Mormonism's OA and the mighty F-S chain

[Limnor]

I’m not sure I see the early leaders primarily as dreamers. Maybe Rigdon and Cowdery. It sometimes looks more like a situation where someone running a confidence game gets in over his head. Once other people understand the mechanics of the game, they gain leverage. At that point the founder can be both perpetrator and victim—still directing things publicly, but privately vulnerable to the people who know how it works.

I'm going by Joseph Smith having having been a "storyteller" from the time he was a kid. I suppose I see him like L. Ron Hubbard. It's hard to imagine Hubbard wrote all that sci-fi without any interest in sci-fi ideas, and purely as a way to start a cult based on sci-fi ideas to get rich. I'll grant though that I think Joseph Smith and Hubbard were sociopaths and maybe people wired like that shouldn't be said to be dreamers in the same way dupes are.

A large part of my composition theory has to do with how Joseph elevated ordinary followers into epic roles through that storytelling. Kings, Melchizedek priesthood holders, apostles, builders of Zion. That’s a powerful form of flattery. I see a similar approach in the Book of Mormon where ordinary figures suddenly occupy epic historical roles. In fact the book even mentions flattery as a means to influence people. It seems to capture the method within its pages.

If there is no grounding and everyone is eternal and on the path to ultimate godhood that would seem to be especially flattering. It seems to me Joseph introduced the idea but wasn’t able to really work out the philosophical grounding before he died.

[Limnor]

So I'm also just following this discussion at a distance to see where it goes. You don't have to even do that if it doesn't interest you, obviously, but don't think that it's all just going over your head. You're probably tracking it fine.

Agreed.

[malkie]

I know that the OA is serious philosophy, but I cannot get my head around the idea that you can argue or imagine something into existence - especially a god.

You shouldn't sell yourself short, malkie, because your point here is precisely one of the main philosophical positions on the Ontological Argument. It's Immanuel Kant's point. The fancy-sounding way to state the point is to say that "existence is not a predicate", meaning precisely that whether or not something actually exists is just not something that can be part of its definition, let alone of how "great" it is. As Kant put it, a hundred purely hypothetical dollars are not even a single cent less as a sum of dollars than a hundred actual dollars. What the hypothetical dollars lack, in comparison to the real dollars, is not the same kind of thing as the ten bucks by which ninety actual dollars are short of one hundred actual dollars.

For my money, Kant nailed the problem with the ontological argument, but I have to admit that the issue may not really be settled. Kant introduced the financial metaphor, but what it suggests nowadays is that maybe there is a way to translate degree of probability of existence into degree of greatness, because a lot of a modern economy is precisely about discounting sums of money in proportion to risk. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

So I'm also just following this discussion at a distance to see where it goes. You don't have to even do that if it doesn't interest you, obviously, but don't think that it's all just going over your head. You're probably tracking it fine.

Thanks for the encouragement, PG!

I'm intrigued by the idea of the financial metaphor, so perhaps I'll look into that further.

[Physics Guy]

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable.

… je crois que chaque philosophe a son Kant propre.

I believe that every philosopher has his own Kant.

Anyone who gets mentioned like this by both Einstein and Monty Python was obviously a gigantic titan, and Kant surely was. If your independent take on something lines up with Kant’s, it’s worth a beer from any educated person.

[malkie]

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable.

… je crois que chaque philosophe a son Kant propre.

I believe that every philosopher has his own Kant.

Anyone who gets mentioned like this by both Einstein and Monty Python was obviously a gigantic titan, and Kant surely was. If your independent take on something lines up with Kant’s, it’s worth a beer from any educated person.

Very nicely put!
All the better if you can distinguish Kant, from can't, from 𝑐𝑎𝑛𝑡.

Dang it, Venerable Dr Shades - you know well that 𝑐𝑎𝑛𝑡 is a perfectly good word. Why does the board s/w "correct" it to can't? I mean, anyone who knows what 𝑐𝑎𝑛𝑡 is should be allowed to use it without jumping through hoops, don't you think?

[Gabriel]

Here's the thought experiment: Imagine if Lou Midgley, lost in the eternities (as he was once lost in the theaters of Europe, according to Dan), meets an apologist from another world. They begin comparing genealogy, and it turns out that while Lou's Heavenly Father was the Savior of his home world, as Joseph Smith implied, Lou's Heavenly Grandfather was a repentant alcoholic and garbage man from the Rose Park of his mortal world. With a twinkle in his eye, Lou's counterpart apologist mentions smugly that his own Heavenly Grandfather just happened to be the redeemer who died for Lou's Heavenly Grandfather, who was a total failure until the very end! I highly doubt Lou would find this acceptable.

****

The problem with the OA intuitions of Mormonism is that they're wrapped up in the parallel intuition of making oneself feel special.

Not to pile on the above-named apologist, but since you have used him as an example of a certain psychological type, does he not have a million more reasons to be torqued, even within our own “F-S” chain?

Think of all those who accept the gospel in the spirit world -– many of whom may have led profligate lives in mortality. Once they have received their vicarious baptism, are their sins not all washed away? And once all the other ordinances are done, it seems to me that they, of all people, will have little to answer for on Judgment Day. What’s to stop them from godhood? Is the Lord going to punish them for anything they might have done before that valiant 13-year-old saved their sorry butts during his water-boarding? It seems to me that the temples are cranking out gods, left and right, every day in the tens of thousands. And when the work is finally complete, it may turn out that to be a god (in our own link of the F-S chain) is to be no one in particular.

In the 4th century, in his work On the Incarnation:

God became man so that man might become god.

This is orthodox doctrine in both the eastern and western rites of Catholicism. I won’t go into it here.

As for myself, I know my place. It must needs be that I, Gabriel, having been born of goodly parents, will find myself numbered among The Smoothies. Sure, I will feel remorse. But not repentance. And I will rebel. I imagine that, at first, I will gently rub my smoothie in the vain hope that it might grow. (Of course, I will avail myself of whatever lotions and oils are provided in that place.) Then, no doubt, after decades of failure, I will probably dispense with this endeavor, reverse course, and move on to something more drastic. You see, out of sheer, obstinate willfulness, I will undertake to sand down my smoothie even further. Furiously! And as the aeons pass, I will sand and sand and rub and rub until that blessed day when, on some far-off green hill, it will be sung of me: “Gabriel’s smoothie is the smoothest smoothie throughout Eternity!”

(I know, it’s kind of vain and childish. But, think on how I was raised.)

[Gadianton]

Thank you for these insights, Gabriel.

Think of all those who accept the gospel in the spirit world -– many of whom may have led profligate lives in mortality. Once they have received their vicarious baptism, are their sins not all washed away? And once all the other ordinances are done, it seems to me that they, of all people, will have little to answer for on Judgment Day. What’s to stop them from godhood? Is the Lord going to punish them for anything they might have done before that valiant 13-year-old saved their sorry butts during his water-boarding? It seems to me that the temples are cranking out gods, left and right, every day in the tens of thousands. And when the work is finally complete, it may turn out that to be a god (in our own link of the F-S chain) is to be no one in particular.

You're absolutely right and you have the intuition I've got in mind down cold. In fact, he has likely rejected deification for this very reason already. Dan, his buddy, from my recollection, on the MADD board (before he took his ball and left to start SeN), made a statement that indicated deification meant taking part in the creation process rather than actually becoming a God. He seems to have explicitly accepted the "VP of subprime auto loans with stock options" version of deification. In fact, I may have errored in using Lou as an example because of this. My intention was to make the intuition obvious, as Lou accused me of "driving a garbage truck" on SeN as if a blue-collar job is a moral failure; and for a little merriment. But now I can see why this was serious error on my part. Internet Mormons explicitly reject deification already, and probably adopt Blake's model that MGs AI brought up, and going with what they wrongly think will make them popular with conservative scholars seems the default option.

The King Follett discourse has two competing ideas and Joseph himself may have been confused about them. The most explicit is God was once a man. And Joseph says "He was once a man like us", but a few words later he says "the same as Jesus Christ Himself", which means what exactly? Did he mean Jesus, who created the world in the pre-existence at the Father's direction and was Jehovah in the Old Testament (Smith possibly took inconsistent views over time) and lived a sinless life in mortality was a "man like us?" That makes no sense. He could say he "had a body" like us, but he was no commoner. And then it's more confusing when he speaks of the Jesus resurrecting himself, having learned this from his father, which brings to mind a royal lineage passing down "the craft" of saviorhood. We can't exactly take our bodies up again on our own. The explicit paradigm of Chapel Mormons is a universe of Gods who are exalted men, and then there's Jesus, who is out of place, somewhat. Because he married Mary Magdalene and will go on as a father himself, and oddly become the greatest being as he was a savior who died for an infinite number in addition to doing everything the Father has. But, this quiet doctrine that the Father was a savior on his mortal world latches into the mind with force when heard. It does so with the implicit contrast of Father-Son royalty against the backdrop of endless "no one in particular" gods. It's not a paradigm shift, I highly doubt my mom thought about the Father's Father as a savior also nor explicitly felt like she "dodged a bullet" not getting born on a world to an inferior God. This chain is what I think of as an implicit model of the Chapel Mormon who doesn't think they have an issue with sanitation workers getting exalted, unlike elitist Internet Mormons who sell their birthright for a mess of pottage. My counterpart world should have contained a Chapel Mormon, not Lou.

This is orthodox doctrine in both the eastern and western rites of Catholicism. I won’t go into it here.

I'll let Limnor take that one.

As for myself, I know my place. It must needs be that I, Gabriel, having been born of goodly parents, will find myself numbered among The Smoothies. Sure, I will feel remorse. But not repentance. And I will rebel. I imagine that, at first, I will gently rub my smoothie in the vain hope that it might grow. (Of course, I will avail myself of whatever lotions and oils are provided in that place.) Then, no doubt, after decades of failure, I will probably dispense with this endeavor, reverse course, and move on to something more drastic. You see, out of sheer, obstinate willfulness, I will undertake to sand down my smoothie even further. Furiously! And as the aeons pass, I will sand and sand and rub and rub until that blessed day when, on some far-off green hill, it will be sung of me: “Gabriel’s smoothie is the smoothest smoothie throughout Eternity!”

That's another strong Mormon intuition. I've heard Brigham said that Mormons would transform hell into paradise if sent there. He probably didn't consider that Mormon apostates would do just that with the Telestial Kingdom.

[malkie]

Think of all those who accept the gospel in the spirit world -– many of whom may have led profligate lives in mortality. Once they have received their vicarious baptism, are their sins not all washed away? And once all the other ordinances are done, it seems to me that they, of all people, will have little to answer for on Judgment Day. What’s to stop them from godhood? Is the Lord going to punish them for anything they might have done before that valiant 13-year-old saved their sorry butts during his water-boarding? It seems to me that the temples are cranking out gods, left and right, every day in the tens of thousands. And when the work is finally complete, it may turn out that to be a god (in our own link of the F-S chain) is to be no one in particular.

"Once they have received their vicarious baptism, are their sins not all washed away?"

Ahh, but "receive" in this case has to mean "accept", and the acceptance needs to be wholehearted, right?

However, I had the impression that death will not change the fundamental type of person we are. As a result, we are no more likely to accept vicarious ordinances than we would have been to accept the gospel in this life. If the conversion rate which I estimated as about 0.1% (one baptism per 1000 people taught by the missionaries) holds in the spirit world, there won't be all that many gods - well, relatively speaking. And that 0.1% doesn't even account for the people who fall away after baptism.

[Limnor]

This is orthodox doctrine in both the eastern and western rites of Catholicism. I won’t go into it here.

I'll let Limnor take that one.

I haven’t read On the Incarnation, so I don’t know the arguments from Athanasius, but the idea probably comes from the New Testament concept of adoption. For example, in Romans 8:17 Paul says ”If children, then heirs, heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ,” and in 2 Peter 1:4 “that you may become partakers of the divine nature.”

This is a big departure from the Mormon explanation that we are all spirit children of God. The idea is you becoming adopted by faith, and as children, you’ll receive an inheritance, through sharing in God’s life. It’s not portrayed as another independent God.

The end of all things seems to describe a new reality through temple imagery. Revelation 21:3 says “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people.” And in Ephesians 2:21–22 it says “In him the whole building, being fitted together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord,” and 1 Peter 2:5 says “You also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house.”

Summary: humans are adopted by faith into God’s family as members of Christ’s body and form the dwelling place of God.

[Gadianton]

"can't define into existence" captures something important, but the suggestion throws a wide net: any ordinary nihilist might say the same about Kant who gets to decide what "synthetic" means.