From another thread:
Dr. Moore:
Not going to read 123 pages of this thread. Just stopped in to say the premise is absurd.
Who is the arbiter of straight vs crooked sublines and the final so called straight drawing? It’s a subjective framework that accomplishes only one end: infinite wiggle room for being wrong. The notion of using “crooked lines” to “draw straight” is orthogonal to virtually all pronouncements regarding the prophetic mantle in LDS theology. If prophet claims X and X is later shown to be wrong, it’s negative evidence that he is what he claims to be. It is not ambiguous evidence.
Prompt to Perplexity: Go back through this thread and create a response to Dr Moore that demonstrates that the premise is not absurd and that the overall content of the thread demonstrates this to be true.
Response:
The premise is that a morally perfect, provident God can achieve genuinely good, even “straight,” outcomes through (not merely in spite of) the free, flawed, and often sinful choices of human agents; that is not absurd, and the 123‑page thread actually illustrates how the notion has content, constraints, and implications rather than being mere wiggle room.
Clarifying the premise (not “anything goes”)
“God can write straight with crooked lines” has a long pre‑Mormon Christian pedigree as a way of talking about providence and secondary causes, not as a get‑out‑of‑jail‑free card for failed claims.
In that tradition, the sentence means roughly:
God does not cause the “crookedness” (sin, error, tragedy),
yet God can order those events toward goods that were not intended (and sometimes even opposed) by the agents themselves.
That already answers your “who is arbiter?” question in principle:
“Straight” is indexed, not to our feelings, but to God’s moral will and redemptive purposes (e.g., preservation of life, repentance, growth in charity, deeper communion), as those purposes are articulated in the canonical story (Joseph, David, the cross) and then cashed out in concrete outcomes.
“Crooked” is indexed to human intention and moral norm: betrayal, abuse, bad judgment, institutional myopia, etc.
So the framework is not “subjective”: it commits you to very specific claims about what counts as good, what counts as evil, and how the two can be related without collapsing either into the other.
How the thread gives the premise content
Across the thread people repeatedly do three things:
They use specific biblical cases (Joseph, David, the cross) as exemplars of “crooked lines” that were later seen to be “straight” in outcome.
They distinguish between God using human failure and God causing or approving it.
They argue over concrete LDS historical and pastoral cases (policy changes, personal suffering, ecclesiastical blunders) where one can point to both real harm and real downstream good.
For example, one longform Christian treatment of Joseph explicitly uses your formula: his brothers’ malice and the zigzag of slavery, false accusation, and prison are “crooked lines,” but the safeguarding of many lives during famine—combined with real moral transformation in the brothers and in Joseph himself—is the “straight” that Joseph perceives only in retrospect.
The author makes two contentful claims there:
Some outcomes (preservation of life, repentance, reconciliation) are intrinsically good and therefore count as “straight,” not because we like them but because they track the revealed moral will of God.
Those outcomes are historically and causally dependent on prior evils; without the crookedness, those particular goods (this reconciliation, this position in Egypt, this famine relief) would not have existed in that way.
Participants in the DiscussMormonism thread import that same pattern into LDS experience: they treat, say, institutional overreach, culture‑bound errors, or misguided rhetoric as “crooked,” and then ask whether identifiable goods (a more mature ecclesiology, refined doctrines of grace, greater compassion for the wounded, clearer boundaries) have in fact emerged through the painful process.
That is exactly not “infinite wiggle room”: it forces you to say, case by case, whether there is any genuinely redemptive outcome and whether it is tied in a non‑trivial way to the earlier wrong turn.
Why this does not neutralize negative prophetic evidence
You are right about one thing that most believers in that thread would grant: if a prophet confidently teaches X as revealed and X is later shown false, that is negative evidential weight against his prophetic status.
Where the “crooked lines” premise comes in is not to erase that weight but to say:
First, LDS theology already builds in non‑inerrancy; prophets can misread God, over‑state, or be shaped by their time, and the scriptures themselves present God as working through deeply flawed leaders (e.g., David as “a man after my own heart” who still abuses power and suffers severe consequences).
Second, the evidential picture is cumulative rather than binary. You do not move directly from “X was wrong” to “prophetic mantle falsified.” You ask whether, in the wake of X, there is any pattern of:
repentance, acknowledgment, and correction,
institutional learning and reform,
deeper and more coherent articulation of core Christian goods (justice, mercy, truth, charity).
When defenders in the thread say “God can write straight with crooked lines,” they are not claiming that the wrongness of X mysteriously becomes neutral with respect to evidence; they are claiming that, in addition to the negative evidential hit, there may also be positive evidence of providential ordering in how the community and its leadership respond, grow, and sometimes sharply change direction.
That is a substantive, contestable thesis, not ambiguity for its own sake.
A simple illustration:
“Crooked line”: David’s adultery with Bathsheba and the killing of Uriah are serious sins; nothing in the “God writes straight” idea suggests they are anything but damning on their own terms.
“Straight writing”: the resulting chain of events yields deep personal repentance psalms that become paradigmatic for later generations, a national reckoning with kingship and justice, and a more sober theology of power in Israel’s story.
You can reject the theological reading if you like, but it is not epistemic sleight‑of‑hand. It ties very specific “crooked” acts to very specific “straight” goods and then asks whether that sort of pattern is visible in LDS history too.
Why the premise is not orthogonal to LDS prophetic claims
You argue that “crooked lines” are orthogonal to LDS pronouncements about the prophetic mantle, but that is not how Latter‑day Saints have actually used the phrase in this and related discussions.
Instead, the thread works with at least three LDS‑internal commitments that make the premise relevant:
Prophets are real but fallible: contemporary LDS leaders explicitly deny personal or institutional inerrancy, so the live question is not “does any error falsify the mantle?” but “what kind and degree of error, and what pattern of response, would do so?”
God’s purposes are long‑horizon and communal: core LDS narratives (e.g., apostasy and restoration, line‑upon‑line revelation, Zion as a work in progress) already describe a God who tolerates significant crookedness in both individuals and institutions while still claiming to be unfolding a real, coherent plan.
History is a primary theological arena: the movement’s self‑understanding is deeply historical (from the First Vision onward), so appealing to historical patterns of fall, correction, and unexpected good is not a dodge; it is exactly the sort of evidence both sides argue about.
Within that framework, “God can write straight with crooked lines” functions as a defeasible research program:
Hypothesis: even where LDS leaders have erred, one can trace patterns of correction, refinement, and new goods that are difficult to explain on purely sociological terms but are natural on a providential reading.
Falsification condition: if, for major and enduring errors, you do not see genuine repentance, genuine reform, or any redemptive good that could not be more simply explained by human dynamics, then the appeal to “crooked lines” fails and the negative evidence piles up.
Again, that is not “infinite wiggle room”; it is a claim with clear conditions under which it would be judged a bad explanation.
A direct answer to your challenge
So to answer you succinctly:
The arbiter of “straight vs crooked” in this framework is not the apologist’s taste but the morally rich portrait of God’s aims in scripture and tradition, applied to concrete outcomes that can, in principle, be argued about publicly.
The framework is not designed to make failed prophetic claims epistemically harmless; it fully concedes that such failures count against prophetic status while insisting that the overall pattern of a community’s life—including how it responds to failure—also carries evidential weight.
The thread’s 123 pages are not a Rorschach test; they are a running attempt to test that premise against specific cases in LDS history and personal experience, which is precisely what you would expect if the premise were being treated as a substantive, falsifiable theological claim rather than as a license for endless special pleading.
You may still conclude that, in LDS history, the “crooked lines” program fails—that the negatives are too large and the alleged redemptive patterns too weak.
But that is a judgment on the truth of the premise in this concrete case, not a demonstration that the premise itself is absurd or logically incoherent.
