One of the salient contrasts in Lehi’s dream is that between those who cling to the iron rod and those who enter the great and spacious building. On the one hand, the former grope about in a blinding fog, doing their best to find their way along a path which they cannot see. The latter, on the other hand, are (somehow) able to see this path from their vantage point up in the building, but are thus unable to follow it. The question I wish to raise is this: which is more rational, to do without understanding or to understand without doing? Indeed, one can interpret the river which separates the rod from the building as the distance which is required for any kind of “objective” analysis. Obviously, Lehi thinks it better to follow the path rather than survey it from a distance. (more…)

Check out this great shot of the 1951 NIT Champion BYU Cougars men’s basketball team.  Too cool.

One popular website running around on Favebook is Isidewith.com. It’s a website which asks you a few questions, then tells you how the candidates answered the same questions. One question is whether you believe in evolution. After you take the survey, you get to see how you align with the candidates. Just to make R. Gary’s head explode, here is Mitt’s response.

Question #1- What does that even mean?
Question #2- Should I be offended that it tells me I should vote Green Party?

I don’t know if it is because I am the father of three little girls or what, but I was just looking at my phone and thinking about all the church apps I have for being at church on Sunday.

Feel free to judge me by my apps:

I wonder if this is just because church is 3 hours long and it is easier to pocket a phone than haul scriptures, coloring books, crayons, quiet books, friends, toys, etc.

Most used are:

Most used by me: LDS tools- always using it to visit other members, call other members, etc. Close second, Gospel Library.

Most used by the family- read the scriptures. Helps keep us on track to read as a family, BUT the app breaks a lot, save your money and just use the website.

Most used by the 2 year old- Primary sing along. She is hooked on “I Am A Child Of God”

Most used by the 5 year old- Coloring games are a big hit here.

Most used by the 8 year old- Where’s the water trumps church games generally, but she’ll play Lamanite or Jonah.

What church apps do you have/use?

There once was an army of soldiers who considered themselves to be fighting a war which must be won at all costs.  What this war was over or who the enemy was are both questions that need not concern us here.   What matters for now is that any other objectives which these soldiers might have also valued in life paled in comparison to the primary objective of victory.  Accordingly, the goodness or desirability of these other goals or ends was essentially measured in terms of the degree to which they tended toward victory in this war rather than defeat. (more…)

A great deal of my thought surrounding the nature of (R)eligious, (S)cientific and (P)ragmatic (or pre-modern, modern and post-modern) approaches to truth is based in the premise that rule-following is the only path to truth.  Empirical observation, logical deduction and everything in between only get us anywhere inasmuch as they are normatively constrained by rules of various kinds.  In this post I would like to briefly unpack this position in terms of a familiar metaphor. (more…)

I’d respond “That’s a Clown Question, Bro.”

This week, I will be teaching Chapter 9 from the George Albert Smith Manual. It is a lesson on prayer.

The lesson begins with a story about Smith’s Mother teaching him to pray. You can hear Smith himself give the original address back in 1946 here.

One thing that was interesting to me was that first prayer that Smith hadn’t forgotten.

It was:

“As I lay me down to sleep, I pray the lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, I pray the lord my soul to take.”

In my (almost) 14 years as a saint, I have always been warned of vain repetition. Now am I wondering, was Smith’s rote prayer an anomaly, or is this idea of being completely against any sort of normative prayer something that evolved within our faith over time?

This is the post that I did not want to write.  Like the man who tells us not to think of elephants, I didn’t think there was any way that I could clearly articulate my position without producing the exact opposite of the intended response.  However, my recent post about the two competing moral theories which logically entail one another has unexpectedly given me a tool by which I might avoid the Scylla of silence without be caught in the Charybdis of contradiction.  We’ll see how this goes…

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I will get back to my “Paradigms Lost” series soon enough, but in the mean time I thought I’d share some thoughts from Ken Binmore in his two volume work: Game Theory and the Social Contract:

Nothing … in the ludicrous constitution of Plato’s Republic constrains the philosopher-king and his guardians [from abusing their power].  We are asked instead to believe that their Rationality will suffice to ensure that they follow the Good.  Nowadays … we are equally afflicted with would-be philosopher-kings, who are just as sure of their own virture as Plato was of his…

Corrupt officials are often utterly unconscious of their crimes against the social contract, but they undermine the social contract nevertheless.  We are only too ready to deceive ourselves with stories about why the insider groups to which we belong are entitled to regulate their affairs according to more relaxed versions of the rules than we think should bind outsiders…

But even saintly leaders are human.  Given long enough in power, they finally learn to tell themselves stories which allow them to respond to their incentives, while still remaining convinced of their dedication to the public interest.  (Vol. 2: 273,236)

Binmore meant these thoughts to be applied within the realm of politics and the rules of law.  I, however, hoped that we could make it a little more personal by applying it to epistemology and the rules of belief.  In particular, there are certain rules of belief which none of us dare break outright and openly.  We don’t want to flagrantly contradict well-established evidence or be caught believing “A” and “not-A” at the same time.  We also tend to not make a habit of kicking against the pricks of common knowledge or well-motivated faith.

On the other hand, given enough motivation and time, I suspect that even the most hard-nosed of rationalists/scientists/philosophers will eventually find a way to think themselves to the beliefs that they so badly long to have.  And this, in turn, fills me with hope.

In going through N.T. Wright’s Simply Jesus, I was quite interested in his discussion of the two currently competing myths of Jesus. Wright defines myth as a story which we hold to be true or historical which defines our beliefs, values, decisions and character. The stories he noted which were currently in competition were the one from the atheist view that Jesus was not the son of God, and therefore the stories about him are not true, but fiction, and possibly no person named Jesus ever existed, and the one from the theist perspective, where Jesus existed and was the son of God, and so on. Both stories, of course, can be broken up into multiple different versions of the story themselves, with Wright noting the two versions in contention today, that of the “liberal atheist” and the “conservative fundamentalist” have one striking thing in common, which is that they have little to do with the man represented by the current scriptural/historical record. (more…)