Three Powerful Books

[_Lemmie]

yikes. MG doesn't do well when pinned down like this.

Admittedly so. As I already have. But what does that actually show/prove? Is there something ‘won’? Something lost? Did you win? Did I lose?

This thing called faith is a position of disadvantage vs. the materialist. That I will also admit. Faith is a position of heart and mind. That is a difficult if not impossible thing for a strict materialist to wrap their mind around and accept as being a valid position.

Regards,
MG

How is any of that relevant to your statement that you find a book powerful and want people to read it, even though you can’t make a substantive statement about the content of the book in order to support your assertion?

[_honorentheos]

Reigns supreme over what?

I would say crude matter. Consciousness reigns supreme over strict materialism. John Polkinghorne is a favorite of mine.

Polkinghorne is thoughtfully dismissive of attempts to account for consciousness through materialist explanations. He thinks using computer processing as an analogy is hopeless. (Where, in these accounts, is the programmer?) He doubts that evolution fully accounts for the mind, since it is not clear that consciousness has any survival value, and at any rate it is very hard to account for the survival value of, say, music, or quantum mechanics. “Our scientific, aesthetic, moral and spiritual powers greatly exceed what can convincingly be claimed to be needed in the struggle for survival, and to regard them as merely a fortunate but fortuitous by-product of that struggle is not to treat the mystery of their existence with adequate seriousness.” [Beyond Science, 64]

I don't know how a person can argue our ability to reason and create using the emergent qualities of consciousness lack evolutionary advantages. That's beyond ridiculous.

I also question what is meant by spiritual power. Since moral reasoning, aesthetic judgement, and scientific reasoning are separate from this, it seems your friend here is inserting a meaningless term to try and win a point.

This goes back to how or why the universe even exists. Polkinghorne, I think, would say that the universe came into being to support consciousness. And we are the manifestation of that ultimate creative process. With purpose. With meaning.

Regards,
MG

I'm dubious of this person based on the points above. This cements it. The causal relationship between consciousness and the creation of the universe is simply declared? I think the idea that observation by limited 3-dimensional beings of a 3-dimensional observable universe that is mathematically "more" should tell you this concept is confusing the results of observation with the substantial qualities of what is being observed. And then exclaiming the thing observed must be what it is to favor the observer. Otherwise, why would the observed be exactly what the observer is able to observe other than it's purpose is to be there for the observer to observe?

[_Gadianton]

A note on the "complexity" of the Book of Mormon Ala Hardy.

I'm somewhat envious that Hardy thought of doing the commentary he did on the Book of Mormon, and his work is brilliant in its own right, but what's really shining is his own brilliance, not the brilliance of the Book of Mormon.

Essentially, what he did was a "reboot" of the Book of Mormon that coincided nicely with the turn in television, possibly inaugurated by "The Wire", but really coming into its own with Battlestar, and then, Breaking Bad, where good guys aren't so good, and bad guys aren't so bad.

This level playing field is an anticipation of, perhaps among other things, a movement called literary deconstruction, which adapts the gist of the post-structuralist movement into a way of reading texts. When Hardy turns the phrase, "close reading" of a "text", it's a "dog whistle", to borrow from Kiwi57, to let us know he's going to do a deconstructive reading now.

A deconstructive reading is subversive, reading the text against the grain. For instance, if a ten-year-old writes a story about some fantasy world where a princess lives in a castle and everybody in the land loves the princess, then the obvious suspicion is that we're dealing with a dystopia where the princess is a tyrant and the people live in fear, and a talented critic could extract a volume of political commentary out of a child's story like that. Stories with a black-and-white mentality are particularly open to the tricks of deconstruction. The Book of Mormon is a sitting duck, of course. The usual fare would be to show how the straightforward reading is unsustainable: Nephi can't be that good and Laman and Lemuel can't be that bad. Normally, one would expect a critic to perform such a reading in order to criticize or make fun. But Grant Hardy was brilliant -- he timed the market, deconstructing the Book of Mormon at a time when Moroni can be the total dick that critics always suspected he was, because the upshot is story gains color and complexity, which is the new criteria by which the audience is judging their entertainment!

But sorry, I don't buy it. Hardy could take any story, no matter how pale, read it subversively and make it complex. Perhaps he'd pretend that he can't just to promote the Book of Mormon as special, but if not him, then his equal sans the testimony.

The re-imaged Battlestar was not the work of Glen Larson's nuanced thinking. It was the result of creatively interpreting Larson's fairly black-and-white story of good and evil. Likewise, the complexity Hardy discovers is not a result of the nuanced thinking of the author of the Book of Mormon.

[_Kishkumen]

While I would never call the Book of Mormon great literature--because it frankly is not--I maintain that it is not so straightforward and simplistic as many of its critics maintain. Writing the Book of Mormon required a pretty deep knowledge of the Bible and works of such authors as Josephus and John Bunyan, as well as being steeped in the sermon culture of the time. The author also pretty obviously drew on Native American influences, especially those of Iroquois peoples.

And, while I find that the racism and colonialism of the Book of Mormon are practically irredeemable, I think it is important to remember, if only for the sake of accuracy in description, that the identities of different groups in the Book of Mormon are unstable over the course of the text, and if we remember that, according to the dictation order, the problematizing aspects of group depiction are chronologically prior to the most simplistic, then that suggests Joseph Smith deliberately chose to undermine the Nephite founders' understanding of Lamanite identity and race. Remember that it is the Nephites at the end who are most savage and wicked, those who obviously treasured their whiteness and looked down on the darker Lamanites.

The implications of these developments are that Joseph Smith is a somewhat more sophisticated author than his critics credit him with being. The story of Nephi sets up a simple moral binary on purpose as a kind of straw man. The author knew from the beginning what the plan was and executed it in a manner that actually makes sense. The real problem with the Book of Mormon is its dictation from memorized outlines, and the way in which Smith responded to the views of his scribes by modifying his work as it went along. The end result is a structure that has some coherence in the big picture but a lot of inconsistencies and bad style along the way.

None of what I am saying is "deconstruction." No, it's historicism and good old fashioned reading. Maybe at some point in the future we will be able to acknowledge the Book of Mormon as it is because we will better understand it. Unfortunately apologists and critics both have their agenda-driven readings that respectively emphasize the text's perfection or call it out for being the work of an ignorant, charlatan hack. The work is not good. But it is also not as stupid as critics generally claim.

[_I have a question]

The author also pretty obviously drew on Native American influences, especially those of Iroquois peoples.

I'd be interested in reading more about that specific assertion.

[_mentalgymnast]

...your friend here is inserting a meaningless term to try and win a point...I'm dubious of this person...

I’m surprised that you are not familiar with “this person”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Polkinghorne

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONekB7jlAfo

Could there be a general bias that confirmed secularists have towards academic types that are also people of faith?

Regards,
MG

[Guest]

Honor, I assume that you think that consciousness arose out of matter. But if consciousness is ultimately an arrangement/organization of information, where did that information originate? And further still, for that information to compose itself into what we refer to as consciousness within humans the conditions seemingly have to be just right. The Goldilocks Principle and the WAP/SAP seem to provide a scientific template in which consciousness arises over time, and it could be argued, with purpose...if fine tuning is part of the equation. I’m comfortable taking this route not only because it makes sense but because it also allows for religious belief within a contextual framework of reason. Polkinghorne, I think, would agree and be able to support this proposition much better than I.

Regards,
MG

[_mentalgymnast]

I would argue that for these three books I’ve mentioned to have any value to folks such as yourself there would, by necessity, have to be an underlying belief/acceptance of the possibility of a creator God. Otherwise, by necessity you are OBLIGATED to explain any premise by which they are written to be flawed at the outset. And books such as these have to be defeated at ALL costs.

Once you cross the line and take up residence in the realm of secular belief...without God...it is very difficult to return to the realm of belief. At least that’s what I’ve heard/read. You have NO CHOICE but to cast these three books to the wayside. They would, by inference, disrupt your confirmed world view that there is no creator God.

And folks like Polkinghorne just get in the way.

That’s the way I see it anyway.

Regards,
MG

[_Lemmie]

I would argue that for these three books I’ve mentioned to have any value to folks such as yourself there would, by necessity, have to be an underlying belief/acceptance of the possibility of a creator God.

Circular reasoning ...is a logical fallacy in which the reasoner begins with what they are trying to end with.[2]

Circular reasoning is not a formal logical fallacy but a pragmatic defect in an argument whereby the premises are just as much in need of proof or evidence as the conclusion,
and as a consequence the argument fails to persuade.

Other ways to express this are that there is no reason to accept the premises unless one already believes the conclusion, or that the premises provide no independent ground or evidence for the conclusion.[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reasoning

They would, by inference, disrupt your confirmed world view that there is no creator God.

Only if you’re inordinately swayed by everything you read. Do tabloids in the grocery store disrupt your world view when they feature Bigfoot on the front page?

[Guest]

Honor, I assume that you think that consciousness arose out of matter. But if consciousness is ultimately an arrangement/organization of information, where did that information originate? And further still, for that information to compose itself into what we refer to as consciousness within humans the conditions seemingle have to be just right. The Goldilocks Principle and the WAP/SAP seem to provide a scientific template in which consciousness arises over time, and it could be argued, with purpose...if fine tuning is part of the equation. I’m comfortable taking this route not only because it makes sense but because it also allows for religious belief within a contextual framework of reason. Polkinghorne, I think, would agree and be able to support this proposition much better than I.

Regards,
MG

Very egocentric. "[T]he conditions seemingly have to be just right." Just right for what? To have what we have? It is very self-flattering and indulgent to suppose that we are special, and so conditions had to be just right for our specialness. "What are the odds?" Well, even at that, it happens--just like there is a lottery winner every month or two. The universe is big, you know.

You also assume that consciousness is an arrangement/organization of information. Really? Why so? You want to make that assumption so that the next logical conclusion is that there was an outside force (a "god" if you will) that did the arranging/organizing. You don't explain why the information was not simply arranged/organized by the conscious being's own efforts to sort what at first were merely random ideas.

The purpose for arranging/organizing information is so that the conscious being can better navigate the reality in which it exists, its environment.

On the other hand, it is quite observable that humans like other life forms adapt to learning additional information, and to changing circumstances. It doesn't require the magical assumptions behind religion to conclude that humans are a form of life that has adapted over time to be what it is, and that consciousness was an early evolutionary trait that helped the species survive and continue to change and adapt to what it is today.