Possible epic thread at MD&D

[_Dr. Shades]

the example of the Three Nephites should show us that it is absolutely possible for us to overcome death "in a twinkling", if only we knew how.

Sort of like how the example of Gollum should show us that it is absolutely possible to destroy the power of Sauron by tossing The One Ring into Mount Doom, if only we could get close enough?

[_Blixa]

I don't know, though, all the "Holy Books" and the history of the world, seems pretty doable in a single lifetime. Of course I suspect I may be looking at this whole thing from a completely different angle than this fellow.

I’m not sure it’s doable in any significant sense, to be honest, but I’m sure a few years of disciplined reading could get one through reading all the sacred scriptures Penguin or Oxford publishing houses offer. I’m not sure how a Westerner without some serious dedication to language, history, and cultural studies could really draw a lot of important readings from things so far from our own traditions, like the Upanishads or the Tao Te Ching.

Well the operative word is "significant," of course. I do think it is possible to get a solid, I don't know, "investigatory," grasp within a lifetime, as well as use that reading to isolate areas for deeper research. At that point, of course language, history and cultural studies would be necessary for significant penetration of much of the western tradition, let alone the eastern.

I just wish this guy would drop this pretentious attitude at 2,000 plus years of Western thought, like he’s some how exhausted all of it and found it lacking, I mean it’s painfully obvious this guy doesn’t even comprehend the work of modern Christians like Plantinga of Wright, much less Greek Philosophy and all it’s facets.

Yeah, well he's not going to get very far by starting with concepts like "the great apostasy" and "the restoration." I don't at all think study of Mormonism is intellectually illegitimate, but to see it in relation world religious history, he can't use it as the fractured lens with which to examine Christianity.

This guy is disillusioned , for what ever reasons, and I wonder if it stems from the fact that Mormon thought is never really seriously considered by outsiders unless it’s for historical curiosity or social science research.

I get that from his posts as well too. It really came through in his evocation of Terence Malick's The Tree of Life as a work which deeply overlaps Mormon theology. While its true that the creation sequences in that film are pretty much the cinematic apotheosis of the kind of films the church screens in Visitor's Centers, the film is steeped in religious assumptions completely alien to Mormon theology. But, I think the film did resonate with him because, whatever the film's intellectual limitations are, it was a light years more serious attempt at contemporary religious art than any which has emanated from Mormonism.

[_EAllusion]

Stak -

Plantinga has two replies to the problem of evil. His free will defense against the logical problem of evil does not appeal to mystery. (It appeals to logical possibility.) His unknown purposes defense against the evidential problem of evil is very much an appeal to mystery.

[_EAllusion]

by the way - Here's how you reply to Jeremy:

Plantinga accepts the Platonic notion that God being all powerful does not let God violate the laws of logic. God is bound to that. What Plantinga points out is that it is possible that achieving the greater good might logically require lesser evils. Plantinga argues that is is logically possible that creating spirits with free will may be a greater moral good for the universe even though this carries with it the risk of them causing all the bad things we see. Therefore, the notion that evil is logically incompatible with the existence of God is false.

This argument is pretty strong for what it is. But all you have to do is say that evil might not be logically incompatible with the existence of God, but the evils we observe make it much less likely that God exists. This defense isn't meant for that sort of argument and is not a valid reply to it. Plantinga's demons aren't exactly a likely thing.

[_MrStakhanovite]

I get that from his posts as well too. It really came through in his evocation of Terence Malick's The Tree of Life as a work which deeply overlaps Mormon theology. While its true that the creation sequences in that film are pretty much the cinematic apotheosis of the kind of films the church screens in Visitor's Centers, the film is steeped in religious assumptions completely alien to Mormon theology. But, I think the film did resonate with him because, whatever the film's intellectual limitations are, it was a light years more serious attempt at contemporary religious art than any which has emanated from Mormonism

This is a really good observation you made here, and it reminds me of the aesthetic appeal a certain Anglican poet had that nearly converted you. I think we’ve chatted at length about the lack of artistic creativity within the Mormon world, not due to any lack of talent the people posses, but the stifling effects of correlation.

I don’t want to psychoanalyze this guy, but I wonder if he has hit a brick wall with all the milk that’s dispensed every Sunday and wants something more. If that is the case, he’s at the wrong forum, because MD&D is a black hole. There are very few things Rob Bowman and I would ever agree about, but I can really empathize with his frustration when people like PaPa and Hannah Rebekah offer up really shameful and simplistic understandings of core Protestant doctrines like Sola Scriptura and important orthodox ideas like the Nicene Creed.

Aristotle Smith and MsJack often complain that standard LDS representations of their own faiths are so poor, it’s no wonder so few ex-mormons become faithful Christians of other traditions. Granted, Jeremy here is more literate than either PaPa or Hannah, so by consequence he is far more verbose than the other two, but his poor characterizations are on the same level.

I’m beginning to see this as the fruits of Mormon Apologetics, as expressed at MD&D.

[_MrStakhanovite]

Stak -

Plantinga has two replies to the problem of evil. His free will defense against the logical problem of evil does not appeal to mystery. (It appeals to logical possibility.) His unknown purposes defense against the evidential problem of evil is very much an appeal to mystery.

I know, but Jeremy only talks about the logical problem and not the evidential problem. I doubt he even knew of the distinction when he wrote that post.

by the way - Here's how you reply to Jeremy...

Deaf ears. Jeremy is there to be affirmed.

[_EAllusion]

I know, but Jeremy only talks about the logical problem and not the evidential problem. I doubt he even knew of the distinction when he wrote that post.

Well, sure. If God wasn't bound by the laws of logic as Jeremy actually offers, then nothing could be logically incompatible with the existence of God by definition. So obviously he doesn't get the problem. I just used your post as a springboard to point out that Plantinga really does resort to mystery on this subject, just not in the way Jeremy thinks.

[_Gadianton]

I guess it makes sense a snake oil salesman like Bukowski would suggest a book like that, since the margins of obscurity are so wide and spacious, that someone can read their own pet theology into the text without much difficulty and use that as some kind of personal self-confirmation that they were right all along.

Pretty true, that. I'll never understand why those who make "the margins of obscurity" into a God and spit on the whole tradition otherwise don't just stand in awe of their margins of obscurity and lose themselves in profundity, with all the leeway and flexibility toward individual processing choices and existential maneuvering it provides; rather than standing in awe of the margins of obscurity, losing themselves in profundity, and paying 10% of their income to a bunch of retired lawyers and businessmen who claim to be apostles and who don't appreciate intellectualism at all.

It's really, really weird.

[_Blixa]

I guess it makes sense a snake oil salesman like Bukowski would suggest a book like that, since the margins of obscurity are so wide and spacious, that someone can read their own pet theology into the text without much difficulty and use that as some kind of personal self-confirmation that they were right all along.

Pretty true, that. I'll never understand why those who make "the margins of obscurity" into a God and spit on the whole tradition otherwise don't just stand in awe of their margins of obscurity and lose themselves in profundity, with all the leeway and flexibility toward individual processing choices and existential maneuvering it provides; rather than standing in awe of the margins of obscurity, losing themselves in profundity, and paying 10% of their income to a bunch of retired lawyers and businessmen who claim to be apostles and who don't appreciate intellectualism at all.

It's really, really weird.

I have to say, that really sums up contemporary institutional Mormonism to me. It also makes me want to read Thomas Merton.

[_gramps]

Mr. Stakhanovite wrote:

I like how Bukowski rushes in and offers Whitehead’s Process Theology as some kind of anecdote to this disillusionment. This is deliciously ironic to me, because Whitehead’s Process and Reality is one of the most notoriously difficult texts to deal with. I read somewhere that there were more than 200 errors are known in the first version of the work, because Whitehead didn’t proof read it. I mean, the author made the hilarious observation that we have a better text of Plato’s Republic than we do of Whitehead’s Process and Reality. It’s said that Whitehead’s Harvard students tell the story that when Whitehead delivered the Gifford lectures in 1928, two people actually attended all 10 lectures, and the attendance on the first lecture to the second dropped from like 600 to 6 or something like that. The end result of these lectures was Process and Reality.

That is funny. I hadn't heard about the dwindling numbers at his lectures. But, it doesn't surprise me.

A little more about Whitehead:

I had his book on my shelf at one time. I still have a couple others of his, The Concept of Nature and Science and the Modern World. Science and the Modern World was the final result of his earlier Lowell Lectures, in 1925. It is in that book that you find him starting to work on his ideas which eventually become Process and Reality.

I think I never got through the first chapter. It is extremely rough going. I believe Whitehead became popular for Mormons, generally, in the early 80s. Some guy, I think his name was Ross, a professor somewhere or other, gave a Sunstone presentation on Whitehead's thought as it related to Mormonism. McMurrin provided the response. Both papers were published in Sunstone magazine shortly after that.

When I wrote a paper for McMurrin's seminar (my paper: Mormonism and the Problem of Evil), he recommended that text to me, forewarning me that it would be extremely difficult to wade through. So, he told me to get Hartshorne's books, which he thought I would have a better chance to understand. For a second McMurrin seminar, I wrote a paper on Hartshorne's 'Panentheism.' I believe Hartshorne was one of Whitehead's students, if I am remembering correctly. And he was right. Whitehead was virtually impenetrable. Hartshorne is much easier to wade through, but not so easy. It takes some work. I think it was Hartshorne, who coined the phrase 'panentheism,' which really is the foundational idea of the Process Theology movement, which I must say I was quite surprised after being in Japan for 10 years, upon return finding that it had really taken off, in a big way, during that time. I noticed Chris Smith recently mentioned the phrase 'panentheism' in a thread of yours, if I recall correctly. It is probably going all through his university, I imagine. Any Mormon who wants to make any sense of their theology, in some rational, acceptable fashion, has to go through Whitehead and Hartshorne. I am guessing however, that they can get all they need from Hartshorne. However, I don't for a minute think that Whitehead or Hartshorne would have ever gone for the personal god of Mormonism - the one with hair on his back.

My hat is off to anyone who made it through Process and Reality. I don't for a second think that Bukowski ever did. I personally doubt he ever went through Hartshorne. I think he is riding on Ostler's coattails.

However, if anyone has made it through Whitehead, I would guess it was Ostler.

Just my $0.02.

Oh, a funny story about Hartshorne which I heard from Bill Whisner, in his Philosophy of Education seminar at the U. Of U. Apparently, Hartshorne was a really odd duck. While Whisner was studying in Austin for his Ph.D., he had a course with Hartshorne. He would hold his seminars outside on the campus. Often they would just go walking around the campus while he lectured. He would have binoculars around his neck, and every once in a while, he would see a bird he hadn't seen before and go running off, completely forgetting his students, chasing the bird and trying to get a good look at it.

Apparently, his hobby was bird watching. LOL.