Hello quark,
Mikwut,
I sort of get what you wrote. So faith is more like loyalty to someone else. It involves trust. That much, I understand.
Yes that is congruent with much and part of what I said. The most often (although not the only) word used in the N.T. for faith is
pistis or trust. I might recommend to you Wilfred Cantwell Smith's Faith and Belief: The Difference Between Them.
So, why didn't LDS choose to have faith in its members? Why did it hide material from them? (i.e. peep stone, KEP, Clayton journals, 3 versions, etc) Does LDS choose not to have faith?
Yes. That was also a main point of what I said. LDS members I believe presently and to a large degree have a limited and distorted understanding of what faith is. The common understanding of faith is a simple agreement with a list of propositions (i.e. J.S. saw God, J.S. was a prophet of God, The Book of Mormon was translated by the power of God, etc...) that get combined with other meanings of the word. Making sure that those propositions are seen as true (as in factual) becomes part of the fundamental motive of believing latter day saints and its leaders. This isn't true for the early members of the church, but has historically evolved to what we see today.
As I mentioned in my first post, that distortion carries with it many Mormons after they leave the church, it manifests often in scientism (a strict adherence to empirical data and facticity as defining an entire worldview), as was evident from DrW, and atheism. I don't necessarily see or view that transition as negative either. That is why I gave a response to Chap above about the analogy of love, and that sometimes for some of us we have to learn what love is by learning what it isn't. Sometimes grace can be learned to be discerned by a vacancy of it, or by learning what it is not. Even the believed in Savior of Christians suffered this dark night of the soul.
I offer as evidence for this the question of what is more probable, a distortion or a fabrication altogether? What I mean by that is if faith as the unbeliever asserts is non-existent and without any basis in reality - then upon what did the Mormon church grab hold of to gain so many adherents and to keep them for so long? To me, although this by no means is a proof, a distortion is more reasonable and understandable.
You can also clearly this distortion of faith from Whyme's posts. Whyme says,
Faith has little to do with trust because there is no evidence that god exists to trust in it. Faith is about belief and not trust. We can trust evidence and this is what happened with the witnesses to the Book of Mormon as many testified of its truthfulness on their deathbed. They trusted that it was true based on the evidence of what they saw.
Doubting thomas needed evidence to believe because he lacked faith. With the evidence he developed trust that Christ was who he claimed he was
This simply isn't accurate. And is a mess, I don't even understand it, it contradicts itself in several ways. But, it reflects the distortion that Mormons have regarding faith. A kind of fideism combined with historical facts that prove a transcendent God. (It also distorts the Catholic understanding of our natural reason and the spectrum of faith, part of which can be accessed by our natural reason alone, whyme adheres to Catholicism in some way as well) Mormons derive (most often) their very belief and trust that God exists from a deduction of the Book of Mormon is true, therefore J.S. saw God, therefore God exists. When that house of cards empirically falls so oftentimes does their entire faith. This shows a lack of faith not a proper understanding of it. In the history of the Jewish and Christian tradition nothing of that sort has ever been perpetuated by its adherents and/or leaders.
Intellectual assent to faith is not blind or merely an emotional venture. In biblical understanding it is supported by signs and wonders (1 Th 1:5), by demonstrations of the power of the spirit (1 Cor 2:4), by the appearances of the risen Christ (1 Cor 15:1-8). But in all of these, faith is achieved with and supported with the help of Grace. Whyme's understanding isn't biblical, it isn't in accord with the writings of Clement, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Abelard, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas and on and on. I might recommend Avery Dulles' The Assurance of Things Hoped For for a good grasp of this.
I have been influenced a great deal by Michael Polanyi. He developed an understanding of how we gain knowledge and understanding in the sciences and that the framework that is used by the sciences that utilizes a personal knowledge to derive meanings and connections and allows reality to unfold itself to us is strikingly similar to the understanding of "faith seeking understanding" which has been historically imbedded in Jewish tradition and Christianity for centuries.
My intent in responding to your thread was to point out to you the atheist might be right and abandoning all faith after Mormonism would be the rational thing to do. But, it is possible that the movements of grace might be discovered by you and your wife in your new journey and that they at least shouldn't be a priori discounted as real possibilities.
my best wishes to you,
mikwut
All communication relies, to a noticeable extent on evoking knowledge that we cannot tell, all our knowledge of mental processes, like feelings or conscious intellectual activities, is based on a knowledge which we cannot tell.
-Michael Polanyi
"Why are you afraid, have you still no faith?" Mark 4:40