In keeping with the title and intent of the thread I looked for gemli's next comment to post, but he hasn't added anything recently, so I looked back a little to see his earlier thoughts on stories. This one adds only the slightest bit of argument, but on the other hand it does seem to indicate his satisfaction in his hobby:
gemli wrote:
That's why it's so much fun to put religions to the test. Not one of them has any proof that a supernatural being exists, or could exist. I don't believe in ghosts, magical beings, etc., etc., but I suppose there are people over the age of five who really do.
I like the term "unevidenced." I wish all religions mentioned that on the cover page of their bibles.
In keeping with the title and intent of the thread I looked for gemli's next comment to post, but he hasn't added anything recently, so I looked back a little to see his earlier thoughts on stories. This one adds only the slightest bit of argument, but on the other hand it does seem to indicate his satisfaction in his hobby:
gemli wrote:
That's why it's so much fun to put religions to the test. Not one of them has any proof that a supernatural being exists, or could exist. I don't believe in ghosts, magical beings, etc., etc., but I suppose there are people over the age of five who really do.
I like the term "unevidenced." I wish all religions mentioned that on the cover page of their bibles.
What would be interesting is whether or not Peterson is prepared to investigate other religions, like Scientology or Bhuddism for example, in the way he’s saying Gemli ought to investigate Mormonism. Does Peterson take the evidence put forward by Scientology, as seriously and with the same credibility as he wants Gemli to take the what the witnesses said?
If Peterson thinks the witnesses are the best evidence for Mormonism, then surely John Travolta and Tom Cruise have equal standing in Peterson’s mind? I mean, they’ve never recanted their testimony.
In keeping with the title and intent of the thread I looked for gemli's next comment to post, but he hasn't added anything recently, so I looked back a little to see his earlier thoughts on stories. This one adds only the slightest bit of argument, but on the other hand it does seem to indicate his satisfaction in his hobby:
What a New Yorker.
What would be interesting is whether or not Peterson is prepared to investigate other religions, like Scientology or Bhuddism for example, in the way he’s saying Gemli ought to investigate Mormonism. Does Peterson take the evidence put forward by Scientology, as seriously and with the same credibility as he wants Gemli to take the what the witnesses said?
If Peterson thinks the witnesses are the best evidence for Mormonism, then surely John Travolta and Tom Cruise have equal standing in Peterson’s mind? I mean, they’ve never recanted their testimony.
The triangle of Higgs Field, angels, and coffee table. Compare and contrast.
I might say that an angel is more like a flux capacitor than a Higgs Field.
A Higgs Field is hard to prove, but I'd think it's one of the most rigorously defined things ever. It would have to be in order to build the most complicated device humans have ever built to try and detect it. They must know exactly what they are looking for.
Like a flux capacitor, an angel makes sense in narrative terms. But if I'm going to go out and look for a flux capacitor or an angel, I have a similar problem that I really don't know what I'm looking for. With enough study, I might have an idea what I'm looking for if I'm sent to find a Higgs Field.
We can't totally knock the narrative value of a thing. Most people who believe in a Higgs Field do so by buying into a narrative about science. That's because it simply isn't possible for the average person to know enough in order to have a proper, scientifically informed belief about Higgs Fields.
I don't know Gemli's background, but it's very possible for someone who stands firm demanding evidence of religion and preaching science to not actually know much about science, and to have accepted a narrative about science in much of the same way many people have accepted narratives about their religion. There probably isn't any way around this, given the time investment it takes to master even small portions of science. How many people made vaccination decisions based on cold, hard science data, and how many decided based on political narrative?
A Higgs field apparently can be put in exacting terms and measured for. Angels and flux capacitors become nebulous concepts if we're to drill down into them, in order to verify their reality. Nobody can sit down and say exactly what an angel is, and so good luck confirming or denying them. They do have a rich life in narrative. We know an angel is a messenger of God and meddles in our affairs. We know a flux capacitor is an important component to make a time machine work in a story about time travel. Vaccines and Higgs fields and Albert Einstein are all part of narratives about science and can live independent of science. But it would seem that a Higgs field and a vaccine are also something that a flux capacitor isn't, something with a rigorous definition that in turn makes them testable. My guess is that an angel is more like a flux capacitor in this regard, and we won't ever get to the part about how to build a super complicated device to measure them.
Within the story, the flux capacitor was testable. It worked. I was never sure why the tire tracks caught fire like that, but perhaps it was flux. Or capacitance.
In some ways the Higgs field is still just a maguffin playing a role in a story, defined by the function it serves rather than as a thing in itself. It's not as though the Higgs field used to be out there living its own rich life as a young and single cosmic entity with quirky art on its walls and weird friends, before it settled down into the Standard Model and became defined by its fixed relationships with all these other particles. For a long time, at least, there were a lot of alternative models besides the "vanilla" Higgs sector of the Standard Model, in which the effective role of the Higgs field was played by combinations of other particles. Some of these models may have been ruled out in the decades since I stopped following particle physics closely, but I'd be surprised if all were.
Higgs bosons—ripples in the Higgs field—have been detected, but detecting one of those things isn't like catching a bird and holding it in a cage to look at it from all sides at leisure. The detection is an inference, drawn from the distributions of many other particles emerging from a high-energy collision, that at some point a certain concentration of energy persisted briefly in one spot. As evidence for the real existence of a fundamental particle, that kind of inference is actually not just weak and indirect—because a briefly persistent concentration of energy is all that it means for a fundamental particle like the Higgs boson to exist.
The Higgs field is well defined and testable precisely because it is, like a movie maguffin, defined by its role in the story. It's a fundamental field. It doesn't have any life outside of its job.
The thing about the flux capacitor was that it was presumed and supposed to have all kinds of properties besides its narrow role in the film plot, but these additional properties just weren't disclosed to the viewer. It was supposed to be a piece of complex technology, so whatever it did, it was supposed to be doing it somehow, through some kind of detailed process of which we only saw the result. The implication of the science fiction context was that the flux capacitor probably had a lot of detailed properties that were defined independently of its effect, even if they were all chosen in order to produce that effect.
In this way the flux capacitor was different from Hermione Granger's Time-Turner charm, which as a magical artefact was not implied to have a detailed mechanism: it just turned time, by time-turning magic. Magic in Harry Potter is a a thing you can study, with lots of different techniques, so maybe the Time-Turner did have some details, and the distinction between magic and technology softens. I think a practical difference remains, though. A Back to the Future film could make a plot turn about some newly revealed detail of exactly how the flux capacitor worked, and it wouldn't seem like a disappointing deus ex machina, at least not if you talked it up right, because the fact that the flux capacitor has some kind of detailed mechanism, which could potentially raise new plot issues, has been in the viewer's mind all along. I mean, it's there in the name: it makes a Time Machine work, sure, but its name implies that it also has something to do with flux, and capacit-ing, so you're kind of anticipating that it might need the right kind of flux, or suffer from lack of capacity. Suddenly introducing a new arbitrary constraint on how the Time-Turner works would in contrast be much harder to pull off in a Potter story, because that's just not what the audience bought when they bought into the Time-Turner. There was no warning on the label about that kind of thing. It's a Time-Turner, period.
If you look closely enough at reality, eventually it does seem to get simpler, to the point of resembling magic more than sci-fi, with things defined by their roles and lacking additional properties, having no life outside work. Fundamental things may not be trivially simple. The office drone may talk for an hour about all the complicated things they have to do in this job, oh man you have no idea, you can't just push the button to copy, oh no, you've got to check that the paper tray's full, every time, or hell itself will break loose. It's still a pretty darn simple existence.
Angels and plates, though, I think those are actually genre-cued to be more like flux capacitors than like Time-Turners, even though this is not science fiction. Relic plates engraved by ancient humans are bound to have lots of details: they'll be cold to the touch, or else warm, with sharp edges, or smooth, covered in angular glyphs—or smooth curves. Angels have clothes, and some preferably even number of wings, and they talk; they have personal names.
They are defined by their role in the story, but with a tag warning that they have additional features which may be revealed later. In fact it is part of their role in the story that they are implied to have many other properties apart from their role in the story, which are yet potentially relevant to the story and could be explored. And yet somehow the particular Mormon story about the plates and the angel doesn't seem to pull this off right, for me. It's somehow stuck in an uncanny valley between science fiction and fantasy, with things that are packaged as flux capacitors but feel more like Time-Turners. Those plates should have had lots of interesting physical details, but nobody ever mentions anything about them besides their weight, size, and (if I remember rightly) an impression of shifting in their stack like leaves or pages. Moroni doesn't have much personality.
...And yet somehow the particular Mormon story about the plates and the angel doesn't seem to pull this off right, for me. It's somehow stuck in an uncanny valley between science fiction and fantasy, with things that are packaged as flux capacitors but feel more like Time-Turners...
Interesting point about angels. I know things have evolved as Mormons have tried to become more mainstream, but in the morridor in the pre-80s era, I was taught that stories about 'Mormon' angels were more credible than other religions' stories of angels because...Mormon angels didn't have wings.
Wings were too folksy, too catholic, too fantastical, and therefore less believable than the more sci-fi version of supernatural bodies that could move ('fly') without needing wings. Keep in mind I was also taught that the catholic church was the whore of Babylon, so distancing Mormon angels from catholic angels seemed an appropriate level of logic to my non-questioning mind.
So, there was a definite non-belief in other religions supernatural stories while still, (illogically, I know) maintaining a belief in Mormon stories.
This may be why apologetic Mormons are more likely to simply dismiss the comparison to other stories. If you were raised in that era, it was bred into you that your supernatural stories are 'true', others aren't. I know there is a lot of backtracking on that now, so I would be interested in anyone's more recent experiences regarding how this apparent contradiction is handled.
I think it leaves gemli nonplussed that apologists just seem to gloss over this concept that Mormons can believe their supernatural stories while disregarding others', while simultaneously claiming to respect other religious beliefs, but in my opinion the history of how apologists may have been raised in the 80s or earlier gives a plausible explanation. It's bred into their psyche to not question the lds version. That doesn't last, as many of people's stories here have shown, but for many it is lifelong.
...And yet somehow the particular Mormon story about the plates and the angel doesn't seem to pull this off right, for me. It's somehow stuck in an uncanny valley between science fiction and fantasy, with things that are packaged as flux capacitors but feel more like Time-Turners...
Interesting point about angels. I know things have evolved as Mormons have tried to become more mainstream, but in the morridor in the pre-80s era, I was taught that stories about 'Mormon' angels were more credible than other religions' stories of angels because...Mormon angels didn't have wings.
Wings were too folksy, too catholic, too fantastical, and therefore less believable than the more sci-fi version of supernatural bodies that could move ('fly') without needing wings. Keep in mind I was also taught that the catholic church was the whore of Babylon, so distancing Mormon angels from catholic angels seemed an appropriate level of logic to my non-questioning mind.
So, there was a definite non-belief in other religions supernatural stories while still, (illogically, I know) maintaining a belief in Mormon stories.
This may be why apologetic Mormons are more likely to simply dismiss the comparison to other stories. If you were raised in that era, it was bred into you that your supernatural stories are 'true', others aren't. I know there is a lot of backtracking on that now, so I would be interested in anyone's more recent experiences regarding how this apparent contradiction is handled.
I think it leaves gemli nonplussed that apologists just seem to gloss over this concept that Mormons can believe their supernatural stories while disregarding others', while simultaneously claiming to respect other religious beliefs, but in my opinion the history of how apologists may have been raised in the 80s or earlier gives a plausible explanation. It's bred into their psyche to not question the lds version. That doesn't last, as many of people's stories here have shown, but for many it is lifelong.
Wow. Back then, things were really different in the morridor than they were in the "mission field." I've heard several examples of stories like this from folks that grew up in the church in Utah or Idaho pre-correlation that I never heard in my Washington state ward.
he/him When I go to sea, don’t fear for me. Fear for the storm.
Jessica Best, Fear for the Storm. From The Strange Case of the Starship Iris.
I heard it all the time in my Spokane, Washington North stake, 7th Ward, to include seminary.
- Doc
Hugh Nibley claimed he bumped into Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Gertrude Stein, and the Grand Duke Vladimir Romanoff. Dishonesty is baked into Mormonism.
Interesting point about angels. I know things have evolved as Mormons have tried to become more mainstream, but in the morridor in the pre-80s era, I was taught that stories about 'Mormon' angels were more credible than other religions' stories of angels because...Mormon angels didn't have wings.
Wings were too folksy, too catholic, too fantastical, and therefore less believable than the more sci-fi version of supernatural bodies that could move ('fly') without needing wings. Keep in mind I was also taught that the catholic church was the whore of Babylon, so distancing Mormon angels from catholic angels seemed an appropriate level of logic to my non-questioning mind.
So, there was a definite non-belief in other religions supernatural stories while still, (illogically, I know) maintaining a belief in Mormon stories.
This may be why apologetic Mormons are more likely to simply dismiss the comparison to other stories. If you were raised in that era, it was bred into you that your supernatural stories are 'true', others aren't. I know there is a lot of backtracking on that now, so I would be interested in anyone's more recent experiences regarding how this apparent contradiction is handled.
I think it leaves gemli nonplussed that apologists just seem to gloss over this concept that Mormons can believe their supernatural stories while disregarding others', while simultaneously claiming to respect other religious beliefs, but in my opinion the history of how apologists may have been raised in the 80s or earlier gives a plausible explanation. It's bred into their psyche to not question the lds version. That doesn't last, as many of people's stories here have shown, but for many it is lifelong.
Wow. Back then, things were really different in the morridor than they were in the "mission field." I've heard several examples of stories like this from folks that grew up in the church in Utah or Idaho pre-correlation that I never heard in my Washington state ward.
I am a little puzzled with this. I understand that LDS believe they have special and true religious stories that other groups do not have. At the same time the foundational stories of Christianity are shared and would be believed similarly by Mormons Catholics Protestants etc.
To all my recollection angels with wings is a longstanding art convention only. I am not recalling a story which centers on wings one way or the other. I do remember Mormons being sure of the no wings angels understanding. Mormons tend to hold a personal bag of examples of how theirs is a better version of Christianity than others. The contents of the bag thought most important could change from place to place, time to time, or pew to pew I suspect.
Wow. Back then, things were really different in the morridor than they were in the "mission field." I've heard several examples of stories like this from folks that grew up in the church in Utah or Idaho pre-correlation that I never heard in my Washington state ward.
I am a little puzzled with this. I understand that LDS believe they have special and true religious stories that other groups do not have. At the same time the foundational stories of Christianity are shared and would be believed similarly by Mormons Catholics Protestants etc.
To all my recollection angels with wings is a longstanding art convention only. I am not recalling a story which centers on wings one way or the other. I do remember Mormons being sure of the no wings angels understanding. Mormons tend to hold a personal bag of examples of how theirs is a better version of Christianity than others. The contents of the bag thought most important could change from place to place, time to time, or pew to pew I suspect.
I agree. And it really does seem to have changed considerably since I left, so much so that I don't even seem to know now what younger Mormons believe sometimes! Last year, after I mentioned on another forum that my non-Mormon MIL was not allowed to attend my temple wedding and how that was damaging to relationships, a very young person argued that their church leaders 'would never do anything so mean!' And that 'you have always been able to marry civilly first so all can attend!!' I was nonplussed.
Also maybe 2 years ago, I read another young Mormon's editorial piece in the DesNews, where they argued that the seer stones were totally believable, because after all, 'we all have experience with Ouija boards and reading our horoscopes, don't we?' Or something like that. Another moment of nonplussedness for me.
