10AR15-19

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Apologia Report 15:19 (1,024)

May 20, 2010

Subject: The LDS become "Mormon" again

In this issue:

ATHEISM - hardliners unify, become increasingly hostile

MORMONISM - LDS leadership finally accepts "Mormon" as church's primary identity

THEODICY - 300 years of explaining "the problem of pain"

WORD-FAITH MOVEMENT - black churches united in opposition

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ATHEISM

"The Fighting Atheists" by Thea Button -- as if to support the theory that belief systems increasingly become more alike as they approach extremes, Button reports that hostility is growing toward religion in general as atheist hardliners become more organized. At the center of recent developments was International Blasphemy Day, which took place for the first time on September 30. "The Center for Inquiry (CFI) ... selected the day to mark the fifth anniversary of the publication of the Mohammed cartoons by the Danish newspaper Jyllensposten...." Related examples of hostility toward religion are mentioned. Button identifies the atheist personalities leading the charge as "science writer Richard Dawkins, historian Susan Jacoby, biologist P.Z. Myers, and - most notoriously - flame-throwing English ex-patriot [sic] journalist Christopher Hitchens. ('I think religion should be treated with ridicule, hatred and contempt, and I claim that right,' Hitchens told a capacity crowd at the University of Toronto in October.)"

Lest one conclude that this campaign is unified, Button notes that "Writing on his New American Mercury blog September 25, former CFI senior vice president R. Joseph Hoffmann called Blasphemy Day a 'preposterous exercise in how to be religiously offensive.' It was 'as tactless as it is pointless.'"

Button adds that "in a November 29 debate on the proposition

'Atheism is the New Fundamentalism,' sponsored by the British debating forum Intelligence Squared, Dawkins vigorously asserted the negative. Atheists, he emphasized on his website (www.RichardDawkins.net) the following day, have a commitment to exploring evidence and a readiness to embrace change, but the passion of their arguments or their refusal to remain silent should not be mistaken for fundamentalism.' ...

"Blasphemy Day (and its brethren media events) seemed less about causing offense than about the social construction of a new American atheist identity. For while, according to the 2008 Trinity American Religious Identity survey, the proportion of Americans who do not identify with a religion has doubled to 15 percent of the population since 1990, admitted atheists constitute only .7 percent." Religion in the News, 12:3 - 2010, pp11, 19. <www.tinyurl.com/2djljuw>

MORMONISM

"The return of 'Mormon'" by Peggy Fletcher Stack -- yep, the word

"Mormon" is back in good standing. "Mormon seemed a benign enough nickname until the 1990s, when critics increasingly charged that the church was not Christian.

"To help counter that claim, LDS officials unveiled a new church

logo in December 1995 with the words 'Jesus Christ' enlarged.

"As Salt Lake City was gearing up for the 2002 Winter Olympics, the LDS First Presidency asked members to call themselves Latter-day Saints and to stop using 'the Mormon Church,' giving preference either to the church's lengthy full name or LDS Church in its place, Brigham Young University journalism professor Joel Campbell said in a speech last year at Utah Valley University. The church asked journalists to use 'The Church of Jesus Christ' as the preferred shorthand.

"That never took hold."

Stack notes that "Some wonder why the Utah-based church tried to jettison the nickname in the first place, especially after spending years and untold millions creating a 'Mormon' brand. The tag line for its award-winning 'Homefront' TV spots, for example, was, 'Brought to you by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - the Mormons.'"

How things have changed in the last year. "Where LDS leaders once were pushing members to call themselves Latter-day Saints, rather than Mormons, now the church-owned Deseret News has created the Mormon Times. 'Mormon Messages' is on YouTube. The 'Mormon Channel' is on the radio. And the faith's missionary Web site is mormon.org.

"So what has changed for the nearly 14 million-member church? The Internet." When the masses use search engines to inquire about the church, studies show that no other identity even comes close.

"'It's simply a reality that people think of Mormons, they don't

think of Latter-day Saints,' [Michael Otterson, managing director of LDS Public Affairs] said.... 'Mormon is here to stay.'" Salt Lake

Tribune, Apr 5 '10, <www.tinyurl.com/yc7ebl5>

THEODICY

"Natural Disasters and the Wrath of God" by Samuel Newlands --

addresses the observation "that many religious believers now dismiss [the idea of correlating natural disasters with divine punishment] out of hand [is] a relatively recent development. ...

"This year marks the 300th anniversary of Gottfried Leibniz's

'Theodicy,' which remains one of the grandest attempts to prove the goodness and justice of a God who created an evil-soaked cosmos like ours. ...

"Leibniz insists, God had a justified and discernible reason for

creating a universe with life-sustaining, but tectonically unstable

planets. Leibniz argues that a world with simple, regular natural laws that yielded a rich diversity of effects - including rational

creatures - was better than alternative worlds with different laws and creatures, even if the alternatives were free from natural disasters.

"If Leibniz is right, then natural disasters aren't the result of

divine punishment for sin. They are the foreseen but unintended

consequences of a well-regulated and overall good system of natural laws. So religious believers can explain the causes of earthquakes in purely natural terms (Leibniz was an avid scientist himself), while still maintaining belief in a divine, nonpunitive purpose for allowing such events. The harmonization of natural and theological explanations, reason and faith, is Leibniz's true legacy.

"One unsettling consequence of Leibniz's view is that God's plans and purposes aren't as human-centered as we might have believed. ... Yet if Leibniz concedes that some people suffer for the sake of making the world as a whole better, then perhaps we ought to challenge him further, not so much about God's blamelessness and retributive justice in the face of natural disasters, but about the focus and extent of His love."

The author, Newlands, "is an assistant professor of philosophy at Notre Dame and project co-director of 'The Problem of Evil in Modern and Contemporary Thought' (http://evilandtheodicy.com)." Wall Street Journal (online), Apr 7 '10, <www.tinyurl.com/2enal7r>

WORD-FAITH MOVEMENT

"Seeking Revival Within the Black Church" by Melissa Morgan Kelley -- reports that "A small group of black [Presbyterian Church in America] pastors seeking to spread biblical teaching within the

African-American mainstream church is hosting a conference in

Baltimore this summer." One of them, Lance Lewis, pastor of Christ Liberation Fellowship PCA "is particularly concerned about the entrenchment of the prosperity gospel and word of faith teaching, which he says have increased within the African-American church over the past 25 years. 'I think it's as much a threat to the historic black church as theological liberalism was to the evangelical church in the early part of the 20th century.'" By Faith, Mar '10, <www.tinyurl.com/29up7jc>

In "US pastors seek to quash prosperity gospel in black churches" (Christianity Today, Mar 24 '10, <www.tinyurl.com/2f86qwf>) Audrey Barrick adds that "Lewis is among a group of pastors in the PCA who ... plan to launch a movement to counter the 'heresy' of the prosperity gospel. ...

"The nation's largest African American religious organization - the 7.5 million-member National Baptist Convention - has denounced the teaching and the Lausanne Theology Working Group recently noted its popularity in Africa."

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