthood blessings we offer in the church almost always fail. Since they have a dismal, an abysmal, rate of success, we should encourage people to heed the last beatitude, and lower their expectations. We have nothing better to offer than any other religion in this respect.

I'm driven to the conclusion that if god exists he is not benevolent, and/or his promises are false.

ETA: I don't consider "healings" that are explicable as normal and to be expected recoveries, and that occur at the un-blessed rate, to be promises fulfilled. In the real world you'd have a hard time selling anything with the promise that returns on investment with our super-duper company are essentially the same as with any other. Micky-mouse taffy-pulling stuff, that.
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Re: Casting a wider net on faith and blessings

Post by malkie »

To widen the net a little more, I won't describe anything that happens in the temple, but simply alluding to it is, I think, OK in the Terrestrial.
Temple ordinances
We know that there are promises made in the temple that cannot be discussed outside. But any endowed member will know what I'm referring to.

At best I believe we can say that there is no evidence that the promises are fulfilled. In general they refer to after-death blessings, and we have no reliable evidence that there even is such a thing as a life after death as described by the church, never mind specific promised relationships and powers.
Blessing our food
When we bless soda, and sugar cookies, and that horrible McDonalds orange drink that we get only because it's cheap, is there any evidence at all that it will now strengthen and nourish our bodies?

Has nobody ever become sick after eating food that has been blessed?

Well, actually:
ABC News wrote:Authorities believe food poisoning caused more than 100 people to become sick following a potluck dinner at a Mormon church in Nevada over the weekend.
https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/ ... d-poisoned
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Re: Casting a wider net on faith and blessings

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Elder Dallin H. Oaks Of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles wrote:As a boy and as a man I have seen healings as miraculous as any recorded in the scriptures, and so have many of you.
Why does he specify that he saw these miraculous healings "as a boy and as a man"? Oaks is older than me, I believe, and if I only meant to say that I had seen something frequently throughout my whole life, I wouldn't use that phrase, because by now my boyhood has been a smallish fraction of my total life. It would be like describing something that went on all day as happening "before breakfast and after".

I might say I heard birds "before breakfast and after" if I had been woken up early by a horrific bird din, and had then heard a few tweets over the rest of the day. That's the only scenario I can imagine, in fact, where I would mention time frames in that unbalanced way: the much shorter time frame gets equal mention because it includes a disproportionate share of the reported events.

It sure sounds as though Oaks is letting slip that most of the events that he considers as miraculous healings were things he saw as a child, with only a few comparable events observed in all his adult years.
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Re: Casting a wider net on faith and blessings

Post by Morley »

Physics Guy wrote:
Thu Mar 23, 2023 12:04 pm
Why does he specify that he saw these miraculous healings "as a boy and as a man"?
It's a poetic expression.
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Re: Casting a wider net on faith and blessings

Post by malkie »

Morley wrote:
Thu Mar 23, 2023 4:41 pm
Physics Guy wrote:
Thu Mar 23, 2023 12:04 pm
Why does he specify that he saw these miraculous healings "as a boy and as a man"?
It's a poetic expression.
Nonetheless, we might infer that he saw these miraculous healings at least twice. He also claimed that "many of you" [presumably present at, or listening to his conference talk] have also seen "healings as miraculous as any recorded in the scriptures".

It seems like a rather bold claim. I wonder what he meant by "many", and where we might find reliable accounts of many such miraculous healings.

The talk was given 13 years ago. I wonder how many "healings as miraculous as any recorded in the scriptures" can be attested of since then.

Considering that some of the scriptural healings included causing the dead to rise again, I have to admit to some skepticism that equally miraculous healings have been witnessed by many in our lifetimes.

But I'm open to evidence that such miracles happen due to the ministrations of the holders of the holy priesthood.

Anyone?
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Re: Casting a wider net on faith and blessings

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JohnW wrote:
Thu Mar 23, 2023 12:26 am
To be completely honest with you, this is the sort of thing that scares me a little. I am a scientist, so yes, that is how I would set up such a test. As a religious person, I would be afraid to look at the results of that study. I certainly believe in the power of prayer. I put people's names on temple prayer roles, and I regularly attend the temple and pray over those folks. I would be uncomfortable with such a study for various reasons.
Doesn't that tell you all you need to know about how much you really believe (or don't believe) in the efficacy of people's names being on temple prayer rolls?
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Re: Casting a wider net on faith and blessings

Post by Physics Guy »

I've been skeptical of intercessory prayer for a long time on theological grounds. I imagine running the universe as a superhuman optimization task, in which even the purpose for which things are optimized is beyond human understanding.
In Job 38:12, the LORD wrote:Hast thou commanded the morning?
It would be irresponsible of God, it seems to me, to take suggestions from mortals.

Even if mortal wishes do figure in God's enormous equations, and can sometimes be the tiny extra weight that tips the scales in favor of one path of history, God must already know all our wishes better than we do, without having to hear them from us. I think prayer must be mostly like stock picking: it's an illusion to think it can work, because any information that you may have is already reflected in the current price.

Maybe prayer is worth making even if it doesn't exactly cause anything. Perhaps there are occasions when the little story of "human asks and God grants" is one of the events for which God is trying to optimize, for whatever incomprehensible reasons. Perhaps it's our part to play.

At any rate it can't hurt, unless we use the excuse of having prayed about something to avoid doing things that were in our power to do. I'm trying to avoid this, though it's a hard habit to break, because it's a convenient comfort if something makes me feel bad but seems to have no easy fix. I'm trying to change this habit into one of trying, whenever I feel like praying about something, to think of what I could possibly do about the situation, and then try to do it.

And then it feels more reasonable and responsible to pray for God to help me in doing that something, than to pray that God will do it without me. I don't know that this feeling really makes sense, because how my own efforts play out is just another little bit of how the universe plays out. All my concerns about giving suggestions to God ought to apply just as much in this special case as they do in general. Perhaps the idea that praying for God's help is part of my part in the story does make more sense, though, when it's a part of the story in which I actually do something.
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Re: Casting a wider net on faith and blessings

Post by Morley »

malkie wrote:
Fri Mar 24, 2023 4:11 am
Nonetheless, we might infer that he saw these miraculous healings at least twice. He also claimed that "many of you" [presumably present at, or listening to his conference talk] have also seen "healings as miraculous as any recorded in the scriptures".

It seems like a rather bold claim. I wonder what he meant by "many", and where we might find reliable accounts of many such miraculous healings.

The talk was given 13 years ago. I wonder how many "healings as miraculous as any recorded in the scriptures" can be attested of since then.

Considering that some of the scriptural healings included causing the dead to rise again, I have to admit to some skepticism that equally miraculous healings have been witnessed by many in our lifetimes.

But I'm open to evidence that such miracles happen due to the ministrations of the holders of the holy priesthood.

Anyone?
Apologies. My reply was too short, too lazy, too underdeveloped. Though the 'boy and man' refrain is one that reoccurs in both prose and poetry, I should have said more.

Poetic expression is about all that's left of either LDS apologetics or General Authority speeches. Even dyed-in-the-wool members realize by now that there was no ancestral couple cavorting in a Missourian Garden of Eden; that no frightened woman was across the aisle from a future prophet, in a nosediving piper cub; and that there were no sword-wielding, chariot-riding, pale-skinned, Jewish Lakota in 200 BCE. And the pistol-packing, frontier-busting, angel-gladhanding, Restorationist prophet of God--the man who used a shiny rock to read Reformed Egyptian from gold plates that weren't even in the same room, and who cunningly bedded his good friends' wives--is best seen through a glass darkly: a poetic lens, if you will. Brother Joseph was a lovable, bigger than life, scallywag from American folklore--someone along the lines of Paul Bunyan, Johnnie Appleseed, or Pecos Bill.

But, as the first rule of fight club is to not talk about fight club, the first rule of Mormonism is to not admit to the realization of the myth.
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malkie
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Re: Casting a wider net on faith and blessings

Post by malkie »

Morley wrote:
Sat Mar 25, 2023 11:11 pm
malkie wrote:
Fri Mar 24, 2023 4:11 am
Nonetheless, we might infer that he saw these miraculous healings at least twice. He also claimed that "many of you" [presumably present at, or listening to his conference talk] have also seen "healings as miraculous as any recorded in the scriptures".

It seems like a rather bold claim. I wonder what he meant by "many", and where we might find reliable accounts of many such miraculous healings.

The talk was given 13 years ago. I wonder how many "healings as miraculous as any recorded in the scriptures" can be attested of since then.

Considering that some of the scriptural healings included causing the dead to rise again, I have to admit to some skepticism that equally miraculous healings have been witnessed by many in our lifetimes.

But I'm open to evidence that such miracles happen due to the ministrations of the holders of the holy priesthood.

Anyone?
Apologies. My reply was too short, too lazy, too underdeveloped. Though the 'boy and man' refrain is one that reoccurs in both prose and poetry, I should have said more.

Poetic expression is about all that's left of either LDS apologetics or General Authority speeches. Even dyed-in-the-wool members realize by now that there was no ancestral couple cavorting in a Missourian Garden of Eden; that no frightened woman was across the aisle from a future prophet, in a nosediving piper cub; and that there were no sword-wielding, chariot-riding, pale-skinned, Jewish Lakota in 200 BCE. And the pistol-packing, frontier-busting, angel-gladhanding, Restorationist prophet of God--the man who used a shiny rock to read Reformed Egyptian from gold plates that weren't even in the same room, and who cunningly bedded his good friends' wives--is best seen through a glass darkly, a poetic lens, if you will. Brother Joseph was a lovable, bigger than life, scallywag from American folklore--someone along the lines of Paul Bunyan, Johnnie Appleseed, or Pecos Bill.

But, as the first rule of fight club is to not talk about fight club, the first rule of Mormonism is to not admit to the realization of the myth.
No problem on my side, Morley, and no apology needed.

I was able to use your short comment as a springboard for a rant - what could be better than that? :)
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Re: Casting a wider net on faith and blessings

Post by JohnW »

malkie wrote:
Thu Mar 23, 2023 2:48 am
Any number of successes does not prove the promise to be true. Agreed?

But how many failures would you say it takes to prove it false?
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I think the above is the crux of the issue. I would argue that any number of failures could occur and still not prove anything. As you state in your explanation, numbers 3 (lack of faith) and 5 (will of God) tend to be the most likely candidates for why a blessing might not turn out the way the receiver hopes. I think it is a complex enough system that we probably can't say what caused the outcome.

I was going to go into an elaborate comparison with some other complex phenomenon like the weather, but that is probably belaboring the point. There are various complex systems that just cannot be predicted neatly. There is some squishiness to them. Failures in our scientific predictions don't prove anything in those complex cases. I think that is what Physics Guy was trying to get at when he mentioned if God is running the system as a big optimization problem. There is much less room for fulfilling favors than we might initially think.
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