by Lee Bright, version 0.7
Papyrus I - A Portion of the Egyptian Book of the Dead
with Joseph Smith's "prophetically" filled-in missing areas.
The papyrus was mounted onto the back of a map of Kirtland, Ohio.
Once upon a time, a younger me was toying with the idea of writing a book to put things physical and metaphysical in their proper relationships systematically. It was going to be called "The Tale of Two Trees", which I now consider to be a somewhat erroneous title (see A Book Like No Other, Season 1). The basic concept was to confront and compare numerous influential articles from the 20th century with philosophy, theology, and in-context scripture references. Almost all of the scripture references were going to come from the Old Testament, as I've long styled myself as an "Old Testament Christian." My greatest naivety in such an undertaking was my ability to write the visual idea in my head into sequential text that was both clear and concise.
Everything I would have covered in that book would be covered better and with less pretension in Redeeming Asimov. This is a modified chunk of the preface of that book, laying out the two driving problems I have wrestled with most of my life. Updated, it now serves as a great preface to Redeeming Asimov.
The Faith has been present with me for most of my life with many peaks and troughs. I have experience joy, contentment and even enlightenment, if a Christian should use such a term. Also, despair, loneliness, and the abyss. I’ve reaped the blessings of heroic faith and the curses of cowardice. I blame the world for these extremes. I think joy could have been sustained and moderated had faith not received constant, often undeserved, challenge. My bitterness is not towards God, who has been refining me for something greater, but towards people who, through carelessness or malice, confuse and corrupt what would otherwise be seen as God's hand.
If I were above such negligence, I might be able to stand in good conscience as a judge of the world. Rather, I must own my bitterness. I have learned the duplicitous nature of the best of mankind, and I'm not one of those. Consequently, any theory of life or mind that fails to acknowledge the human will to destruction piques my annoyance. Worldviews that fail to see human depravity are legion. We pass them on directly and indirectly to our children through complicit actions, expectations, culture, and social selection. Our culture selects for, but often against, the best traits. Perhaps this is Original Sin?
From an early age, I was a critical thinker. Not so much in the biting sense, but rather in the quick rejection given to explanations (and the people giving them) that just weren't up to the bar. From my first memories is a conception of an orderly universe and society, intent to train me to become a decent citizen. This made for a very early faith akin to Stoicism, acknowledging order in the universe and wisdom in a rational society. I followed the Stoic maxims to be content in all situations and to ration emotions accordingly, long before I knew anything about Stoicism. And that was good because I was emotional. I can only imagine the terror I would have been without these internal principles.
From this early understanding, I actively sought those underlying premises that made sense of life. Would-be mentors who could not provide this (occasionally my parents) were ignored as I searched for better ground…or just did what I wanted - I was a kid after all. My poor parents were frustrated by an introverted kid, either far too docile or in quiet but determined rebellion against the world.
Our family began going to an American Baptist church (ie. the liberal Baptists) when I was around nine years old. I was hesitant at first, but came to accept the Christian worldview because it so successfully accounted for human nature and my failings. That lay at the root of my earnest decision to be baptized at the age of twelve. Puberty, people, and philosophy have made a struggle of faith ever since.
I grew up in Utah, home to a religion that would like to be called the Church of Christ. Its long form is the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints, but all the world knows them as the Mormons. Although never a member of this church, it has exerted a profound influence on my life. Much of that has been confusion and striving, but so much is good that it bears some special comment as the first serious antagonist and protagonist of faith.
Although it is not the first thing they would bring up, Mormon theology is based on a god subject to the physical properties of the planet Kolob - literally, a 1000 years on Kolob equals 1 day on Earth. God is himself the son of another god. Jesus and Satan, his sons – and thus brothers – were locked in a competitive pyramid scheme with their many wives to populate Earth and become its god. Jesus' plan for the earth was accepted, and Satan’s was rejected by their father.
The spirit children of the two took sides. Those who chose Jesus’ plan are the “white and delight-some” - white-skinned folk - like their founder, Joseph Smith, and the early followers of primarily Scandinavian descent: Larsens, Hansons, Monsons, etc. Those who chose Satan’s plan became the disembodied spirits that populate the earth - demons and the like. Those who sat on the fence were the dark-skinned folk – Africans, Indians, and Asians, supposedly. The Native Americans acquired their darker skin on Earth after they exterminated the righteous living in the Americas.
So, what is the grand plan? “As man is, God once was. As God is, man may become.” The opportunity is open to anybody good enough to become the god (or one of his wives/mothers) of another planet in the same way the Mormon god is the father of this one. This is done exclusively through baptism in the church, admittance into the temple priesthood, and marriage within the temple to a spouse(s) for all eternity. It has been confirmed for me from high-level teaching churchmen that Mormonism is, in fact, polytheistic.
All this theology in contradiction to orthodox Christianity is given to us exclusively at the word of a convicted conman who claimed to have discovered and deciphered golden plates in a hill near Palmyra, New York. Being so far away from the Holy Land, the plates must have a unique story to have anything to do with Jesus of Nazareth. Sure enough, they chronicle a tale of Jews sailing across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas 600 years before Jesus. Their progeny recorded the occasion of Jesus' coming to the New World right after he left the Holy Land in the ascension. Finally, the evil descendants of these Jews, the Lamanites, exterminated all the righteous Jews, the Nephites, earning their darker skin. Mormon was the last living Nephite and left the golden plates as a record. It is quite a tale told by 20-year-old Joseph Smith, although very similar stories were circulating at the time he published it.
Though I grew up in Utah and have counted many of my friends as Mormons, I admit I’ve never been able to get through all three major works that make up the Mormon canon – Doctrine and the Covenants, Pearl of Great Price, and Book of Mormon. The faux King James writing, obvious plagiarism, faked translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and knowledge of how it came about were too much to stomach, but the religion was worth looking at again and again because I could not deny the fruit.
For most converts to any religion, demonstrated fruit is the driving factor. And well it should be. Our Lord says as much - “You will know them by their fruits.” Saint Paul agrees and lists the many different kinds of fruit: love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance. All of these same fruits show up again when he discusses love. Since love is the highest commandment, it is easy to see why Jesus and all the apostles focus on good fruit as the yardstick of true faith.
A Tree and Its Fruit - Matthew 7:15-20
As imperfect as perfection-aspiring Mormons may be, the people and the LDS church continue to demonstrate a tangible love for one another and the rest of the world within the confines of their theology. They put the family on a pedestal surrounded by prescriptive procedures to keep it there. The church teaches nuclear family skills to every age group. The patriarchal hierarchy of the family has been consistently maintained, keeping a place for honorable, manly men. While the nuclear family has fallen apart across the United States and Europe with dire consequences, strong families persist among the Mormons. Divorce is known primarily amongst its apostates and those not seriously engaged in the church.
Feeding off the emphasis on family is a strong work ethic and service to the church. Many employers have moved to Utah because of a trustworthy, ethical, hard-working, well-educated population...and antipathy to unions. Even though the church disapproves of gambling, there are many stories of mafioso and casinos hiring Mormons because of their honesty and work ethic. Las Vegas has always had a thriving Mormon population. The expectations of the church keep work and business ethics more or less in line, even apart from law and government. Occasionally, this breaks down in notoriously weird ways, but in the aggregate, Mormons are ideal workers and honest businessmen.
The laity is organized in a hierarchy of differing responsibilities. Only the higher leaders of the church have paid positions. This organization is aimed at practical rather than theological purposes. Mormons determine how best to care for each other through various committees, assign a responsible party as a "calling", and go. Through the organization, Mormons have been able to mobilize quickly during times of emergency or heightened need, such as during the great Teton Dam flood.
The primary church service is the laity organized and performed sacrament meeting. This involves boring, patronizing, and unifying singing, reading, and communion (with water instead of wine!), seeded with (overly) emotional testimonies.
At 19, boys are expected to go on a mission, often to a foreign country, fulfilling the Great Commission as they understand it. Missions are effective at gaining converts, especially from other countries, but can be make-or-break affairs for the young missionaries. In this almost mandatory proselytizing, one is either predisposed to defend the church for life, or the seeds of doubt have been planted.
Even the sexist and racist conceptions that lie near the center of Mormon theology have been moderated. As a prerequisite for Utah's statehood, the church had to renounce the practice of polygamy. Most indicators show this development to be a clean break from former practices. The church now publicly recognizes polygamy to be an act of apostasy. That said, I've known a couple of very respectable polygamous people as well. To maintain a clear separation between church and state, Utah’s constitution is one of the more detailed among the states.
In 1978, the church changed its practice of excluding dark-skinned people, mainly those of Native American and African descent, from entering the temple and their priesthood. This, at least theoretically, allowed advancement in the church to the dark-skinned. The hierarchy has subsequently gone to the lengths of changing their scripture to erase and recode some of the more racist statements. The church’s zeal for expanding missions to South America and Africa has largely pushed its racist past out of collective memory. Consequently, Mormons are no more predisposed to racism than the general population. Many of the spinoff churches have not followed those changes, however, and formally practice polygamy and white superiority.
There is some rotting fruit in Mormonism. Without a strong conception of grace to offset the focus on works, superficial fruit often comes to the fore. Being seen doing good becomes more important than actually doing good. It is not hard to find Mormons using their energy to gain the trappings of good fruit by boasting rather than through humble service. Envy is one of the pervasive sins in Mormonism. This attitude meets with consternation by the honest (though not always humble) faithful. To them, the bar to becoming gods is set extremely high. Suicide has even resulted among Mormons who deem themselves as not quite perfect enough to achieve the highest level of heaven.
Mormons focus on selling and reselling their church, which certainly translates into business prowess. Add in the particulars of Mormon theology, and one can see the temptation for pyramid schemes. On the whole, they keep their religious and business sales pitch separate, but the basic form is the same. The line between business and personal relationships can get very fuzzy in Utah. Consequently, an odd sort of consumerism is the norm amongst Mormons, at least in Utah. Utah is not a place where less is more.
Finally, Mormons have allowed an almost criminal naivety to take place in their laity, especially amongst their women. Within Mormonism, emotional ties are almost always preferred over rational ones. This emotionalism follows from the major spiritual event in a Mormon's life – the “burning in the bosom.” If a potential convert is becoming at all difficult, every Mormon knows to ask them to pray to see if the church is true. If they receive a “burning in the bosom” - whatever that is - they will know the church is true. No reasoning required. What an effective content-free way to get people into your church – if you feel it's true, it must be true. In consequence, most Mormons are raised on sappy stories and know hardly a thing about Mormon theology. Only the boat-rockers deal in rational theology.
However, with only slight modification, I can make the same criticisms of Bible-Belt Christians or large swaths of the Catholic Church. In comparison to the Mormon church's collective fruit, most large church organizations don’t even come close. While I’ll give a nod to the Nazarene and more conservative Presbyterian and Reformed Churches as equals, the only large religious movements in the United States that demonstrate higher quality fruit are the Amish and their spiritual cousins, the Mennonites.
“Well, the Mormons have the fruit, right? Then sign me up!” And people have. I’ve known many a Mormon who brought their families into the church for no other reason, consciously holding their nose at the theology. The Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints is an organization that provides morality, security, support, education, defined roles, meaningful "callings", strong families, and group identity. Really, what more can you ask?
Well yes, but is it true? Joining means we trust this church not only with our lives, but our afterlives. Certainly, some deeper scrutiny is in order. It is only prudent to look at the messenger, message, and corroborating evidence.
Credible historical research going only slightly beyond official church teaching shows the founder, Joseph Smith, to be a conman, from a family of conmen. In a 1826 trial, he was convicted of a misdemeanor for fraudulently claiming to be able to find buried treasure. His explanation for why he wasn't able to get the treasure - “The more I digged the deeper it got.” His activities in Palmyra, New York show him to be constantly playing schemes.
Fuller Consideration by Clint Kimball - fullerconsideration.com
Even if I set aside Joseph Smith’s “pre-prophetic history” as it has been called, I still have no reason to believe him. He prophesied that people would inhabit the moon dressed like Quakers. Once he came into town drunk, naked, smoking a cigar in defiance of all decorum and violating what became the church's Rule of Wisdom, which decries alcohol and 'hot drinks' - nowadays usually interpreted as caffeinated coffee and tea - hot chocolate is fine. Clearly, this was a man out to make a name for himself by any means necessary. What exactly recommends him as a prophet to anyone but the naïve?
Though deemed a martyr by Mormons, he had used a gun at his death, with reports that he killed a man from the angry mob that attacked him in his jail cell. Was he put in jail without cause? No, he was awaiting trial after he ordered the destruction of a printing press that was printing mostly true things he didn’t like. There is little about the man that can be rhymed with the prophets of old or the injunction of Jesus to turn the other cheek.
His most lasting contribution is the documents he ‘discovered' and 'translated'. Though numerous, the documents are unimpressive, either recounting versions of stories already in circulation or plagiarized from the King James Bible. He even plagiarized the translator's preface to the King James Bible! The golden plates from which came the Book of Mormon have long since been ‘lost’, which is quite incredible as they would easily weigh 70 lbs or more. All of the witnesses to these plates are problematic. Some were even excommunicated from the church later.
Joseph Smith's Plagiarism of the Bible in the Book of Mormon - utlm.org
We do have the scroll from which he deciphered the Book of Abraham, also called the Pearl of Great Price. Smith bought the manuscript with several mummies from Michael Chandler, who was using them in a traveling mummy show. This manuscript turns out to be a typical section from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a scroll commonly found with mummies that, at one time, was even mass-produced in Egypt. Deciphered copies read nothing like the Pearl of Great Price. Indeed Joseph Smith achieved the amazing feat of getting xx words for every x pictograph.
There are first printings of the Book of Mormon in existence, but even though the text was translated into English, they read little like the copies the church distributes today. Smith’s English was so poor that an apostle around 1913 decided to correct the 3000 or so grammatical errors it contained. He corrected some inconsistencies in the text as well. Despite being written in English, the church continues to modify the text as it is felt to be needed right up to the present day.
Finally, there are no corroborated ancient witnesses to anything uniquely Mormon. The very best that can be mustered is rumor.
The evidence is insurmountable. Clearly, this is false religion. I hope that the LDS church will reform by retaining the best practices of the church while making a clean break with its false historical claims and the worst parts of its theology. That is, reform in the mold of the Worldwide Church of God, which left its cult and became a conservative evangelical church when it conceded that the commentary of its founder, Herbert W. Armstrong, was not true.
While I so easily disparage Mormonism, without an appeal to fruit can I turn around and comfortably endorse Christianity? Think of Moses, for instance, one of the top five characters in the Judeo-Christian framework and traditional writer of the Torah. He fled Egypt after murdering a labor boss. When he returned to free the Hebrews, many of his tricks, intended to demonstrate God's power through him, were reproduced by the Egyptian court priests. His first ‘miracles’ were known art! Are these not the marks of a swindler?
What of David, the king after God's own heart, coming into town naked, dancing, and flirting with young girls? His jealous wife admonished him, and for her righteous anger, he never slept with her again.
What of God telling the Hebrews coming into Canaan to exterminate the Canaanites, at the very least, the inhabitants of Jericho? In the developed world, we call that genocide. Ironically, genocide has come to be such a heinous crime because of the Holocaust, the meticulous destruction of German Jewry. How can we square such a God of genocide with a loving creator?
What of the uncertainties with the biblical sources? Unlike the Book of Mormon, we have no first copies of the Bible. Much of the Old Testament biblical text is thought to come from a long oral history. All the autograph sources have long since disappeared. There are positives to be sure: the New Testament manuscripts were translated early on into four different language families; a high-fidelity scribal tradition has existed for the Old Testament; and more texts of the Bible are extant than any other ancient document. Although these sources provide good agreement between them, there are still thousands of little and even a few big differences among them. Archaeology can confirm many places and events in the Bible, but one could hardly say there are fewer loose ends.
Finally, the Mormons cannot match the Bible for fantastic content, and here I mean beyond that of miracles. What of Abraham’s raising his knife to sacrifice his own son? That Isaac was spared is immaterial. Abraham had acceded to child sacrifice following what he believed to be the command of God. He becomes a murderer by breaking the moral law given to Noah, and a madman for killing the son of the promise, who was to be the father of many. And because of this, Jews and Christians everywhere call him father!
The absurdity of the Savior of the world, God on Earth, dying at the hands of his own chosen people. Intimately conjoined and of the same essence as God the Father and the Holy Spirit, and yet unable to save himself. Christianity – the religion of love – has the cross as its foremost symbol, an instrument of torture and death. Outrageous!
Don’t get me wrong, these events are necessary parts of the Jewish and Christian narrative. A close reading and Christian theology provide sinew to connect all these bones, but the nagging problem remains. There is no decisive way to separate the true from the false by a simple comparison. One has to look at the minutiae in each issue, not just to settle that Mormonism is false, but that Christianity is true.
I call this the Mormon Dilemma. Not a dilemma for Mormons, but for the rest of us. Once you depart from emotion and fruit as your criteria, only shades of differences can be found between any religion. There will be no easy comparative test to discern which religion is true. If fruit does not indicate, you’re stuck in indecision. What gives this dilemma its force is precisely because Mormonism is false, as clear as they come for a world religion. And if decisive differences are difficult here, where the comparisons are fairly direct, then how about Islam, Hinduism, Baha'i, and Buddhism? And more perniciously, transhumanism, transexualism, and Trumpism?
Certainly, the Mormon Dilemma is a lesson in epistemic humility. One should always approach a subject with humility, immerse oneself within it, and not be prone to rash judgments. Multiple lines of evidence and argument need to be considered. Shun the ways of tyranny and demagoguery. However, these attitudes don’t get you out of the dilemma. They just allow you to work better within it. The question remains: How will we know the truth?
“Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt, as I understand the subject; difficulty and doubt are incommensurate.” - John Henry Newman
A way out of this dilemma is to compare the demands of faith to reality, rather than to another religion. Ultimately, the credibility of authors, actions of the protagonists, and probability of events are pointers to truth, not the truth itself. Authority is only valid when based on these pointers, but even with them, authority has no necessary correlation to reality. When seen in such a light, comparative methods are nothing more than a sampling of possibilities - side roads along the way.
If the faith closely approximates reality in its points of contact, it is true. If not, not. We may qualify by saying we are looking for a “spiritual” reality, but it must be reality nonetheless. If Christianity and reality are the same, then similar lines of thought and concepts should be forthcoming. We should be able to move from these common denominators to some of the complexity within the Christian faith. Perhaps we will find it isn't complex at all. Finally, if the evidence is common enough and the lines of reasoning are deep enough, we can drop the comparative religions method altogether and get out of the Mormon Dilemma.
In such a scheme, there can be many difficulties without there being a doubt. Most difficulties arise from imprecision or missing evidence. Arguments by evidence must humbly concede the silent evidence. The focus is not on trivial minutiae, which are bound to have divergent interpretations, but the plausibility of the general movement of the faith. To achieve such a project, nothing can be accepted superficially, including knowledge itself.
No argument can bear upon authority alone. Authorities should be cited, but only to show that an argument is durable and not religiously novel. Unpacking old ideas into a contemporary context is allowed, and even encouraged, but ideas new to history require solid justification. All arguments and evidence must be able to stand within an appropriate context on their own merit. Sentimentality needs to be closely guarded and emotionalism extinguished. Welcome to the much-maligned philosophies of metaphysics!
Even if that sounds doable, this is a grand project, overwhelming even for the honest and humble, perhaps especially for them. Some difficulties in its achievement:
It is assumed that reality can be described with sufficient detail and independence that lasting, durable inferences can be made. Ask the Catholic Church if this was a good assumption when it so closely followed Aristotle's view of nature into the Copernican Revolution.
With 2000 years of history separating Christians from their Christ, no single person can marshal together all the evidence, argument, and history, and yet, no group effort could hold it all together so tightly. Some sort of strategy or summary must take place to make this project more than mental masturbation. Whatever the required detail of reality must come as a reduction from general knowledge. Although losing its ground, Post-Modernism - the chief cultural philosophy at the end of the 20th century - quite specifically opposes the veracity of this kind of knowledge.
As we will see, this last point is partially answered by history itself, specifically the history of the Sumerians. What is obscuring the general public from seeing this is not so much missing evidence or the multiplicity of conclusions possible, but the biases, prejudices, and erroneous consensuses of the be-knighted knowledge makers and those who naively regard themselves as neutral. All knowledge is indeed theory-laden. How do we converge on truth if neutrality is not possible for anyone?
It is not like this project hasn't been taken up before. There are thousands of books written on natural theology by the brightest minds over the past three millennia. If these authors were not conclusive, then really, who am I to add another?
Even if the above criticisms are quenched, inhuman humility and resilience are needed. The consequences of ideas must be taken head-on without prejudice. When ideas and facts run over your worldview, you must figure out what went wrong and try it again. But to do so without prejudice is the problem. As Martin Luther interpreted Hebrews 10:25, “If you try to come to Christ without the church, you will break your neck.” What sect of Christianity could someone be beholden to and fall back into when times are rough, that is still flexible enough to allow such challenges? The only hope for success is to pray for God to intercede and demonstrate Himself.
However, these are not just problems limited to Faith seeking understanding. These are problems in every field of knowledge for the whole human endeavor of the Knowledge Project.
I won’t pretend to have full answers to the difficulties above. Regardless, I’ve been wrestling with this project for the last 30 years. It has often been a painful and lonely undertaking. I wouldn’t have begun except for another persuasive religion already claiming so much of reality. I was a believer before I knew its name. Its description of the universe was so compelling that it had swallowed other religions whole. Wars have been waged, populations subjugated, rebels and scapegoats persecuted and killed by its principles. The Mormon Dilemma shrank away into insignificance in the face of this new challenger.
Unlike Mormonism, this religion teaches the rigid impersonality of the universe, the insignificance of mankind, and the total subjection of mankind to his environment. All the work and knowledge of mankind are ultimately futile enterprises, and yet still perceived as the closest thing to meaning. This religion does not often produce good fruit, but is so efficient and effective at accusing others, few have noticed. It resides at the core of the 20th century – by far the bloodiest century in human history - driving people from one social disaster to another. I’m writing, of course, of Modernism - the culture, methods, and philosophical extrapolations that have built up around modern science following the Renaissance and coming into its own through extrapolations of the works of Isaac Newton, René Descartes, and, of course, Charles Darwin.
The works dealing with Modernism in a compelling Christian way are few and far between. The best were popular British writers such as G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis. In the United States, Old Princeton writers such as Hodges, Machen, and Van Til were impressive. From both groups, we have the development of a consistent Christian Worldview, rational criticism of modern philosophy, and accurate predictions of human self-destruction under Modernism. Though these writers have been somewhat successful, a sympathetic reading is required. Several generations later, sympathy is lacking. Most present-day Christians have not taken them up.
Evolutionarily, humanity is necessarily religious. To religion, or not to religion, is not really a question. Despite containing many of the knowledge makers, several religious arms of Modernism have depleted the wisdom, common sense, and ultimately the humanity of its adherents. The most pernicious is the many-headed dragon of Marxism - Communism, Bolshevism, Maoism, Trotskyism, Neo-Marxism, Critical Theory, and others. All of these modernist religions have predetermined ends, driving biases and prejudices that have woven their way into a general knowledge that was supposed to be "one damned thing after another."
There is no question that Modernism claims more than it should, but in nearly every avenue, it claims reality. How much to acquiesce to modern understanding and methods? How sufficient can a phenomenological understanding of things be? Thus, the Modern Dilemma.
...to be continued