The presence of extra elements doesn't inhibit reading the character within the GAEL system because each line or dash of a character, in the grammatical schema of the GAEL's strange language, is an independent signifier building on a base character. The "grammar" of the GAEL focuses on each character having multiple "degrees" of meaning, each building on the one prior, the transition from one degree to another indicated by adding marks to the base character. Each character was a semantic matryoshka doll - a core indicated by the base character, with additional semantic content added with each mark until one symbol can equal paragraphs. So the presence of extra elements doesn't at all impact the identification of a base character.
That was the bit about mummy unwrapping parties, wasn't it? Michael Chandler, antiquities dealer and mummy salesman, brought them to Joseph Smith for translation.
This seems basically normal. I've got a pot sherd from Mesopotamia (I think?) sitting around somewhere. "How did this questionable sherd get from the middle east to Australia?" Well, my dad was working on archaeological digs over there in the 80s and one dig had crates of unwanted pot sherds. Since it was the 80s, they let anyone on the site take some home.
The boxes of rocks covered with money thing is likely untrue - a later invention, popularized by Fawn Brodie. It's also pretty unclear what went on between Jane Law and Joseph Smith, sources either don't exist or are unclear. But it's clear that contemporaneous folks were upset, both about the failure of the KSS and about the implementation of polygamy!
My reading of Kinderhook Plates is that Joseph Smith tried to pattern-match one symbol from the GAEL and then moved on, and didn't pay them much attention afterwards, which is interesting - why was he purely in intellectual/secular mode there, in contrast to the very mystical translation process of the Book of Mormon?
In fact - the Book of Mormon translation process is the most interesting comparison to the production of the Book of Abraham that exists, and this review almost completely glosses over it. How does Joseph Smith go from producing hundreds of pages in a few dozen days to laboring over the GAEL and the Bible "translation" for much longer? The Book of Mormon is a much harder project to wrap your arms around as an outsider, I suppose.
I agree that this review doesn't seem particularly interested in covering its material with any real depth. The generated image also smacked of pop science. If I hadn't read several of the other finalists already, I'd be seriously concerned about the quality of contestants this year.
You know there's a lot of us here that maybe not on your forum but low brow weak-minded unwashed masses that have divergent minds that think in a similar pattern to the top to bottom thinker and like a quark jumping helixes when you refuse to keep your mind open that your theory might be wrong and you should question all theories and fully test them you are no longer a scientist that is true to the science or a reviewer that is true to the review even if you don't read if you just skim like I do because I can't follow along with the Mormons I'm sorry they kicked me out because I drink coffee and smoke cigarettes that wasn't even in the f****** s*** that was Joseph's wife and excuse my French I've got a sailor's mouth Joseph Smith was one of those that Jesus talked about false prophets they do miracles you want to say everybody wants to say it's in times I want to look at the lineage of the Kings that's so important why Jesus didn't walk with them no I could write a book but the last time I showed any of my book that I'm writing to make a type of graphic art novel short story like the elfquest comics used to be but a little thinner than their big book like about 10 pages of writing and 10 pages of pictures but when you don't open your mind to all possibilities because nothing is impossible only highly improbable you shut off the improvement you shut off me back and forth discussion you shut off the ability to evolve because you stay stagnant to your ego now I failed every math class I ever took but I know damn well the Fibonacci sequence is highly flawed you've got no Dark matter numbers no Dark energy numbers how the f*** you breathing out only all at once just like the other theory of over imploding how the f*** you breathe in all the time you can't the universe is freaking a breathing entity it contracts and expands just like every other piece of life in this 3D realm if you can visualize it and measure it and everything in some manner even if it's only one then it's there and it already has its blueprint you don't get the image it on there okay you don't get to say to the cork or any of the other stuff it's not that until I look at it that's stupid and dumb and ridiculous we are all given a blueprint and then the free will to do what we want if you can't handle neurodivergent thinking that might bring in new ideas even if it seems pop logic to you you might be wrong hell for how long did we think the Earth was flat and the sun revolved around us if you want something sooner back when I was growing up they told us eggs coffee and chocolate were bad for you all the time and high cholesterol was bad for you and now look at the studies no you don't want cholesterol off the charts but if you're a genetic family has a propensity for certain things and you know that your mother has a propensity for the same thing you do and she lived until she was 90 and you didn't do a damn thing to change your lifestyle which was high cholesterol COPD my sister however the age of somewhere in between 50 and 55 did everything the doctor said she was dead before she even reached 70 my brother he stopped doing everything except for smoking weed and he was like 62 and could not walk across the kitchen to the sink from the table without an inhaler because he wouldn't go to the hospital because it was covid and if he'd gone there they would have incubated him and he would have died because he wouldn't need incubation he just needed oxygen but it would have been labeled this is covid and we all know it and you all of the verified peer study reviewed all of that b******* critics of AAA status you guys are pandering to a crowd that doesn't exist we live maybe other people exist but even in our rugged lives of trying to keep everything balanced completely straight not a house low income housing no I'm never heard by people because they don't want to hear about my theories because I never graduated just they don't want to hear my theories about faith believe me I have asked many preachers and they look at me like I'm stupid question then how is that truth what is fantasy in this realm to you might not truly be fantasy it was fantasy to believe that man would fly remember it's one thing to review and give constructive criticism or at least to the best of your ability respect the person for sharing what they wrote this is why I won't write my book because you all one will ignore it because it's not peer-reviewed or triple A and they definitely don't want to hear about the Fibonacci not adding up from the last two and they definitely don't want to add that to the fact that they do not know what happens past the golden ratio it doesn't stop okay and it has different you don't you breathe in you breathe out you don't know he's breathe and breathe out the same it's not always only this one pattern same with the mandelbrot every single living thing has its own blueprint and that's what the mandelbrot is we are but insignificant in the cosmos as far as species go what are we like still in the womb and we think we know everything and we think that nothing that we think might be fantasy could ever be true that's a shame such closed mind
This is unreadable. You need to learn how to use periods to separate your thoughts when you write if you want anyone to engage with you or read what you wrote.
You have no excuse for not knowing how to start and end a sentence and use proper punctuation at whatever age you are. It is not hard to learn. Everyone else here can do it, and there is a reason why we do.
Bingo, white spacing too. I'm pretty sure regardless what age you (OP) are, or modern culture, they start to teach grammar at nearly the same time as spelling. I get writing was different in the 11th Century where paper was a premium, this isn't then.
I live in Europe and my closest connection with Mormons is reading Twain's Roughing It (he hated mormons) so I enjoyed reading this. I don't see you or David say anything particular that's wrong.
Funny enough, that is also my closest connection to the Mormons. I've got a tattoo of the blue jay from Baker's Blue Jay Yarn on my forearm, going to drop another acorn into the hole.
I have a top-level comment below where I explain more.
I've now read it and I can't disagree but religious history is just one of my favorite things and I don't really care if it's a bit sloppy. Just feed me the slop!
I don't really follow this comment. There seems a lot of depth on the book of Abraham here, which is the reviewer's subject. We can see that a lot of work has been put in to show how symbols and images match between these facsimiles and other Egyptian art, and to explore the arguments and counter arguments for what's going on.
David's right to say that the translation of the Book of Mormon isn't much covered, but I think a reviewer couldn't determine whether the Book of Mormon was accurately translated or not, since the golden plates are gone, and has instead stuck to lines of argument where there is evidence.
But he does do a lot of digression into the overall early history of the movement and of Joseph Smith's life. And he talks about Kinderhook Plates as a relevant comparison.
So I think it would be stronger to either:
1. Get the digressions into history and biography right (several small errors based on relying only on secondary and tertiary sources there, in contrast to his Book of Abraham sections where he does actually meaningfully engage with the primary sources)
2. Leave the digressions out and focus on the production of JUST the Book of Abraham
3. Do a proper comparison of all the times Joseph Smith produced purported scripture, which would include the Book of Abraham, the Bible "translation" (absent), the Book of Mormon (translation/production process completely glossed), and Kinderhook plates (present)
On the topic of the boxes, I feel a lot of the intermissions are lacking in quality. I believe quite a bit was drawn from Early Mormonism and the Magical Worldview, which relied quite heavily on interviews from locals (the affidavits in Mormonism Unveiled) decades after the fact and once people had much to gain by claiming whatever would hurt Joseph's reputation the most. While we do have much more on Joseph than we do Moses, most people weren't keeping daily journals and lots of information we have about Joseph was from far after when events actually occurred.
Well he doesn't cover the competing church versions of BoM translation, nor the theories that he copied key ideas from existing literature and stories of the time.
Smith bounced between something like linguistics and inspired translation.
He had his entire childhood and teenagerhood and young manhood thinking up the stories of the BoM, that stuff had stewed and swirled in his mind his whole life. The follow-ups had not.
Funny to compare the attitudes of the Mormons who see this evidence and still believe, versus Scott´s position in the latest Fatima-post: "If you witness a miracle, you must convert".
This isn't a favorable comparison; both are wrong. The Mormons, because "con artist lies for power" is a simpler explanation than "the chosen representative of an omni(potent/scient/benevolent) being endorses forgeries and mistranslates so thoroughly as to not be translation at all". Scott, because seeing something you don't have an explanation for, just means you saw something you don't have an explanation for, and *doesn't* give you permission to endorse the first crazy unfalsifiable story someone hands you. If you apply Scott's Fatima-post epistemology to David Blaine, you'd be immediately forced to believe in magic; after all, you saw something crazy you can't explain, and therefore you must buy the first explanation handed to you. Thank goodness he has a level-headed wife, a helpful readership, and the genetics to not see the visual effects. Otherwise, his epistemology in this area would have turned him Catholic.
I'm doubtful. If Scott saw the sun start spinning, I'm fairly confident that he would seek more information and try to investigate more thoroughly. But if one has become convinced, after investigation, that a miracle has occurred, you are obligated to believe in the miracle. What other alternative is there?
When you say "believe in the miracle", you're combining two things that need to be cleanly separated. The first is, "I had a wild perceptual experience". Yes, you should definitely accept this.
The second is, "I saw a magical suspension of the laws of nature, which is explained by <metaphysical story>". Stop right there, huge mistake, you are obligated to *refrain* from accepting this, if you want to be rational.
People see wild stuff, for which they have no explanation, all the time. Uncontacted tribes see airplanes overhead. Our ancestors saw the sun. Normies see David Blaine do street magic. The right thing to do when this happens is to admit ignorance *and* resist the temptation to accept bad explanations, just because they're "explanations". Admitted ignorance is far better than false knowledge. When you get so uncomfortable with ignorance that you accept the first thing someone hands you, you end up joining a cargo cult, or believing the sun is a giant chariot of fire, or thinking David Blaine has superpowers, or that the Virgin Mary makes weird shapes in the sky.
If you go on to investigate what you saw, and still can't figure it out, you *still* don't have permission to accept "miracle" as an explanation. For example - no amount of investigation would have allowed medieval philosophers to figure out that the sun is a giant ball of gas undergoing nuclear fusion. Pivoting from frustration to "therefore God" was still the wrong answer; the right answer is "dunno yet, maybe someday".
Your assertion about Scott is falsified by his whole post. He unambiguously says his proclivity to accept miracles is so strong, that he had one of the most serious arguments of his entire marriage about it. This piece makes very clear that his wife, his readership, and his visual-phenomena-resistant genetics, are all that saved him from bad epistemology converting him to Catholicism.
I disagree. Belief can never rise to the level of 100% certainty, yet life requires that we believe something. When in doubt (as we always are) one must accept the preponderance of the evidence as being most probably correct, even if that level of certainty is not very high.
When I used to teach psychology, I would a demonstration that went this way: I would show them a chair, and ask them to help me test the hypothesis that there really was a chair there. They would have a lot of fun having me stand on the chair, drop the chair, strike the chair with something, etc. Yet every time the chair passed these tests, I would explain to them that there was always an alternative explanation: we might be having a mass hallucination, the chair and I might both be a hologram, etc. "Can we ever be 100% certain that there is a chair here?" No, we can't. But most of the evidence supports the conclusion that there is one, so we accept that.
Admittedly, I've never heard of a "miracle" that met this level of skepticism, but if I ever find myself in the presence of a being that could snap it's fingers and change the universe around me, while claiming to be God, I think I would probably accept the preponderance of that evidence. I think you probably would too.
Your epistemology still fails the David Blaine test. Meaning: if I parachute David Blaine into a tribal village in the Amazon, and the villagers follow your epistemology, then, they end up believing David Blaine is truly supernatural. After all, he meets all the criteria: he's doing crazy inexplicable things and he's claiming superpowers, and so therefore, preponderance of the evidence, he must have them. Rationality is systematized winning, but you're describing systematized losing.
That might be the best conclusion they can come to, given the evidence they have. Note that incorrect conclusions are sometimes the best one can come to, while keeping an open mind, of course. I take as given that enquiry is never fully completed.
I think there's a degree to which this is reasonable, but we also have to acknowledge that not all "miracles" provide similar levels of evidence, and we're not always working against similarly heavy priors.
I don't think that the Fatima miracle was ever a hugely persuasive miracle, because if the whole belief structure of Catholicism is true, it doesn't particularly predict that this is the sort of thing we ought to expect to happen. Like, one of the best documented and attested to miracles of all time is that... the Virgin Mary supposedly appeared to some children to tell them to expect some sort of sign, they gather a bunch of people, and then... they saw the sun do a bunch of weird stuff? What about answering prayers? What about helping people who're suffering? What about the sorts of miracles written about in the Bible, or stories of early saints, which would not only be really impressive if well attested to, they actually appeared to serve functional purposes?
If you actually saw God personally part the heavens and deliver a coherent message to you in all his divine glory, I think that would be much, much stronger evidence for a particular religious framework... but you'd still have to weigh the possibility that you've gone crazy and started hallucinating, which does seem to be something that happens at a not-insignificant rate.
If you not only saw a dramatic, coherent and apparently purposeful miracle, but a bunch of other people saw it together with you, and you had mutual acknowledgement that you'd all seen the same thing, that would be much stronger evidence still. You could be hallucinating the other people affirming that they saw the same miracle, but those sorts of coherent social hallucinations seem to be much, much rarer.
If you see a dramatic, coherent, purposeful miracle, together with a group of people, who discuss it publicly, and the fact that this is something that a group of people experienced together is widely discussed and reported on, so you receive recurring confirmation that this is something that actually happened, that would be even stronger evidence.
Personally, if I saw a dramatic, coherent, apparently purposeful miracle together with a group of people who could confirm that they'd have the same experience, I'd probably feel obligated to operate on the assumption that it had actually happened, and had some sort of explanation outside the framework of belief I previously held. It's possible I could have experienced some sort of psychotic break, but at a certain point, you have to trust the data you have to work with. But if it were a purely private revelation, and I didn't didn't get additional confirmation that it had happened... hypothetically, it could just hjiack my belief structures with divine power or persuasiveness or something, but if I still had command of my usual reasoning faculties, I'd probably suspect I'd hallucinated it.
" For example - no amount of investigation would have allowed medieval philosophers to figure out that the sun is a giant ball of gas undergoing nuclear fusion. Pivoting from frustration to "therefore God""
When did any medieval philosopher pivot to "therefore God" to explain the sun?
That requires a dogmatic certainty in the lack of the supernatural. You are free to be thus dogmatic, but to lay it down as a requirement would require evidence.
To say that everything that has been investigated properly has a naturalistic explanation only works if you have a definition of "investigated properly" that is not overtly, or covertly, "found a naturalistic explanation for."
If you don't know about plasma, St. Elmo's fire is supernatural. If you don't know you live in a simulation, a glitch in the Matrix is supernatural. How is "supernatural" different from "natural" fundamentally? We either believe we theoretically can make sense of the world and predict things about it (maybe not right away, maybe when we know more or become smarter) or not. The mistake is believing some fraud who proposes an unverifiable unfalsifiable theory, whether it sounds supernaturally or sciency.
Edit: They might happen to be right, but you can generate any of infinite alternatives yourself. The main evidence for the frauds' ones boils down to "they were very successful frauds".
You are correct - technically speaking no pre-enlightenment civilization ever believed in something they self-identified as "super-natural." The will of God (or the gods) was simply how they thought the universe worked. Nature only worked the way it did because some numinous entity willed it so. That was the world view they had available to them by which they could interpret phenomena.
And that method of inquiry wasn't entirely wrong - after all it eventually led to ours.
If I set a block of concrete on a dinner plate, that's not a meal, even if it's in the spot where meals go. Meals require something edible, that's what "meal" means.
Similarly, "explanations" require integrations with, and connections to, existing knowledge. That's why "just because" isn't an explanation, and neither is "because flurb", if "flurb" isn't a well-understood concept.
The supernatural is not a domain of existing knowledge to connect to. Instead, the supernatural is a confusing morass of the unknown and the unintelligible, not just de facto, but inherently, definitionally, permanently. Otherwise, we wouldn't call it supernatural, we'd call it the unknown-natural.
Supernatural explanations are thus no explanations at all. They're unfalsifiable, thought-terminating cliches sitting where explanations should go, like the block of concrete on a dinner plate.
Why on earth would we accept your description of it as "a confusing morass of the unknown and the unintelligible, inherently, definitionally, permanently"? Do you have any evidence of this assertion?
"The supernatural is not a domain of existing knowledge to connect to."
That depends on what you are referring to. I can imagine a person not having a systematic reason for believing something, that that doesn't include religious systems of belief. You may have reasons to conclude that they are wrong, but believing in the miraculous visitation of the Virgin Mary is anything but an unintelligible morass of confusion.
They have a model of what is happening, you just think their model is wrong.
tracing, being a former latter-day saint, would probably not have made the mistake of saying "Israelites who had voyaged to the US in 600 B.C using something resembling a wooden submarine" which is conflating the jaredite (non-israelite) migration with the lehite (israelite) migration.
while possible, it's unlikely that anyone who was raised in the faith would have made this mistake.
there are a high number of tells this is from someone not raised in the faith, not just this one (the repeated characterization of the BoM as an “Egyptian document” without really qualifying what they mean by that, saying Mormon “wrote” instead of “abridged and compiled” the history, etc)
This was the first thing that stuck out to me during the review—anyone familiar with the plot of the Book of Mormon would recognize those are two completely different parts of the book.
Honestly that’s a good point, I think you’re right. I felt like there were some mischaracterizations of the Book of Mormon and so on, but skimmed past them to get to the book of Abraham parts. No way Trace would mix up the Jaredites with Lehi’s family
Interested read sans "Compared with other versions of Christianity", Mormonism isn't a version of Christianity hence it's not apt comparison. Mormonism is a Abrahamic religion, a peer of Christianity if you like, not a branch. No one believes Mormons to be Christians but Mormons, they are the trans of women's sports.
Mormon's self-identify as Christian. I'm an ex-Mormon and I still think Mormons are Christian. Pew, Gallup, and the General Social Survey all classify Mormons under the Christian umbrella. Britannica and most encyclopedias describe the LDS Church as a Christian restorationist denomination. The World Christian Encyclopedia counts Latter-day Saints within Christianity but assigns them to a "marginal" bloc along with Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Scientists, which is a technical term for groups outside the creedal mainstream.
As I said "but Mormons". You free to self identity however you want, it doesn't make it true, even if you can convince others (and the LDS has a slick and well funded PR operation).
Marla Svenja Liebich can claim he is a woman all he wants, it doesn't make it so even if German courts and Wikipedia say he is.
if you define christian as "believing in the nicene concept of jesus" which was adopted in 325 AD, then mormons aren't christian.
however if you define christian as "someone who believes and worships jesus christ as the son of god and savior of all mankind" then mormons are definitely christian.
To those of us who believe in the Nicene concept of Jesus, the "Jesus" worshipped by the LDS is equal in diety to the Jesus who works in our office in Quataro.
It's literally the same Jesus. If Jesus is one person of the trinity, then Mormons worship one person of the trinity, just like you (though they would be mistaken about some facts in this scenario).
Using the belief in the Nicene Creed as the standard for who is "Christian" seems like a bad definition. When I use the word "Buddhist", I don't have to know about specific creeds or historical councils. I just think "follower of Buddha". There's no need for me to tease apart sectarian, theological, or historical claims. That seems to make for a bad definition for a word that clearly has the same "follower of" pattern that we see in "Buddhist", "Lutheran", or "Calvinist". If someone says they are "Christian" because they are a "follower of Christ", that seems to rely on a very common sense definition of the word.
Christianity and Buddhism differ in that Christianity is a confessional faith, Buddhism is not.
The various flavors of Lutheran, Calvinist, etc all accept the historic Creeds through Nicea. Most of our embarrassing intramural bloodshed has been over astonishingly small issues.
This is fascinating. Do we accept that people can self-identify or not? If some third person objects to the self-identification, should we privilege one view over the other? As a non-Nicene Christian, I say Marla can be whoever she wants to be.
On the other hand, I recognize that I am not welcome to share, say, the Catholic communion (I stay seated).
Bingo. No one here is denying anyone has a right to self identity however they want, you can either try (and in some cases be successful) convince others, but it doesn't make it so. We can all agree tomorrow 1+1=3 and that can even become “true” in a language sense but that doesn't change the answer is “2” as the concept of “2” simply become the word "3" in that new reality while old "3" becomes something else. The concept of 2 has not changed though.
Outgroups don't get to define in-group membership as groups are a object, not a descriptor. A US Republican is a member of the Republican Party. What one politically believes is irrelevant, either you registered with them or you didn't hence, that's objective fact. You can love socialism, hate America, and voted for Obama but still be a Republican.
Some words refer to concepts with precise, technical requirements. "citizen" is generally understood to be one of those in most cases. Contrast that with a word like "bibliophile". There's not precise definition for which books one must like or how often one must read in order to qualify as a bibliophile. So if someone tells you that they like books, they certainly could be lying, but at a practical level, there is a certain level of self-ID involved. There's no agreed upon body to decide that sci-fi lovers, for example, do not qualify as bibliophiles because its genre fiction. And if some body did exist that made such a decision, it would still feel like an oddly arbitrary carve-out to exclude sci-fi books. The root and suffix of the word immediately suggest a meaning without any reference to sci-fi carve-outs. A definition for "bibliophile" with sci-fi carve-outs seems worse than the existing meaning for this reason.
The contention is that Merriam Webster's definition of "Christian" as "one who professes belief in the teachings of Jesus Christ" is a good definition and is more like "bibliophile" than like "American citizen" in this regard. If one claims to love books, they probably do and "bibliophile" seems reasonable. If one claims to believe in the teachings of Jesus, they probably do and "Christian" seems reasonable. No arbitrary carve-outs for sci-fi or Mormonism necessary.
No, he's just being a pedantic edgelord pretending he doesn't understand normal language when talking about large groups of people, I.e. there is no absolutism with people, not even death hence the outliers aren't worth considering in the conversation, we don't need to add disclaimers to everything when talking social issues.
Just curious—is the difference because Mormons are weird or because they deny the Trinity? Would Community of Christ count as a Christian denomination?
Declaring oneself a prophet and adding extra books to the divinely inspired canon generally demarcates a distinct Abrahamic religion from those who refuse to accept the new revelations, as Christianity to Judaism, or Islam to Christianity, or the Gnostics to Christianity.
There are complexities. Martin Luther removed several books from the Bible (the deuterocanonical books); does that mean that Catholicism and Protestantism are different religions? Also, did Judaism become a different religion each time a new book was accepted? But I feel comfortable designating the Book of Mormon and associated texts as massive enough to warrant a designation as a separate religion.
Okay, that's fair. At least from the perspective of myself in Christian spaces, we share a lot with each other and it is more of a looks like a duck, quacks like a duck sort of thing. Judaism and Christianity differ in their view of the Levitical laws, which significantly changes how religion looks in practice, and Islam has very visible changes like daily prayer, a different day of worship, and also rejects just about all of the Bible along the way. I feel like Mormonism mostly looks the same as Christianity, except the more ritual stuff like communion practices, baptism, and our temple practices. Besides that we have dietary laws and more of a focus on works, but I would argue nothing as drastic as your other examples (though I really don't know very much about Gnosticism). Do you agree that we come off as a lot more similar than the other examples, or are there things you can only really see looking from the outside?
The rituals matter for distinguishing religions, since participating in them is a major component of praxis. (It's worth noting that Protestants started with Catholic rituals and then discarded some, rather than adding major new rituals the way Mormons have.)
And theologically, one huge difference that separates Mormons from Catholics and Orthodox and Protestants is the cosmology. Things like pre-mortal existence and "there's regular heaven and then there's superheaven in which the most special married Mormon men get to be gods of their own solar systems" are super-anathema for everyone else.
Catholics and Orthodox and Protestants form a big natural cluster. There's a long distance separating the Greek Orthodox from Unitarians or from Seventh-Day Adventists, but there's a chain of relatively short hops connecting them along the way. Mormonism has a large gap between itself and anything in that natural cluster. The gap may be shorter than that between the Catholic/Orthodox/Protestant cluster and Judaism or Islam, but it's still much larger than the largest hop size needed to make the C/O/P cluster a connected graph. I think it's more reasonable to treat it as a separate cluster.
If you disagree, it might help to name a chain of denominations that bridge the gap from the C/O/P cluster to Mormonism, with hops as short as those separating anything in the C/O/P cluster from its nearest neighbor.
(Religious disclosure: non-angry atheist, was very sincerely Catholic and very well-read in matters theological up until age 23)
Fair points. I do think that in these sorts of discussions, cosmology is overemphasized. At least from what I've seen, Mormons spend ~0 time thinking about exaltation (being a God). I personally didn't learn about it until it was offhandedly mentioned when I was a teenager because nobody really cares, which I find astonishing. It is really more of a 3 heaven system vs a heaven and hell system, which is large but not as large as superheaven Kolob.
Anyway, your point about the jump length is good. We never had the history to diverge naturally the same way Protestantism did, so we don't get to ship of Sisyphus our way into Christianity the same way Evangelicals did from the high church.
I would second your observation that Mormons don't spend that much time discussing cosmology or eternal progression and your reaction that that is pretty surprising
Just want to say I appreciate and sympathize with your religious disclosure. I'm a non-angry pagan agnostic who was very sincerely Episcopalian and well-read in matters theological up until age 34.
I don’t scorn angry atheists/agnostics. I'm just grateful my journey was not traumatic enough to require that phase, although the change hasn't been entirely easy.
I think there's a strong case to make for drawing a category for Mormonism separate from Christianity, but I don't think Gnosticism really fits into the same bucket with the others. Many scholars of early Christianity now consider "Gnosticism" to be an inappropriate label, since it seems to be more of a label that the proto-orthodox used to characterize multiple different groups with their own distinct beliefs, and not a unifying category that those different groups of believers would have identified with. But also, the people in what are now considered gnostic branches of Christianity didn't claim their own prophets or leadership figures, and seem to have claimed direct lines of apostolic succession just as the proto-orthodox, the group who became what we now know as the Catholic church, did.
Rather than being a new breakaway religious tradition from Christianity, I think they're better understood as another line of descent from the earliest seeds of the Christian movement, which was eventually outcompeted by the proto-orthodox line.
Partly the Trinity. Partly that you have to be baptized with the baptism that Christ instituted. The person baptizing you must intend to perform the baptism that Christ instituted. Mormons teach that there is no difference between it and the baptism of John.
I don't really know the difference between those two. All I could really tell you from a Mormon perspective is that baptism is a covenant where you are spiritually born again and take on the responsibilities of that. What are the differences between the baptisms of John and Christ?
I believe Mary is referring Acts 19: 1-6. The previous chapter refers to a disciple who "only knew of the baptism of John" but does not say he was re-baptized. In Acts 19, Paul asks some disciples he meets if they've received the Holy Ghost, and they don't know what he's talking about. He asked "unto what then were ye baptized?" and they answer "John's baptism". Presumably they'd just told Paul they'd been baptized, but when they weren't given the gift of the Holy Ghost (by a Priesthood holder blessing them with his hands on their heads (which is the next step ), that caused him to question their baptism. This is because the gift of the Holy Ghost is the next step, (both in the New Testament and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints). The interpretation I've heard is that they had to be re-baptized because whoever baptized them before wasn't himself a Priesthood holder, or he would've proceeded to the next step. This is the only re-baptism in the New Testament I'm aware of.
Not sure I understand the objection, but from what I gather by your comments it hinges on an idiosyncratic reading that is not at all universal among denominations. Or maybe you weren't aware that after baptizing with water, LDS perform a laying on of hands to give the Holy Ghost?
When John says the one who comes after him (Jesus) will baptize with fire, LDS take that to mean that Jesus (unlike John) will impart the gift of the Holy Ghost. The episode in Acts where believers who only received John's baptism receive the Holy Ghost under Paul's hand is taken to be about believers who received water baptism, but not laying on of hands to receive the Holy Ghost. LDS make a distinction between the priesthood necessary to perform water baptism and laying on of hands for receiving the Holy Ghost (baptism by fire) and perform both as separate ordinance one following the other.
The idiosyncratic reading is the one held by one sect, namely the Mormons, that there is no distinction between the baptism of John and that which was instituted by Christ, despite repeated statements pointing out that someone had received only the baptism of John.
Could you explain more? Maybe cite the passages you're thinking of (I assumed Acts 19, but now I'm not so sure) or confessions or statements of faith from some denomination to see if LDS actually disagree? I still suspect that you might be confused about what they believe.
Catching up on all these and I'm going to have to disagree with you on the baptism part here Mary as a differentiator, it's accepted practice is all over the place within Christianity often leading to various schisms especially within Reformed Protestantism hence people are rebaptised all the time when doing something as changing denominations, branches, or even churches in a new town, sometimes even the changing of the parish clergy sparks a rebaptism. All agree baptism is a necessary part Christianity at some level but what specific part, it's barriers to entry or access, and specific form very vastly, especially as the doctrine developed became more communal and Western Church thinkers looked to codify Jesus and deconflict seemingly inconsistencies.
But if Salt Lake tomorrow was to implement Roman Catholic baptism procedures universally to the T, they still wouldn't be Christian. It's simply a non issue.
Generally Christians think there's some core parts of Christianity that you need to agree on (e.g. divinity of Christ) and some inessentials that you can disagree on, including, sometimes paradoxically, what *exactly* you put in the "core parts you need to agree on" bucket.
The "Mormon-are-Christians" argument is basically "they believe all the core stuff, just a bunch of extra stuff, too". "Sola Fide" not "Sola Fide and no 'weird' beliefs about exoplanets". (... but even then, "Sola Fide" is a *Protestant* principle, not a universal Christian one)
The counter-argument is that the Council of Heaven stuff *does* deny core Christian stuff, especially if you consider the trinity a core belief (which most Christians do, but that itself is itself a debate), or even just the "cosubstantial with the father" phrasing found in the Nicene creed (which basically exists to try to codify what the 'minimum viable Christianity' is).
... but I think the main counter-argument is just pragmatic. "Obviously a whale is a feesh" and obviously Mormonism is different than Christianity in most of the ways that anyone cares about. You can say "it's still Christianity because it just adds 'extra stuff'", but when it starts to feel like the "extra stuff" is 90% of the religion, you start to care more about the "swims in the orshun" part than the tiny hairs or the phylogenetics.
(Ultimately, the real question that matters is whether God considers Mormon Christian and I hope that he has a different answer than I do, but it doesn't really change my answer)
Thank you, I really appreciate the answer. I think so little about how weird we seem because I can affirm the beliefs of Christian spaces (I can listen the Christian radio station or listen to a sermon with friends) but it probably doesn't go as easily the other way. Also, I really appreciate your sidenote about God's view. The stakes sure make me uncomfortable!
Even disregarding the cosmology, what gets to me about Mormonism is the addition of works to faith. I guess I'm outing myself as a Protestant, too. I just don't like how Mormonism cheapens grace by claiming that humans can make progress towards God on their own. That's a different Gospel! (in my view). But we all know God imperfectly, and if a Mormon claimed to believe that their whole faith rested in Christ and His salvation, then I might consider that person a Christian. But not the Latter-Day-Saints, generally. I wish more Mormons would come to understand the differences between their religion and the Christian faith, so that they would be less comfortable in Christian churches. The Christ the Christians preach is a real challenge to Mormons, I think, if only the Mormons could appreciate the difference!
IMHO, over-emphasis on grace cheapens the need to actually follow Christ's teachings ("Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven..."). But I understand the concern. We (practicing Mormon here) do believe that everything depends on Christ, and without Him, nothing we could do would save us.
You'd know more about being Mormon than I do, of course, so I am willing to accept what you've said about what you believe. However, I've got to say that I believe that most of "following Christ's teachings" boils down to revealing the freedom of the Gospel to as many people are able to hear and believe it. Live your life knowing that Christ is unshakeable, and you will do good because of the truth that is in you. Furthermore, one ought to be able to rest assured in salvation by not thinking that he/she can add anything to it. Remember the verses following the one you referenced: "Have we not... done many wonderful works?" To these, Christ says "Depart from me, ye that work iniquity."
There's probably more to be said, and I've appetite to discuss, but I won't push you into it. I respect any who try to do good. Lord knows we need them. I dispute the assertion that emphasizing grace cheapens the need to follow Christ's teachings, because Christ's teaching, and example, is about grace. He went to the cross so that we could be forgiven, so that our shame would be His and His glory would be ours. Real, specific acts of good are released when we are freed from our terror at having done evil.
I don't think I have a perfect understanding of things, by any means. But here I am, and you are. Glad to share a planet with you, in the meantime.
The vast majority of the time, this definition is perfectly fine for anyone and everyone who calls themselves Christian. It's only those who don't like Mormons that use a different definition, and then only when they are talking about Mormons. I could have a little more respect for a sect which has a very specific definition of Christianity, and is upfront and consistent with that definition whenever they use the term. We members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints freely call other denominations that believe Christ is the savior of the world "Christian". While I'm not denying our church disagrees with most other churchs on certain major theological points, what we DO have in common with most other churchs should be enough to make us allies on matters such as promoting family values, preserving religious freedom, etc.
Except it leaves out what, exactly, are the teachings of Jesus Christ. There's plenty of room for contention there.
(One also notes that Merriam-Webster was caught, red-handed, changing a definition for obviously partisan purposes, so can not be treated a neutral authority.)
Islam, which no one today considers to be Christian, was considered by Christians to be a heretical form of Christianity in the middle ages rather than a distinct Abrahamic religion.
Actually, I think there are many parallels and similarities between Mormonism and Islam.
That's a debunk myth, it was debated early and quickly discarded by the Church. That said in more modern times scholarship has started to wonder if Islam came out Muhammad's exposure to Christian Jews (non-Nicene) after the Roman exile after the Jewish Rebellion in the First Century , i.e. Pharisees that converted.
It is certainly not a myth! It is well-documented that Christians considered Islam a Heresy that grew out of Arianism.
This view may not have been universal and the nature of Islam was debated, but it is very far from a myth. It is similar to the way people here are arguing whether Mormonism is or is not a form of Christianity.
As to how Islam arose and its relation to Christianity - I find interesting the argument in a modern book, controversial obviously, "the hidden origins of Islam", arguing Islam is based on some Syrian Christian liturgical texts that were distorted through misunderstanding or translation.
The mainstream version of Christianity these days is "moralistic therapeutic deism" - I'm pretty sure that Mormonism hews closer to orthodoxy than that.
It is futile to argue about what counts as being Christian or not. There is no important difference between calling a Bible-influenced religion that centers on Jesus Christ "heretical Christians" or "non-Christians who have large overlap in theology with Christians."
This is one of the few I didn't read on the website. Boy does it need some proofreading. Missing or incorrect punctuation, awkward sentence fragments.
Also, a lot of tension between "Mormonism is a recent faith with lots of great documentation, and I'm very interested in this early history because I think they tapped some very effective techniques for creating and managing organizations with a common goal" and "I don't know what their early sales pitch was, but it must've been good!"
Combined with the informal tone, the whole thing just grates because it feels breezy and surface-level. The author brings up so many sub-topics without seriously engaging with them--just a quick "Well, I don't know, but isn't this neato!"--and it wouldve been far better to have removed those sections altogether. As-is, they come across as filler, and the whole thing starts to feel like it belongs on BuzzFeed.
What a strange question/accusation to make. My only stake is that I've been a member of this community for some time and I enjoy reading high-quality, well-researched posts, and this review did not meet those criteria for me.
Also, having read through the comments which have come in since I made mine, I see that I am far from the only one. Others have even pointed out mistakes of varying importance in the review, indicating an author not well-versed on the subject matter. The ones I've seen here regard things like the bit about the submarine in the Book of Mormon--which, again, if you're not going to be serious in your coverage of a topic, just delete that section and write about the thing you want to write about.
Completely fair criticisms, though I must admit feeling a good bit of tension reading criticisms like yours in the comments. Here's the tension
1. Real scholarship requires understanding the thing you're analyzing with such depth and commitment to accuracy that any mistake or misrepresentation should make you stop, question your conclusion, and retrace the argument from the beginning. Math proofs seem like the clearest implementation of this framework.
2. Mormon theology (as well as most other religious theology) is so incredibly dense, so incredibly massive that it would take a 1000 people-lifetimes to grasp it all. This creates a pattern where somebody trying to honestly and intellectually engage with the topic always runs into a technicality or mistake that is used to dismiss the whole framework. "Are you fucking serious? You don't know the difference between the jaredite and lehite migrations? This entire argument is now bunk." Does it matter which theoretical ancient people we're talking about when disputing the feasibility of oceanic travel with wooden submarines with no other archeological evidence thousands of years before any other recorded oceanic travel of that scale?
At some point, as a rationalist, you have to take into account the validity of the source itself, holistically across all it's claims, because sources with no commitment to epistemic rationality will produce nonsense orders of magnitude faster than you can dispute it. If you're fighting a firehose of bullshit by trying to pick apart every water droplet, you will always lose.
Yes I'm doing a bit of conclusion-weighting by framing mormon teaching as "a firehose of bullshit." But I don't consider the difference between jaredite and lehite people to be relevant to ancient oceanic travel that has no recorded evidence elsewhere, especially when the evidence for those different people itself has no recorded evidence aside from this one source.
We're trying to see if this source itself pattern matches to external observed reality, not determine if the source itself is internally consistent. The latter is an impossible task without first doing the former.
I think you're conflating criticisms of the article with criticism of evaluating the truth claims of Mormonism. The SSC-style "take a strange topic, steelman it, and then dissect it for interesting bits even if it doesn't hold up overall" is always going to be difficult re: Mormonism.
The author has clearly done a lot of reading. I myself only bought but never quite read "Mormonism and the Magic Worldview." But we're talking about a subject where people like me were quite literally born into and have spent a lot of time studying the finer points. I try to stay in practice when I get the opportunity, like right now.
For instance, the Jaredite voyage comes after the literal Tower of Babel and involves the hand of god touching stones to make them glow such that the ancient submariners have light. (I don't know that we ever learned what happened to the stones.) The Lehite voyage involves a god-directed compass. Many pages have been written about an Atlantic vs. Pacific voyage!
So someone coming in and trying to do an interesting take on the BoA while also getting into various other things a bit helter skelter is gonna catch some criticism from us "dedicated scholar" types.
For instance, he didn't even mention the Salamander Letter. Or the lost 116 pages. No mention of editorial revisions to the BoM/BoA. No mention of the inspired biblical translation. Etc etc etc
(It would be very interesting if Scott had written on this or something similar just to see how nitpicky Mormon-obsessed folks like me would be.)
And to clarify, I'm not a Mormon, or ex-Mormon, or former Mormon, or scholar of Mormonism. My distaste is for the tone and the poorly-sourced diversions which didn't add to the point. The review felt like a first draft--and, as I've seen at least one person said they felt the need to resort to LLMs to finish "writing" their entries on time, it may very well be that what we're seeing is in fact an unpolished early draft.
> Mormon theology (as well as most other religious theology) is so incredibly dense, so incredibly massive that it would take a 1000 people-lifetimes to grasp it all.
Not really. The errors in question here could have been avoided simply by reading the Book of Mormon itself, which is about the length of a novel. It would take 1 person a couple weeks is all. There are even young men and women who volunteer their time to help people understand the theology!
I agree. I don't think that Mormon theology is incredibly dense. It has a lot of wild concepts in it, but it's a mile wide and an inch deep. If you really try to get into the mechanics of things like eternal families or the infinite regression of deities or the translation of the Book of Mormon, you will be encouraged to not worry about these things. Mormonism has a fairly strong norm against speculative theology, so most of the details are left intentionally vague, and only elaborated when absolutely necessary in an apologetic context.
well, I suppose it may seem like a bit of an accusation, but I mean the question honestly. Your reaction seemed very strange. I read the whole thing and had one take---it seems to clearly be a high-quality and well-researched article, much better than many---and then read your reply and couldn't figure out what possible internal state would lead to you saying that. Obviously one theory that comes to mind is "this person is strangely defensive about Mormonism for emotional reasons and has illogical negative reactions to things which cast it in a negative light". Another theory that comes to mind is "this person is extremely pedantic and thinks a few grammatical or factual errors should invalidate a whole essay", which I also can't understand. Rather than assuming either of these things I figured I'd just ask. I'm open to other explanations, but I am confused.
In many ways the article was a good overview of some of the biggest problems in Mormonism, but I shared the view that it contained a number of errors or mischaracterizations. I don't think they invalidate the essay per se, but I do think that the author misunderstands the Mormon mindset about a lot of these things, which is a fairly major criticism. I'm leaving another root-level comment laying this out.
I, too, felt it was an easy and interesting read—one of my favorites, in fact, out of the past few review-contests.
It might be relevant that the reactions given above very much match my own initial reaction, *as I was reading*—"we keep coming to this or that interesting tidbit, and then breezing on past! where's the analysis? what gives?!"—but not at all my *final* evaluation: I think the author ended up doing a pretty good job of returning to most of those breezed-past points. Makes me wonder if perhaps the above commenters skimmed or skipped the latter portions of the review (...although it could *also* be, of course, that they simply didn't like it as much as did I!).
Even with the most clever twist in the world, my response still would have been "okay, but I had to slog through the first two thirds to get to the good part".
Chopin's Fantasie Impromptu returns to the same theme a few times in different contexts, and it's a great effect--but, notably, the piece is pleasant to listen to from beginning to end. "Dissonant screeching which eventually resolves into consonance" sounds like an interesting concept, but my patience for it in practice caps out at the duration of the THX "Deep Note" trademark sound effect.
I thought this was far too harsh a reaction but there were plenty of typos and some jarring asides that took me out of the reading. Overall I thought it was fairly well-done although I had one slightly more major quibble (neutral scholarship seems to show that Smith sealed himself to many women, but it doesn't appear he had any sexual relationship with at least the majority of those women, contra what is implied in this essay).
That seems, to me, sort of implausible—at least, *prima facie;* I haven't actually looked it up (my interest in Smith is, at best, rather mild). I mean, for what purpose the "sealing" in the first place?
One might become yet more (unjustly?) suspicious upon noticing that the making of such claims—it's all just for deeply significant spiritual purposes; totally non-sexual, really; in fact, come to think of it, maybe *you're* the pervert for suspecting otherwise!—is actually a pretty common defense, for the ol' Illicit Harem™...
...but said defense doesn't always seem to convince, as certain Tibetan gurus* (most notoriously: Trungpa) and a more-recent Mormon polygamist (Bateman) have learned to their innocent (yet righteous) dismay.
One of the arguments in that discussion is that Joseph Smith doesn't appear to have fathered any children except with his first wife Emma. I'm not a Mormon scholar so I can't comment beyond that - that was just one argument that I heard while I was actively practicing.
The LDS church after the death of Joseph Smith definitely practiced polygamy that included sexual relationships.
He definitely had sexual relations outside of his first wife, but he also definitely didn’t have any relationship with the majority of the “wives” he was sealed to — in fact, some of them he never met in person.
I took a lot of the ”isn’t this neat-o” stuff as a rhetorical flourish, very on-the-nose skimming past obvious absurdities here and there ahead of the twist and conclusion
Only read Part 1 so far, so sorry if this comment fails to account for later context. I'm a Christian (not a Mormon) and wanted to pause my read and provide another perspective on faith. I actually do not like the word. In the NT, the Greek word pistis is often translated as faith or belief, but a lot of Christians, including myself, feel that a better translation would often be "trust" or sometimes "faithfulness". I see the concept as more about allegiance and action. Tied to credence of course, but not as directly.
For example, imagine you are in prison and a guard says he can break you out if you meet him at midnight. If you decide to go to the meeting, you are putting your trust in the guard, regardless of your credence that he will come through. Trust is a choice.
Re the meanings of "belief": This is a distinction I first came across in Iain McGilchrist's "The Master and his Emissary", and it is pivotal to understanding what people of faith actually mean by the word.
There is "belief" in the Pythagorean Theorem, which is a weighing of the structured arguments and evidence. In principle, anyone with the same information and the formal tools to process it would "believe" the same thing. Disbelief here is just logically incoherent.
There is also "belief" in your child's inherent goodness. Here, "I believe in you" does not mean "I acknowledge that the evidence for your existence is irrefutable"! The word is used to connote personal connection, unconditional support, advocacy, and love.
The slippage between the two meanings has caused great harm in both directions, from the emotional nihilism of atheism to the pseudoscience of creationists.
Do you think religion/Christianity makes any factual claims at all, then?
When I hear Christians say things like "I believe Jesus rose from the dead", they certainly seem to be expressing a belief in a factual claim - one that could be proved or disproved in theory, even if the evidence for or against it was never written down or has disappeared over the last 2000 years. When a Mormon says "I believe Joseph Smith translated the Book of Abraham by the power of God", that seems to be the same sort of factual claim, and that claim is false if they actually mean translation in the sense of writing down the meaning of the text in another language.
Of course Christians do say things like "I trust God's promises", which sound more like the kind of thing you're referring to. But for many of those people, that trust seems to be strongly intertwined with belief/faith in the factual claims, even if they aren't the same thing.
I took him to be making the opposite claim you do. Not that the factual claims are unimportant, but that the charge to have faith *doesn't free us from evaluating the claims truthfulness* contra frequent mischaracterizations of the term as "belief without evidence" or such stillness.
Would "trust without evidence" be a more accurate characterization? That is, would the message be that even after evaluating the claims' truthfulness, you still have the obligation to trust regardless of what your conclusions were?
For me the evidence seems lacking, and I therefore doesn't believe the factual claims. I frequently hear Christians claim that faith is a good thing, even a moral imperative. I don't trust the promises of a god who I think doesn't exist (at least not the God with as many details as Christians tend to claim, e.g. all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly loving, cares about humans in particular, etc.). When someone tells me to trust that God, it certainly sounds like they're telling me to trust without evidence.
No, certainly not. The writers of the New Testament wrote to convince people by giving evidence and reasoning. Given that God has done X (created the world, provided for you, redeemed you by his Son) then you should trust in Him, that is, believe that He will do what He said and that you should follow Him.
Evidence doesn't mean proof, though. Do you have the same level of evidence for God, in general or in particular, that you have of gravity? Definitely not. There is a gap between evidence and certainty. How big one thinks that gap is depends on how they weight evidence. But there's times in life where one has to act beyond the level of certainty they feel. For example, marrying someone, you cannot foreknow their entire life history. Committing to anyone is an act of faith. But committing to someone when the evidence shows they are unlikely to deserve it is different from merely acting on incomplete evidence.
Fair enough. I was certainly taught growing up that trusting in God was a moral imperative. If two people analyzed the same evidence and came to different conclusions about whether they should trust God, then the person who chose to trust God was always portrayed as the good one making the right choice, and the person who decided not to trust God was portrayed as the bad one making the wrong choice. In the latter case, reactions to that choice from my household/community members/church leaders could be anything from sadness to mockery to complete rejection, but always negative - it was never considered acceptable. Choosing not to marry someone was fine, choosing to trust God was mandatory.
Of course that is a description of the people and leaders I grew up with (who were LDS), not a comment on Christians or Christianity in general.
To be clear, my position is that you should indeed trust God because He deserves it and there is evidence for it, and not doing so may be a moral failing if it is because of motivated reasoning or not taking the matter seriously rather than someone convincingly deceiving you.
I think that people who say "Faith is believing without evidence" are doing you a disservice by implying there is no evidence. But I won't pretend the evidence is undeniable proof.
(This is me speaking on my own and may not reflect on the doctrine of any particular church)
From my perspective as an atheist, it's more like choosing to go to the laundry room at night based on the rumor that a prisoner in another jail many years ago heard it from someone else that there's a certain man who works as a prison guard by day, but dresses up like Batman at night to shimmy down laundry chutes so that he can break prisoners out at midnight, and by the way he can also move faster than the Flash.
Interesting that this should be the first book review posted, when I'm currently in the middle of a weeks-long deep dive into Mormon history and theology.
There's one premise in here that I'd push back on a bit: the notion that Mormonism, even if not true, acts as a particularly effective organizing system for a highly functional, high-trust society. The data does suggest that Mormons are fairly exceptional along various measures, but I think it's worth taking into account that the doctrines and culture of the Mormon church may, in some respects, result in its membership effectively gaming the system in terms of many performance metrics of welfare. Members are encouraged to present themselves as living happy, wholesome, fulfilled lives, even if those things are not the case privately, and I've heard numerous accounts from ex-Mormons describing miserable personal lives, while they did their best to keep up appearances and present themselves, explicitly as well as apparently, as being happy and fulfilled.
Mormonism's culture of "personal testimonies" of the truth of various claims also extends beyond beliefs about the doctrine of the religion itself; believers are told that the Holy Spirit will guide them in making judgments about other beliefs as well, and that when they feel warm, positive emotions in association with some claim or belief, that's the Holy Spirit telling them that it's true. Some ex-Mormon podcasters I was listening to a few days ago made what I thought was a pretty strong case that this is directly related to the fact that Utah leads the United States for cases of criminal fraud, by a margin of something like 60% over the next runner up. There are positives to Mormonism's society-building mechanisms, but I think it'd be unwise to discount the negatives.
Ex-Mormon here and I can confirm this. I really felt I had to put forward a happy front. Part of it was that I really believed, so I had to be an ambassador for how good the church was. But my (likely genetic driven) depression was just as bad when I was in as when I was out.
Also, the piece implies some causation from faith to coordination, but does not adequately explore other possible explanations for the correlation--for example, selection bias (for folks converting in), survivorship bias (for folks who haven't left yet) and even genetics (for members closely related to other members).
There is lots of very strong evidence for religious practice correlating strongly with prosocial outcomes, and that exists across denominations and faith traditions. For example, people who attend church services every week have higher self reported life satisfaction, educational achievement, and longer life expectancy than people who do not attend at all.
Yeah, those stats on "even after tithing Mormons donate more to charity" are kind of problematic in their selection of respondents, too.
Lots of "aren't Mormons great" involves mostly ignoring active vs. semiactive vs. inactive Mormons, let alone us Exmormons.
Another thing is that the primary reason Utah and the Mormon Corridor more often resembles the northeast on various social indicators, despite being a deeply red state, is because a lot of us have ancestry from New England and upstate New York, and various waves of 19th century British and Scandinavian ancestry.
Less of those rambunctious Scots-Irish genes in ancestral Mormon stock.
With all due respect, if your going to evaluate a religion or community, it makes sense to focus more on the actual participants, and less on the "less-actives" or the ones who left. I'm active Mormon, raised in an active family, and I never experienced, nor observed, the kind of abuse or extremism that is often laid at the door of, not just Mormons, but conservative Christianity in general. I'm not denying that it happens, but I've seen plenty of real-world proof of what the author states about how well we live.
First, it stands to bias the sample pool. People who're more active in the church may tend to be happier because active participation tends to make one more happy, but people who're more active in the church may also tend to be happier because people who're made unhappy by participating will tend to participate less. In medical research, it's well understood that when you exclude early dropouts from your treatment dataset, you'll tend to introduce a positive bias, because early dropouts will disproportionately tend to be people who the treatment wasn't working well for; the same principle likely applies with people who distance themselves from a religion.
Second, because it's liable to introduce reporting biases. I've talked to numerous people who've had extremely unhappy experiences with the Mormon church. One thing that all of them had in common is, they kept their distress close to the chest until leaving. Most said they kept their feelings entirely private, some would share their feelings exclusively with a spouse, or some extremely close confidant, like a single childhood friend they'd known for decades. The culture of high-commitment religious groups in general, and especially Mormonism in particular, tends to filter out a large proportion of all reporting of negative experiences within the group. The reporting bias also operates from the other end, with people within the group preferentially signal-boosting positive experiences.
I'm not saying the experiences of people who're active in the church should be discounted, but we shouldn't expect the reports of people who're active in the church to compose anything like a complete picture of how it shapes people's experiences.
Good points, but Occam's Machete wasn't even referring to those who might be "keeping their distress close to the chest" while still presening an image of full activity, he was referring to those who are varying degrees of openly less active. In your medical study analogy, yes you want to take the early dropouts into account but for the rest, you want to make sure they are actually following the parameters of the study.
To give another example, a common defense of gender transitions is that the majority of those who undergo it report feeling much better after going through the process. I don't even agree with with gender transitions, but it would be bad faith for me to say that all or even the majority of those who go through with it and feel great are liars, while only the de-transitioners are telling the truth.
I don't think all the people who report positive experiences with the Mormon church are lying or misrepresenting their experiences, but I think people who're active in the church are disproportionately likely to withold reporting of negative experiences. I don't think it's bad faith to acknowledge that bias in the data.
I do think there's likely a pressure for people to skew positive in their reporting of gender transition as well, and if someone drew their impression of that from "how happy do the people around me who've transitioned seem to me to be," I'd point to the same problem.
> but for the rest, you want to make sure they are actually following the parameters of the study.
The extent to which people follow protocol is very important to know! If you have a treatment that is very effective when followed precisely, but it's extremely difficult to follow precisely enough to be effective, that's something you have to account before deciding if you want to prescribe it.
Similarly, if a religion has a high drop-out rate, that's very important to know when determining if it creates successful communities, human capital, high trust, etc.
There's possibly some genetic confounding, but it seems likely that the religious/social factors have a signicant causal impact.
Anecdotally I felt some pressure to present myself as happy and keep up appearances when I was originally active in the faith, but I would almost characterize it as Mormons believing those qualities are axiomatically good... you're not just keeping up appearances because you're desperate to fit in, if that makes sense, but because it's good in and of itself.
Feel free to AMA about this if you'd like. I'm also pretty convinced that exmo communities online are uniquely toxic spaces (particularly the two subreddits) which have entirely driven out those with alternative perspectives. Everything else seems like the automatic and fundamental downside of high-trust, high-cost religious societies (vulnerability to fraud, MLMs, feeling isolated after leaving, etc).
I can't speak to whether ex-Mormon spaces tend to be particularly toxic; I've drawn on some ex-Mormon youtubers as resources when researching Mormon history and culture, but I haven't engaged with their surrounding communities, let alone any associated subreddits. I certainly wouldn't consider it implausible that they'd end up that way. But most of my exposure to ex-Mormons has come more organically, through communities with no direct connection to Mormonism, and a lot of them reported similar experiences of distress while they were active Mormons. Mormonism isn't just a high-cost, high-trust religious community, it's a high-control religious group, and people who don't conform well to its requirements often experience a lot of distress and turmoil, which they usually feel obligated to conceal.
(ETA: I appreciate the offer to ask about your own experiences, but I personally prefer to discuss people's religious experiences in more private settings, since I'm way too prone to getting sidetracked by other people's interjections into more public discussions.)
I don't have direct skin in the game bc I've never been Mormon, but I live in Utah so I a LOT of both Mormons and ex-Mormons. The thing is, the ex-Mormons are actually emotionally traumatized. And it takes them many many years, typically, to get over it. But part of the reason they're so traumatized is because they're missing something that was once so safe and happy and good-feeling for them. Most are NOT traumatized bc they experienced anything awful...what was awful was losing the emotional safety and optimism and sense of community they once had, when they stopped believing. Think of it more like getting a divorce when your marriage was NOT terrible, in fact you loved it and it fundamentally structured your entire identity and understanding of the world, how much you and your spouse loved each other and how solid and wonderful your marriage was. And then one day you come home and they've moved out and cleared everything and it's just gone. And all of your friends and family look at you weird and don't like you anymore bc they think you must have done something terrible to cause it. That seems to be more what it's like for them. They are often very angry for a long, long time. Not bc they hated it but bc they lost something they once loved.
This sounds like a fair way of putting the experiences of a lot of the ex-Mormons I've talked to. I'd add that because Mormon culture is so sticky with respect to the belief system- Mormons are constantly expected to offer personal testimonies about the truth of their religious beliefs, and socially reinforce each other's acceptance of the whole framework, it lends itself to an experience where leaving is like a divorce that your whole social circle thinks is specifically your fault.
Mormon culture has extremely high conformity pressure.
I loved growing up Mormon. Had an excellent experience.
But it’s not true and the vast majority of the claimed benefits of being a practicing Mormon are either nonsense or simply being in a tight community.
I don’t think the exmo subreddits are more toxic than the TBM ones. (My main complaint is so many exmos are moronically progressive, as is most of Reddit.)
I think the Exmo forums are just as intolerant of opposing views as any politics forum on Reddit (which is to say, very).
Don’t believe it’s just a selection effect, I think it’s a fairly straightforward causal impact of growing up in a tight prosocial community with strong norms for intracommunity support.
I was certainly one of the less happy ones, but when I consider the counterfactual of growing up outside of the church I’m extremely grateful that I did have that in my life. There was a laudable amount of ward service that contributed to keeping my mom and my family from spiraling after the divorce. I can’t find a way to be bitter or resentful in light of that.
I’m still mad my childhood ward where my parents still live was significantly reorganized a couple of times now.
It had been a continuous ward for well over a century in a historic building.
I would redo my childhood again no question, because it would be hard to improve on it. And I exited the church with minimal problems. But I know plenty of people who very much would choose a different option.
I don’t know how much I benefitted from the church itself vs. a loving family and good neighbors. My kid’s life is going to be extremely different on so many fronts. I rode my bike a mile to school in first grade.
Before the Great Awokening, I had an easier time in Exmo groups. But that’s also true of all atheist/humanist groups I was once a happy member of.
I walked 3/4 mile to school throughout elementary school and I’m grateful for that too. It was a different time, or so they say. I’d like my kids to have that same experience. I’d like them to grow up in the church as well.
> Don’t believe it’s just a selection effect, I think it’s a fairly straightforward causal impact of growing up in a tight prosocial community with strong norms for intracommunity support.
I would guess it's a result of people who identify as "ex mormon" aren't really interested in anything that comes across as "the thing that made you miserable is good actually" or seeing the same stuff they were exposed to for years and rejected.
I think any community based around being "anti" something is going to develop toxicity sooner or later, just due to selection effects + usual group dynamics + people probably not being interested in apologetics for the thing they're opposing + the result of focusing defining your group around "thing bad."
> I would guess it's a result of people who identify as "ex mormon" aren't really interested in anything that comes across as "the thing that made you miserable is good actually"
Your guess would be mostly wrong, though.
Plenty of Exmormons, myself included, can wax poetic about the great parts of being Mormon. The parts we miss. In a deep sense, I'm about as Mormon as possible, despite having lost my faith as a teenager and formally having my records removed a few years later.
In fact, the desire for community is one of the driving factors for participating in such communities. I did it a lot more in the past. I navigated my own departure, and then my wife's. Our families are still mostly active TBMs and we live in Utah.
There's also a wide range of "not explicitly orthodox Mormonism or Exmormon" environments, where you'll have Exmos and Jack Mormons and doubting Mormons and unorthodox Mormons and True Blue Mormons (with thick skin) interacting mostly peacefully. Some of that is still on reddit.
Some people leave and do entirely check out. Some people get very negative and never get over it. Some people find a way to have one foot in and one foot out indefinitely.
For me, what became most challenging was that the "woke mind virus" took over the Exmormon space in the same way it took over almost all similar spaces from ~2016 onward. I've had more fallout in my life from becoming a rightwing libertarian than I have from becoming an Exmormon. My past self would not have believed that.
Interesting, I would not have guessed most of that. My experience with exmormons is that they had much more mixed/negative-on-average experiences than what you describe, but you've probably interacted with a lot more numerically as well as a more representative sample of all people who identify as Exmo than I have (since I mostly see them coincidentally, not in exmo spaces).
"Some ex-Mormon podcasters I was listening to a few days ago made what I thought was a pretty strong case that this is directly related to the fact that Utah leads the United States for cases of criminal fraud, by a margin of something like 60% over the next runner up. There are positives to Mormonism's society-building mechanisms, but I think it'd be unwise to discount the negatives."
I immediately thought of Young Boy NBA, so I had to ChatGPT it. Long story short, Utah is especially high in white collar fraud, but lower than the national average in criminal fraud all together. And the overall response emphasized that it was more likely Utah being a high-trust society then Mormons belief in the Holy Spirit per se that would make them vulnerable.
Here is the conclusion, "My best read: there is solid evidence for LDS-targeted affinity fraud, but weak evidence for a sweeping claim that Mormons specifically commit or suffer white-collar crime at unusually high rates independent of Utah, class, business culture, reporting patterns, and social-network effects. The safest explanation is “high-trust affinity networks can be exploited,” not “Mormon theology causes fraud.”
I wouldn't contend that Mormon theology causes fraud, and the podcasters in question didn't offer that contention either. But their point, which I think had reasonable basis, was not just "high-trust affinity networks can be exploited" either.
Rather, they felt (and I share the suspicion based on my own experience) that Mormon culture tends to render people particularly gullible and vulnerable to particular types of exploitation, because Mormon culture doesn't just implicitly encode, but explicitly discusses and regularly reinforces, the belief that your emotional reactions are a reliable guide to empirical truth claims. If a person, even a person who's not a part of the trusted Mormon social network, approaches you with a business opportunity, and you get a good feeling about it, and you think "that means the Holy Spirit is guiding me to take this opportunity," you're liable to be vulnerable in a way you might not be if you're not part of a culture that regularly tells you "getting a good feeling means it's actually right and trustworthy."
I think this is a little infantilizing; in reality, most fraud or MLM schemes which successfully target LDS members come from other members of the church who are taking advantage of the high-trust norms of the community. That sucks but it also seems like a built-in feature of high-trust tightly-knit religious societies? Those who are taking advantage are simply defectors.
I think there's a perspective according to which it's infantalizing, but... spiritual testimony either works or it doesn't. If a culture teaches that spiritual evidence allows people to assess the factual truth of claims made in the material world, that's probably going to affect the ability of people in that culture to make accurate judgments, for better or for worse.
If spiritual testimony works, it'll probably tend to make people's judgments better, because they're able to draw on an additional useful source of evidence beyond what people outside that culture have to work with. If spiritual testimony doesn't work, it'll probably tend to make people's judgments worse, because they're systematically over-weighting the evidence of their own emotions. Everyone's decisions are influenced by emotional valence, but if you raise one group of people encouraging them to be cautious and recognize that just because something sounds good, doesn't mean it is good, and you need to do your due diligence in looking at the evidence, and you raise another group of people telling them that when they feel good about something, that means God is telling them that it's true, that difference is probably going to affect their decisionmaking.
I absolutely acknowledge that there are positive elements to Mormon community-building, and that Mormon doctrine may specifically relate to or directly cause some of them. But by the same token, there can perfectly well be elements of Mormon doctrine that have negative consequences on a personal or community-building level.
I think it's a lot more simple: they have people to defraud, should they want to, while most people simply do not. Your average Mormon who WANTS to take a bunch of people's money and spend it on themselves and not return it has no ability to do so. If you are Mormon there is exactly a 100% chance that you know at least 100 people and families who you can pitch to just from your local ward. And every single one of them has cousins and siblings and others to introduce you to from other wards. I think it's really just the network itself and you don't need much else. I'm not even Mormon and I've been astonished how thick and quick the business referral network can operate once you know just a few. Do work for a handful of people and eventually you have more work than you know what to do with just from referrals because they all know each other bc it's their brother's wife's brother's mission companion or whatever. The entire state is a 2 or 3 degree of separation situation among the Mormons.
> result in its membership effectively gaming the system in terms of many performance metrics of welfare. Members are encouraged to present themselves as living happy, wholesome, fulfilled lives, even if those things are not the case privately,
While not Mormon myself, I did know both Mormons and Ex-Mormons and this tracks with my perception; people for whom the system doesn't work fall off the wagon and also fall off the statistics
I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (mormon is a silly nickname that ive never liked, its almost never used positively anyway so it feels almost slur-adjacent? (EDIT: nevermind call me mormon all you want!! this endless discourse about the name is so tiresome and surface level)) who has made it through this essay and many more like it with my faith intact. And I like to fancy myself a pretty careful thinker.
You may AMA if you wish. The answers will mostly boil down to some version of: Joseph was obviously wacky and flawed and my model of the world allows for both him receiving revelations from God and also him thinking he is receiving revelations from God and mixing up the two, and the test you can apply as to which is which is what endures as headline doctrine.
The nickname “Mormon” was enthusiastically embraced by all my Mormon ancestors, going back six generations on some lines. When I was a child, I learned peppy songs with lines like “I’m a Mormon, yes I am / and if you’d like to study a Mormon I’m a living specimen”. It was therefore very odd to me when the Powers That Be decided to distance themselves from the nickname. I’m assuming you must be younger than 40 because you seem unaware of the deliberate rebranding.
Well, the deliberate rebranding was around 2018 so you don't exactly have to be 40 to remember the before-times (and I do remember the before times). But I never liked the term even then, least of all because my friends didn't understand I was a Christian and considered the Bible to be scripture. I am told repeatedly in the scriptures to take upon the name of Christ but now we're taking upon the name of some other guy named Mormon instead. I much prefer just being called Christian without distinguishing my sect
>I much prefer just being called Christian without distinguishing my sect
There are two problems with this. First, "we should get away from sects" is an old instinct, and one that keeps producing new sects instead of healing them. (Looking at you, Churches of Christ.)
Second, while I share the author of the review's admiration for the LDS church as an institution, I don't think it's unreasonable for the rest of Christianity to treat you as not part of the club. Even if we are completely neutral towards the truth claim involved, "these people treat as divine truth a bunch of stuff that these other people don't" is a big, big divide. Yes, there are some differences in canon between various branches of normal Christianity, but Book of Mormon et al is a way bigger difference than any of the fights over Apocrypha. If you're willing to own the difference, that's fine, but this kind of things is triggering epistemic alarms about infiltration.
I think you have misapprehended my motivations here. I’m ok with not being part of the creedal Christian club and I have no desire to infiltrate you or dissolve all sects. The name thing is just about signaling that my number one dog is the Christ of the New Testament that everyone knows and loves, not the Mormon of the BoM that nobody cares about
Agree that this makes sense and is a more accurate signal to outsiders (not the least because Mormon is a relatively less important character in LDS doctrine).
This is exactly my point: you are too young to remember when Mormon culture itself was happily exceptionalist. The name rebranding came along with the mainstreaming of Mormonism.
Once again, I really am not too young to remember this. I just don’t care. I have very little loyalty to the culture and branding, im my own person with my own opinions
I enjoy considering myself ethnically Mormon, so to speak, being descended from polygamists. I use LDS, am used to Mormon, and didn't mind it, but recently met someone who only new us as Mormons, not Christians, and said it with such bigotry, misunderstanding (mixed us up with various cults), and derision, that I completely understood what it meant to sound like being cult-adjacent. Perhaps Oaks will bring it back. Perhaps not. Its OK either way. I too like being a peculiar people
If the Mormons are Christians because they believe the Bible to be scripture, then the Christians are Jews because they believe the Jewish Tanakh (what they call the Old Testament) to be scripture. They've just added to it something else they consider equally canonical. So have the Mormons.
That certainly would be absurd! I believe we're Christians because we really really really like Christ and his teachings and it seems like a good appellation for people who really really really like Christ and his teachings (and I believe its a much more twisty and contrived reasoning that lets one exclude us due to some ancient creed. Call us "non-creedal Christians" if you must distinguish)
Muslims also venerate Jesus and his teachings, but I don't think it thereby follows that we should consider Muslims Christians.
I don't have any sort of hard commitment to whether Mormons should be considered Christians or not; I think there are cases to be made in either direction. But I would ask, are there any groups that self-identify as Christian, whose self-identification you'd disagree with? For instance, would you consider the Unification Church, which believes that their founder, Sun Myung Moon, is the second coming of Jesus, and also the reincarnation of Adam, to be Christian?
I don't think Muslims are Christian because they deny Christ's divinity. I am also very glad we stopped calling the Mohammedans and wish we could be so progressive about "Mormon" :P
I think on second thought the Rastas and the Unification Church are maybe better described as "Post-Christian" or something because they believe a false second coming has occurred.
If I may make an argument from authority: Wikipedia describes The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as "a Christian denomination" and the Unification church as "an Abrahamic monotheistic new religious movement". So calling ourselves Christian isn't exactly a non-mainstream view, indeed it is what the polemicists intent on excluding us believe that is non-mainstream.
This but unironically. The Jewish God came to continue his revelation in their midst, drawing deeply on previously revealed Jewish scriptures to do so, and invited them to continue to venerate him in a deeper way, now that more truth was revealed.
Some did, many did not.
Of course, using the term Jewish to refer to a Christian assembly would be misleading and so silly to do so commonly simply to make a theological point.
I think Christians and Muslims should be considered Jews. But also, Mormons are closer to non-Mormon Christians in practice than Christians are to non-Christian Jews. If you're going to draw lines, it's perfectly consistent to draw them between Christians and non-Christian Jews but not between Mormons and non-Mormon Christians.
Also, how many other breakoffs would there be? Are Amish people Christian? They're a lot more unusual for Christians than Mormons are. If you focus on books, what about the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church? Does following the Book of Enoch make them non-Christian? And while we're at it, the Epistle of Jude quotes from the Book of Enoch. So was Jude not a Christian?
> I much prefer just being called Christian without distinguishing my sect
Yeah, but sometimes the sect is relevant. If someone said the Book of Abraham was a Christian religious book, it's technically correct but very misleading.
I'm as orthodox and pro-Joseph as Latter-day Saints come. Where exactly do you draw the line between what God has said and what Joseph believes falsely? Are you talking about polygamy or apotheosis, or just the more one-off things? Do you have any particular examples?
I don't think Joseph was divinely inspired to dig for treasure as a teen.
I am open to the idea that he was wrong about polygamy (or at least was going about it wrong in technicalities, since the polyandrous way he did it was in sharp contrast to the way it was practiced later). But I am also open to the idea that every marriage we might regard as sus was actually "sealing for eternity only" and not sexual in nature, but that continues to beg the question of why he did it that way when subsequent polygamy was practiced very differently.
I am open to the idea that the facsimiles are altered and mistranslated. I am also open to the idea that there are reams of papyrus that were destroyed in the fire (Joseph F Smith recalls that there was a *lot* of scroll, much more than the consensus states) that recontextualizes all of this as perfectly genuine. There are some extremely important doctrines in the Book of Abraham that my entire faith hinges on so I can't wave it all away as a mistake. I do think he made a error in that same category with the kinderhook plates, though that whole ordeal is highly overblown by critics.
The general pattern on most of these controversial issues is that I'm open to both an orthodox and heterodox interpretation being true, and I haven't staked my faith on either being true because they're essentially immaterial to my relationship with the divine.
Very happy to see someone else express it like this, didn't really realize there were more of us!
Also, the OP touches on this but is ultimately pretty dismissive of it, but I think people need to understand that the motivated reasoning is actually an attempt to square these empirical questions or tensions with another kind of evidence which can be very persuasive and powerful: spiritual evidence.
I'm not mad if somebody wants to consider spiritual evidence illegitimate and not evidence as all, but as someone with a lifetime of very robust personal spiritual experiences, it's not something I will easily deny or wave away. I want to square ALL the evidence, that included, hence the reasoning on the purely empirical or historical stuff looks motivated. For someone without that on the other side of the ledger, I completely understand why the math looks baffling. No shade from me, but at the same time I know what I've experienced and it's very meaningful to me 🤷
spirituality, especially the way it is practiced within our religion, is imho a form of empiricism, maybe even science. Moroni 10:3-5 is the hypothesis, now say a prayer and test the claim.
for it to work requires some level of value alignment in the proper direction. maybe one would call that motivated reasoning, but the fruits are good. if you're looking for reasons not to believe, you will most certainly find them. just read stuff like this and let the cliches terminate the thoughts.
The single biggest reason that I left the LDS church was realizing that the bundle of feelings I'd been referring to as the Holy Ghost was felt and experienced by other people too, and it told them different things, some of which contradicted mine.
The first of these was meeting someone on my mission who had tested Moroni's promise directly, and had received a personal witness from the Holy Ghost that the Book of Mormon is not true. He asked what I would say to someone like that, and I responded that he must not have fulfilled the conditions, e.g. by not having enough faith. (He gave me a look, and I immediately realized that had been a very rude thing to say.)
Over the years I kept hearing more and more stories of people like this, usually people who had received confirmation from God that their religion was correct and used that to conclude that the LDS Church is false. Eventually I concluded that the bundle of feelings I had been calling the Holy Ghost was unreliable. If all those other people's experiences weren't actually revelation from God, my experiences probably weren't either.
Same here. I just couldn't justify that feeling the spirit is a valid epistemological approach for discerning truth.
Having said that, Emerson Green quotes Michael Huemer as citing religious experiences as _some_ valid evidence for belief, in the absence of other defeaters. I'm not sure I fully agree or follow, but even atheists making the point is interesting.
Spiritual evidence is the only thing that will convince someone of spiritual truths. I could point you to the testimony of the three witnesses—and the fact that all three men though estranged at times from Joseph never denied that they saw a miraculous vision—and you could even find it compelling (though I suspect you won't) but it wouldn't lead to any special spiritual development so what's the point?
Religion and epistemics are not in the same category. Religion has more in common with physical exercise. It's principally about self cultivation, not knowing true things
"Spiritual truths" is not an actual category of beliefs.
You can't simply wall off religious faith from epistemics. Your faith might not be interested in epistemics, but epistemics remains interested in your faith.
Moreover, the spiritual truth claims of the church are immense and frequently rely on nonspiritual reality. The church numerous times throughout its history acted to confirm the accounts in the BoM via archeology.
The actual circumstances of the witnesses is much, much murkier that is commonly portrayed. The nature of the "witnessing" does not pass the scrutiny of modern audiences. Appropriately enough, the witnesses did not actually handle the plates. They saw things spiritually. It was their spiritual truth. Now it's your spiritual truth.
Many religions have their spiritual truths and have had believers go so far as to put their lives on the line instead of denying them. It's an extremely common religious phenomenon.
So I don't believe Joseph was a better prophet than Mohammed. I don't think he had golden plates any more than I believe Mohammed had a flying horse. My spiritual development was coming to understand I should not use different standards of evidence for similar claims. My religion is that epistemics is the foundation of everything. Otherwise, how do you know what you should be "self cultivating"?
Beyond that, the whole framing is hilariously off.
There were three whole witness of a set of golden plates that, independent of any religious value, would be incredibly interesting as an archeological find.
Why not just, uh, show us the plates? Why is that so hard? (See also: just retranslate the lost pages.) It's awfully convenient to simply handwave away the discrepancies.
Still, we have the text of the BoM Smith provided and we can examine that compared to what we know about the ancient Americas and, as it turns out, things do not match up. Smith and the church for most of its history made VERY strong claims about the truth of the BoM as the history of a major people in the Americas.
If that were true, at all, it would be obvious and undeniable, as it was claimed in those earlier times. Nowadays the church has to be far more modest and hide in the ambiguity. They gave up on turning the natives white with the gospel.
Testimonies used to be based on a confident view of doctrinal truth claims. "I know it's true." It's been a while since I've been to a testimony meeting, but I wonder if that's still a common phrasing.
The fact someone like you has to retreat to separating your faith from epistemics is a wonderful form of postmodernism/relativism that the religion I grew up in was adamantly opposed to. What ever happened to the god who could rain down fire from heaven, smite people dumb, and cast out devils?
"For someone without that on the other side of the ledger, I completely understand why the math looks baffling."
I've had the spiritual evidence.
I felt obligated to test it against what we can know about reality via other methods.
The spiritual math did not suffice.
The insight you're missing is that there's not actually a separate category called "spiritual evidence." That's a shielding mechanism for a sacred belief to survive scrutiny you would otherwise apply.
I'd bet some substantial portion of your "spiritual evidence" had entanglement with physical reality. Typically these experiences are not merely inside one's own soul. Also, things like "the gifts of the spirit" tend to include powers over physical reality. There's not a clean line you can build a wall on and then hide behind.
You're going to have to come up with a label that's less than eleven words if you want it to stick. And I think to most people "he's LDS" comes across as more off-putting than "he's Mormon."
I don't think the vast majority of people disagree with me, or if they do they couldn't name why, because the modal Christian does not know or care that much about the finer points of theology that distinguish us
Setting aside some disputed distinctions, there are times when the disambiguation between your peers and, say, Baptists are relevant, such as, well, in this thread talking about the likelihood Smith was a conman versus a prophet. What to use then?
Latter-day Saint as an appellation is just fine when distinguishing from other sects. Church of Jesus Christ is a fine shortening of the church itself.
Or you can just say Mormon all the time, I'm not the boss of you. Just stating my preferences
True, by saying "feel" you made clear that this is your opinion.
But by expressing the feeling of it being a slur, you introduced the idea that it is a bad faith usage.
That's the reason I offered a rationale for using the term in contradiction to the preferred "member of the church of latter-day saints." To argue that there isn't malice in using a much shorter appellation.
I don't think there's usually malice except inasmuch as there is malice in not respecting people's preferences once they've been expressed (e.g. misgendering someone who wants you to use some really out there neopronouns)
More precisely: my experience with the term is that it is increasingly used with a negative valence, either mockery or disdain, so it generates actual internal discomfort and puts me on edge that the person using the word is an opp that doesn't like my core identity, even when that's not true.
How do Mormon apologists such as yourself react when they read Scientology apologists try to explain away the many inconsistencies and apparent frauds of L Ron Hubbard?
I don't know. I haven't read Scientology apologia. It doesn't really appeal to me because I don't see the merit or benefit of Scientology to begin with. I also don't really consider myself an apologist since I don't author defenses. Just a believer
So, a church that was founded in the USA by an "obviously wacky and flawed" charismatic storyteller/adulterer/criminal, claims to have millions of members worldwide, seems to indeed have some suspiciously high-functioning/wealthy public proponents, has official scripture about pre-existing spirits being sent to Earth by a higher power in order to inhabit human bodies who must earn their eternal reward through specific rituals (some of which are kept secret from nonmembers), but said scripture upon critical examination proves to be facially self-inconsistent, and its true believers expend considerable effort to explain this away, and you aren't even curious to read more about it? And you fancy yourself "a pretty careful thinker"?
You've made a very compelling set of comparisons here that would be pretty convincing to somebody who doesn't know too many details about my religion. I am at least familiar enough with both my own religion and Scientology to know that these are a little tortured.
I hereby pray to the Goddess of Rationality that, should I ever have a blind spot as big as this, may She please send some blessed Internet Rando to call me out on it, using some words more compelling than I, poor missionary unworthy of Her grace, have managed here, such that I will actually sit up and take notice. Amen.
if you want some advice on how to be more compelling than you have heretofore been, there's an exercise in empathy one can engage in to try and identify high level generators of disagreement https://www.lesswrong.com/w/ideological-turing-tests
I have only a passing similarity with both LDS and Scientology. Is there a way you can explain some key structural differences between them (apart from the obvious doctrinal differences) ? It is entirely possible that the answer is "no, there's no easy way to do that", but just in case...
Well, our doctrine is just spicy Christianity. It's about an 80% overlap with boring old protestant Christianity, maybe more. We just believe that the way things are done in the scriptures (where prophets reveal God's will) didn't stop being true any more, so we continue to have prophets who reveal God's will.
On scientology's side... it's not Christianity, I think. So that seems like a pretty big gulf.
Hi! How do you endure servicesif you vaguely know that maybe sermons/ prayer / etc aren’t actually divine/the scripture isn’t flawless? Being in services where they speak as though things are true that I don’t agree with is excruciating.
Isn’t most of what is being discussed in sermons heavily dependent on the existence of a infallible Book of Mormon / Bible and that the information presented above shows a clear alternative to this fact, degrading the relevance of sermons / discussing anything related to Mormonism as hinging on the veracity of the original accounts?
Yes - I only would attend due to the above mentioned benefits. I think it solves coordinating in a way devoid in other community groups. But I find it painful.
LDS don’t believe in scriptural infallibility? Fascinating. Maybe I would enjoy it more than I would Protestants. I don’t drink or smoke anyway. Do you think they’d mind that I don’t believe in supernatural things?
You'd be welcome to attend church as much as you want. You wouldn't be welcome to be baptized and join as a member unless you actually believe the supernatural things, unfortunately (you probably wouldn't want to give up a tenth of your income anyway)
Would you agree with the opening thesis of the review -- that it is possible for virtually anyone to convince himself to believe in a religion (LDS specifically) by a deliberate effort of will (and practiced repetition) ?
On the one hand, this makes sense; but on the other hand, how come believers in all those other religions, most of which are pretty violent, don't convert to something superior like LDS, or Tibetan Buddhism, or Taoism or something ?
I think you ought to ask a sociologist or scholar of religion that question, they'll probably be able to answer better. The factors are probably the same social factors we can use to describe most human phenomena.
I very much enjoyed Patricia Crone's "Preindustrial Societies" and her diagnoses of the role religion has played for most of human history
I too am old enough to remember it. Are you curious why it hasn't caused me a faith crisis besides defaulting to believing that I am simply irrational?
I've read a fair number of your replies here and I'm intimately familiar with the topic at hand.
Which is to say I'm very much not "defaulting to believe" that you are "simply irrational" on this topic. You're complexly irrational! I know firsthand what that's like. I've been there.
You do accept a lot more fallibility in the prophets than would be generally considered good form. This is a very common approach to deal with challenges, whether historical or moral.
There's all sorts of ambiguity in doctrine and history you can employ to avoid any direct contradictions between say the claimed powers of the priesthood and reality, or anything about evolution and doctrine. And the church itself explicitly uses such stances re: evolution and blacks and the priesthood. "We just aren't sure we believe that, except for when we are, until we're not."
But at some point you gotta wonder what actual power of prophecy anyone ever had, or has. The last few decades, prophets have mostly just undone the work of prior ones!
For me, when I was doing my research in the 2000s, when one had to dig a little to find stuff, the primary issue that shifted my confidence was not the overwhelming amount of evidence that the church's truth claims about history or science were blatantly false, but the fact that there are many where the church actively worked to conceal inconvenient facts from its own members. Including excommunicating members who had been researching honestly and without intending to attack the church.
The "ah shucks there's hard, publicly available evidence, so we'll pivot to 'it's complicated'" approach is great PR, but epistemically and ethically very suspect.
A fun recent example of this is the church recently quietly admitting they'd had the 1886 Revelation in the archives for nearly a century. (I'm one generation removed from the practice of polygamy on my dad's side.)
but it is interesting to me that you found the church's efforts to slow walk research a negative, when that reads as a positive of a conservative institution that seeks to maintain a cohesive belief structure that doesn't jump to conclusions, which is what I'd want the institution I'm offloading many life viewpoints onto, to do!
That’s a remarkable way to characterize “the church lied about a document pertaining to one of its most important doctrines because it conflicted with the party line.”
The fundamentalists would argue that the belief structure isn’t all that cohesive without polygamy.
Seems they have a point.
But I’m sure that general attitude of “well anything the church was trying to suppress was for the good of the cohesive belief structure” helps keep your testimony strong and less focused on the accuracy of said beliefs.
When Joseph Smith died, there was no clear successor. At least, not one that was currently alive. So the followers of Joseph Smith fractured. The LDS church followed Brigham Young. Despite ostensibly being a prophet of God, he endorsed slavery. And he justified it by the Curse of Ham, even though the second Article of Faith is pretty clear about sins not being inherited.
So based on that, I have two questions:
1. If prophets can be that wrong about something that important, and can stay wrong as long as they did, how can you trust them about anything?
2. Are you sure the LDS church didn't pick the wrong prophet?
That's not even the worst thing Brigham Young did! You gave me a softball.
Sadly the purpose of prophets (this is just my opinion) is a lot less exciting than it sounds. It's to bring things to your attention, not to innovate. Even Joseph just restored lost things. It's very easy to check their work because the things they say that are true are repeated again and again ad nausem by other prophets and apostles and scriptures. They say very little that is surprising. And when they do? Well the prophets of God are just dudes. I think the ones in the Bible are just dudes too, they just mostly got the good parts written down about them that filtered to us and they might've made some serious errors as well (maybe Elisha shouldn't have called the she-bear on those hooligans after all...)
Brigham Young was also the governor of a territory that became a state. His religious maneuvers and his political maneuvers were all twisted up together. Perhaps he believed that endorsing slavery was politically expedient. Perhaps he believed it incorrectly and he was not corrected because it was ultimately inconsequential since slavery largely (besides a few isolated cases) never reached the Utah territory.
I emphatically don't believe he was the wrong prophet. There are very few people who could have kept the church together, led them across the plains, established the Utah territory, and held it together through war and famine etc besides him. He was one of a kind for better and worse.
I agree that the view "the leaders of this church often err, but that doesn't mean they aren't worthy of leadership" is a reasonable one. However, I don't think that the LDS church leadership would agree with that characterization of them at all. They often project a much more dogmatic and authoritarian posture about their own revelatory abilities than would be consistent with your more humble position (cf. The Mantle Is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect, When our leaders speak, the thinking has been done, Fourteen Fundamentals in Following the Prophet, The Prophet will never lead the church astray, etc.).
If the Quorum or First Presidency regularly admitted that they might teach incorrect doctrine, or that it's possible for them to teach something as divine revelation to the Q12 that later turns out to have been wrong, that would be one thing. But they seem to studiously cultivate the opposite impression among the faithful.
Do you agree that there is at least a little bit of tension between your own openness to heterodox interpretations, as you say, and the attitude of LDS church leadership?
There are very few if any examples that come to my mind of the entirety of the first presidency and quorum of the 12 all converging on the same mistake. Maybe upholding Brigham Young's teachings on race and the priesthood? But even then, that's ultimately Brigham's fault, and all we had to do was evolve past treating his every word as gospel (he said a lootttt of things, and seldom failed to claim them as revelation) Those originate from the early era when the prophet seemed to have a lot more unitary executive power if you will and now we have a counterbalancing quorum that keeps things much less spicy.
I don't think the church would be better off if everyone were more distrustful of the leadership. I think our deference for authority is one of our coordination-problem-solving superpowers and I hate to see people erode that by engaging with church like they do politics, trying to drum up support and agitate for change and what have you. (I do however approve of agitation in the periphery institutions like BYU, where the leadership have demonstrated again and again that they are both less cautious and more receptive to agitation)
It's yet another issue of populations vs individuals. The population of the church has to sustain the leadership pretty intensely for them to be effective and unifying, and in return we trade off some "accuracy". The individual needs to moderate their expectations of how spotless a track record the leadership is capable of or you're staking your faith on something easy to defeat (no man is perfect). The mantle is a coordination mechanism that allows a membership with a high spread of IQ to converge in outcomes. (Aside: many people's proposals for better ways to do public institutions or secular religions etc. that I get to hear about around here only work with an exclusively high IQ congregation and are thus DOA. The parts of religion that seem nonsensical and dumb to you aren't for you, they're for everyone).
I don't think any presidency+quorum in recent memory has "taught incorrect doctrine". They've emphasized and deemphasized certain aspects, and the more hotheaded and maverick among them have said one-offs that people latch on to (looking at you McConkie) but overall I feel they have proven to be inspired.
When you say you are "open to the heterodox interpretation being true" about controversial issues like the Book of Abraham, doesn't that mean you are open to the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve being mistaken?
Your other comments strike me as Straussian. It seems like you're suggesting that it's good for LDS leadership to cultivate a greater confidence in their authority than is justified by the facts because it's good for the organization. But deceiving people is morally wrong, not to mention a contradiction of the teachings of the LDS church, whether or not it's good policy.
The priesthood ban was clearly an instance of the 12+3 teaching incorrect doctrine -- I don't see a way around that. You can't blame Brigham Young when the First Presidency affirmed its status as a doctrine in the 1949 letter, and the church maintained this stance for more than 100 years.
1. My point with blaming the priesthood ban on Brigham is that I think that the leadership in the ensuing decades, rather than all independently coming to the conclusion that it was right, were laboring under the assumption that previous prophets could not be wrong speaking ex cathedra, which is maybe a more forgivable mistake.
2. The heterodox interpretations I tend to be open to are usually not places where the prophets have come down hard on the other side. There’s a lot of “we don’t knows” with regard to Abraham for instance, I think the church carefully defines their stances in these cases that leaves open an interpretation that there was a mistake involved but doesn’t outright state it.
3. “You will be blessed for following the prophet” and “the prophet is never wrong” are not the same claim, but it is very hard to insist on the first one without implying the second. You have to walk a thin line of not being actively dishonest while not leaving the door open for the proud and self-assured among us (I certainly belong to this group) to start nitpicking and reinterpreting. That’s a recipe for coordination failure and schism. I think my Bishop is wrong about things all the time, but I sustain him and take his sacred leadership seriously, even if I might exercise some D&C 121 style diplomacy as well.
4. I wouldn’t say this the first time there has been some misleading going on via sacred revelation. God had the whole world thinking that an eternal burning lake of fire awaited sinners for a long time until we learned that “my punishment is eternal because I am eternal” and the whole idea of hell changed to something more reasonable. There are many many cases of lies by omission you have to accept if you want to accept our gentler God.
What makes you believe this religion over others? When you see others believing religions with the same intensity you believe yours, what do you think?
I'm a pretty big religion fan in general, I think most major religions are good for their adherents in principle (if not always in practice) and most of the problems people identify with *religion* are problems with *humanity* and repeat themselves in any institution or human endeavor, sacred or secular. I try to draw truth from Islam, Daoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shinto, Sikhism, where I can see it. I love studying them and participating in their ceremonies when I get the chance. I see the greatest truth, the most authority, in my participation and studies of this one.
When I see intense believers I feel happy, I believe God works in their lives and speaks to them in their own ways. Except when they turn that intensity to violent or unjust ends. I try to withhold judgement as much as I can, as religion and culture and politics are all twisted up. You'll see people monocausally blame Islam for a warlike and unequal Middle East, but Islam is much bigger than that (Indonesia! Bangladesh! Bangsamoro!) and these aspects of the Arab world seem to predate the arrival of Islam.
With regard to "most major religions are good for their adherents in principle (if not always in practice)", I'm not sure I agree unless you're really loose with meaning; for example, if Catholics lived strictly by their church's doctrine, then certain things which I believe can be good (premarital sex, use of contraception, homosexuality) would be banned. This seems bad to me -- honing in on homosexuality for a moment, I think most liberal people would agree homosexuality is fine, and yet the Bible seems pretty staunchly in the "homosexuality is a sin" camp. There are groups like Episcopalians who have somewhat awkward work arounds for this, but I find it hard to believe that this means the religion is good in principle unless you really warp the meaning of in principle. It seems like the awkward work arounds to inconvenient religious rules from scripture are practical ways to make religions better by deviating from their principles!
And with regard to "most of the problems with religion are problems with humanity," I find it hard to find the content in that statement. I do not believe in divinity, so I don't attribute any problems with any particular church to God or whatever. Religions are a particular kind of societal institution; when someone critiques grocery stores, I don't think it's any kind of defense to say "this is a problem with humanity, not a problem of grocery stores!" I agree humanity has many problems, it's just that some types of behaviors or organizations tend to lead to certain types of problems.
It’s true there’s a level of tiptoeing that goes on to coexist with society. Religions that are insufficiently conformist to the society they exist in get chased out (see: Falun Gong). I think people who choose to live by the principles of their religion live pretty meaningful personal lives for their sacrifice in a way that’s hard to reason about at population levels. I don’t think premarital sex has been a productive and winning experiment for western society, and people who choose to forego it are winninger.
As for the humanity thing, there are of course specific critiques you can make of a specific sect if you like as well as trends across sects. I think nations should be secular for instance, that seems to have worked out better than the bloody 1500s. I’m just shadowboxing with the critique I hear that religion caused this or that when it’s not very obvious that this or that wouldn’t still have occurred in a counterfactual world where religion doesn’t exist
Okay, I have a question. Suppose God wants to communicate something to humanity. Why doesn't he simply make a book appear on everyone's kitchen table, or why doesn't he appear to everyone in a dream and tell them what he has to tell? Why would he reveal himself to only a single person in a complicated way?
how you go about answering this question depends on what you think our purpose here on earth is, as well as how comfortable you are opining on God’s mind. It’s also a place where our distinctions with mainstream Christian doctrine surface quite prominently. It’s also really long (sorry)
first: I do not think God only speaks to the prophet. He speaks to all people in all times and places, to greater and lesser degrees. What distinguishes a prophet is what he speaks about. A prophet has stewardship over the whole world and so may receive revelation on their behalf. Anybody can receive revelation, but only for their zone of stewardship, like a parent for their family. It is precisely through the process of personal revelation that we believe one ought to acquire a belief in God in the first place, not just trusting some other dude. This is a sharp way this topic differs from regular epistemic topics that get discussed around here, which can be made clearer through learning facts about them and weighing them against each other. There are no number of facts about high levels of so called Mormon welfare that will convince you God exists or that we wield his authority, only God manifesting the truth to you will.
So why this way? Why not just prove God’s existence through some global supernatural miracle and speak clearly in an unmistakable booming voice from heaven about God’s will? Why all these lossy, human-tainted transmissions that are difficult to untangle from your own thoughts?
Our cosmology believes that before this life we were all spirits, co-eternal intelligences with God that had been authored into distinct persons, disembodied and perfectly naive. Being a disembodied perfectly naive spirit in God’s presence isn’t half bad, no evil or pain to speak of. But you don’t know anything and you can’t do anything, you can’t influence the matter around you or fall in love or make a choice. As we learn in the text of the Book of Abraham that this review failed to review, God’s plan for us that we consented to was thus: we’d receive bodies, endure a mortality of struggle, deprivation, confusion, ignorance, and pain, to test us yes but more importantly to *teach* us how to be more Godly. With an aim to returning to God’s presence and inheriting God’s power and glory for ourselves, not because it’s externally bestowed as a reward but because we’ve grown into seeing and acting on the universe as God does, with perfect judgement. This is the meaning of the “degrees” of heaven our faith believes in: the person that you’ve grown into will determine your course in the hereafter, with very generous chances (like test retakes and test corrections from college) to fix your messups and learn the lessons the right way around courtesy of Christ’s Atonement bridging the gap between sinful humans and a perfect God.
The parameters of these tests and lessons require God to be pretty distant during the process, like an RCT. Yes he intervenes some ways and times (I believe he intervenes far more in the scriptural era because the religion he was building was somewhat maladaptive and tiny vs the pagan contenders and needed the thumb on the scale for it to continue existing as long as it did) but mostly this life is seeing what you do on the other side of Rawlsian veil of ignorance. We quite literally believe in something near to Rawls’ thought experiment as a point of doctrine.
Imagine learning a subject like math but the answers to all the problems are already filled in. *Some* people could probably will themself to do the exercise to learn how to arrive at the answer, but even they would be tainted by the number being there already, influencing and constraining your calculations.
Because in the course of this experiment the free will of the participants is never and will never be abridged, everything sacred we have is very human shaped. Books and buildings and stuff.
I think by-and-large the secular humanists we have around here are doing pretty well in the experiment (a lot better than some religious people!). They reject God’s existence but they get some other pretty important things right, about the nature of morality and their duty to other people. The intellectual underclass is a little less likely to arrive at these conclusions independently so you can see how religion is useful for them. Due to the aforementioned test corrections the moral atheists are going to be just fine at the judgement bar. But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t improve their life right now by aligning their will more with God’s.
The joke used to be that everyone in Utah is Mormon: Mormon, non-Mormon, jack Mormon, ex-Mormon, but regardless, something-Mormon. Now, oddly, everyone in Utah is Mormon except for obedient members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
This is not my personal apologetic belief set, but it is always funny to me how little people being up any simulation theory arguments in these conversations. Esp with more people increasing their credence in such beliefs with the rise of LLMs AI AGI ASI. Papers missing? Partially found? Filled in fraudulently? New details every few decades? Well yeah God has an free will o meter and has to edit the sim so we can still be agents unto ourselves with enough uncertainty to require faith, etc
I have a couple questions, though I might be late responding to a two weeks old comment (disclaimer: I'm very much an atheist)
1. Is your theory of god unfalsifiable, and if not, what evidence would shift your opinion more towards 'Joseph Smith not being divinely inspired' vs 'Joseph Smith being divinely inspired'?
2. If there are two religions, both of which are popular and both claiming to be divinely inspired, but that have contradicting claim, would that imply that one of them is not actually divinely inspired, and if so, how do you figure out which, if either, is actually correct?
3. My atheist position comes mostly from not seeing anything that is better explained by god than by other theories. What would be an area where existence of god would have more predictive power or explain phenomena better than all the other theories?
1. I think the existence of God is not unfalsifiable in principle, but maybe in practice. But this is true for many of the softer sciences. Historical narratives are constructed because we gather and analyze documentary and archeological evidence and convince ourself that such-and-such happened. We could find evidence that weakens or strengthens our conviction in this narrative, but it would be hard to find a kill shot that we couldn't explain our way around (unless the claim was something very specific like event A predates event B and then we found and dated a potsherd that definitively proved that event B in fact occurred first). Same goes for psychological and sociological phenomena, all we can really do is observe and update.
What this means for religion is we can accumulate evidence for and against it and bayesian update ourselves around. Bayesian evidence for God essentially boils down to the trifecta of the spiritual power of scripture, one’s specific transcendent spiritual experiences, and the prosaic fruits of living the Gospel. If you did a population level investigation of people who identify as "Mormons" then you'd see we're not *that* special, but if you were able to invasively track who is actually not just professing membership in a church but correctly engaging with and applying the doctrine, your key indicators of wellbeing would all shoot up quite dramatically. I think this would be true of most religions to the extent that their doctrines are not actively deleterious (there are no shortage of those as well). If you could do the same study and found that wellbeing indicators were level or even down, that would be pretty strong evidence against its truth. You can say this is just because our doctrines map suspiciously well to known good things that are not necessarily an indicator of anything divine or supernatural, and I agree! Christ’s exemplar life is sort of hard to argue with because the rightness and trueness seems to exist separate from the question of his divinity. Like duh it’s commendable to be nice to the downtrodden and sacrifice on their behalf. For a work of fiction that illustrates the self-evident goodness of the still-imperfect believer, read the Brothers Karamazov.
We have a path we always invite people to try to prove to themselves: read the Book of Mormon, think about it, pray with faith that you can receive an answer if it is true, and then you are promised an answer. If the answer is no, or there is no answer at all, I think you are entirely justified in following a path away. Most people don’t make it that far, so I’m not sure what the success rate is on people actually testing the test.
2. In questions of contradictions, you pray about it and solicit an answer from heaven, along with intensive study yourself. I tend to focus on where religions overlap rather than where they diverge, and sometimes the divergences don’t seem so intense that one ought to not test the waters of both? As in, listen to their own argument for their truth and their prescriptions and apply them. Unless one religion has some precept that’s like “you go to hell forever if you don’t choose us first and immediately” which I am not aware of being the case in any major religion. It is possible that they could string you along from the less disruptive prescriptions to the more disruptive ones (oh you’re doing shahadah and salah and sawm and you still don’t feel anything? that’s just cuz you need to do hajj and zakat too) but you are welcome to terminate your investigation at any point.
3. The best explanatory power God offers is for the classic triptych “where do we come from? where are we going? why are we here?” Answering those lends meaning, direction, and accountability to your life. They give you buy-in into a morality better than any purely philosophical or empirical theory can. And it of course provides explanatory power for spiritual experiences beyond your neurons firing in ways that mislead you.
I also think something secular philosophy has a big blindspot with is sin. Consequentialism tells you what you ought to do, but not necessarily what you ought to do when you don’t do what you ought to do. I spend a lot of time in irreligious spaces hanging out with brainy atheists (whom i deeply love and do not look down upon, they are all smarter than me) and I’ve always found them ill equipped to discuss akrasia and fallibility wrt to <maximizing utils|fulfilling your deon|cultivating virtue>
Eliezer talks about how one can choose to explain, worship, or ignore any phenomenon https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yxvi9RitzZDpqn6Yh/explain-worship-ignore. He says you can always ask “why?” to the next explanation and it without fail recurses down to the standard model of particle physics and the big bang, at which point you can’t answer why any more and you choose to worship instead. I do not find the prospect of worshipping a set of fields and forces very appealing. I don’t see how a pure materialist explanation for reality permits free will, and I don’t see how a physics-driven world of brains without will completely driven by the interactions between elementary particles permits for any real theory of morality beyond an observational one. Anybody who subscribes to a materialist explanation for consciousness is engaging in the same sort of self-deception they use to explain away my spiritual experiences when they reason about all of the various philosophical topics that rest upon free will as an axiom. Yes I am familiar with compatibilism and moral anti-realism, I find those arguments incredibly unconvincing placed against the transcendental experiences I and many others have had grasping onto some deeper non-material tissue.
1. Why would it be hard to falsify existence of god? For example, if you believe that god can hear your prayers and influence the physical world, you could, for example, look at outcomes of patients who are devout and pray to god (maybe ask people how much time they volunteer and only choose the top 10% to make sure you don't get 'free riders') vs atheists. In a godless world (or a world without a god who can hear prayers and influence the world, to be precise), we would expect no difference. In a world with a god, we would maybe expect the outcomes to be better for those who pray. Of course, you can modify/specify the theory of god such that maybe he cares for both those who pray and those who don't, so that's why you don't see the difference, or maybe there are some other mysterious reasons for there to be no difference. But generally, in a world with god, P(patients who pray have better outcomes|god) is higher than P(patients who pray have better outcomes|no god), so if the result of such a study is positive, you should update towards god, and if it is negative, you should update towards no god (or at least a god who influences the things happening on Earth).
You can also ask one person to pick a number, and then another person to pray to god to reveal them the picked number, and see if it is higher than what you get in the same scenario without praying. But perhaps god doesn't care about such minute studies and so doesn't bother to asnwer? Ok, but surely there is some possible study idea such that we would expect different outcomes for devout religious people and for atheists, otherwise it just looks like an invisible dragon (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/7gRSERQZbqTuLX5re/p/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY).
My understanding is the differences that you can observe come down to religious people having more buy-in in their beliefs, and thus being more virtuous (with respect to the moral systems already existing at the time). For example, the post had a link to a study about Mormons spending much more time volunteering and donating than other Americans. The things that you point to as evidence for god ("the spiritual power of scripture, one’s specific transcendent spiritual experiences, and the prosaic fruits of living the Gospel") are also explained by people just being really convinced that their religion is true and thus making sure they live virtuous.
> You can say this is just because our doctrines map suspiciously well to known good things that are not necessarily an indicator of anything divine or supernatural, and I agree!
Wouldn't we expect that in a godless world as well? If the religion practices are good (for example solve Prisoners' dilemma), then the groups of people believing in that religion would be more successfull than other religious groups, which would attract more people, so that just by evolutionary mechanism we would expect the more popular religions to have traits that are beneficial for the group. I don't see anything suspicious there.
My main question here is: Are there effects of religion that are not explained by people really believeing and being more motivated to live virtuosly? If not, wouldn't that be suspicious?
(It seems to me that the people who lived closer to the founding of their religion would be more likely to say that there are indeed supernatural effects explained by religion, and were willing stake their belief on falsifiable tests (for example the contest between Elijah and priests of Baal had direct falsifiable claims and tested them), but with time it retreated to only making moral and spiritual claims. But even in the moral realm, it seems like believing in god doesn't give you new information about morality, but only increases your belief in the existing moral systems. For example, there's no reason for god to not at least mention that slavery is bad to the people he inspired to write the bible, even if they couldn't abolish it at the time. Or even in current times, I'm not aware of a strong correlation between people being highly religious vs people being vegan. It seems like the work of moral progress is not done by prophets, who we would expect to have much higher understanding of morality if they were divinely inspired. Instead, the prophets amplify the better memes of a current moral system, which, while useful and good, again is more easily explained by a godless world.
2. I guess here I'm not sure how does one determine if a text was divinely inspired. If a person wrote a text and claims it was divinely inspired, is there a difference between determining if the text was actually divinely inspired vs determining if you think the text has good moral points?
3. Similar to 1, some reasons here ("Answering those lends meaning, direction, and accountability to your life. They give you buy-in into a morality better than any purely philosophical or empirical theory can.") come down to instrumental usefulness, which does not require a god, and I agree that some religions might indeed have instrumental usefulness.
While religion also does provide some explanation for existential questions, when I say 'have explanatory power' I usually imply not only providing an explanation, but also that explanation being better than others, like being supported by other evidence or being better epistemically. But I don't think starting a discussion of free will and materialism will be very productive here.
(Also, when you say "I do not find the prospect of worshipping a set of fields and forces very appealing.", what do you mean? If the options are worship, explain and ignore, I assume you're not choosing 'explain', since that would require having an explanation for why god made quantum field theory the way that he did? I guess one can invoke 'mysterious ways', but that wouldn't be much of an explanation)
1. I don't think religion can be approached in the way that most other epistemic topics are. Catching a belief in God has to be a personal journey. I don't think your prayer studies would yield results because you are specifying the criteria of success (knowing the hidden number or recovering from illness) when those aren't necessarily in alignment with the grantor. Imagine there is a superintelligent AI simulating all of us with some objective function, and you use these tests to disprove its existence. Why do you suppose that the superintelligent AI who can see all causes and effects and is over all people has an objective that implies more people who pray to them to recover and will give praying people mind-reading powers? It's a highly simplistic view of what role God plays (though to be fair there are definitely Christians who think this is exactly how God works!)
Your point about moral evolution occurring societally outside of religion is well taken, and I agree that's the case. My best explanation for that is that a pragmatic religion that won't die out in a generation (and/or completely isolate itself from society writ large such that it ceases to grow or exert much influence on the world like the hermetic orders) can only ask so much of its adherents, and so the pareto optimum exists in demanding only they exemplify the "better memes of a current moral system”. Jesus drank wine, but I do not.
It is curious that these extreme miraculous proofs always seem to exist in these long dead scripture stories, isn’t it? But one great thing about my church in particular is there’s miraculous stuff happening in contemporary accounts! You’ve got multiple contemporary documents attesting to the same events, like Joseph healing people during a malarial outbreak, or the testimony of the 3 witnesses. And of course you have the Book of Mormon itself which I must reiterate is our main proof, a book of scripture with so much profound insight and spiritual heft that it is difficult to wave away as the invention of an isolated farm boy turned con man. I frequently say that my personal theory for why miracles seem to be so prevalent and public in scripture and so absent in day-to-day life is a combination of survivorship bias (holy scripture is of course going to focus on miraculous events, and since the books cover hundreds or even thousands of years you don’t need that high of a frequency to populate them) and precarity (the God of Abraham had to intervene constantly to not be wiped out by the more memetically attractive pagan deities on all sides, Jesus had to display his divinity constantly to build such an enduring legacy that wouldn’t be wiped out by the Romans/Pharisees/etc, the early restored church had to give the saints very good reasons to suffer all the privations and persecution that they did).
2. I think there’s a big difference between determining if a text is diviniely inspired vs morally good, which is the aforementioned prayer and receiving a witness from heaven that it is divinely inspired. This is what all your demands for proof are going to continue to boil down to. Spiritual proof is individualized and non-fungible. You gotta get it for yourself, I can’t share mine with you even if I really wish I could.
3. To some degree I think a religion’s instrumental rationality is proof of their epistemic rationality (by their fruits ye shall know them). I think bare utilitarianism is a fairly effete moral philosophy that is metaethically flawed. It can’t be full-throatedly recommended to any individual because they lack the ability to apply it rigorously. It’s maladaptive. If I wear the shoes of the supreme being and I am constrained by
- some set of physical laws (yes we actually believe this, we don’t believe in ex nihilo creation)
- some set of moral laws (we believe this too, Alma 42:13 “…the work of justice could not be destroyed; if so, God would cease to be God”)
- human agency (Alma 42:27 “…whosoever will not come the same is not compelled to come”)
I think what I would come up with to influence my little wards over a vareity of personalities, circumstances, and talents would basically look like the religion that I know and love.
At the end of the day the true explanatory test you can apply is when you study and pray and then receive an answer and you have to explain that. It's one on one and the result will not be publishable in an academic journal.
When I say I do not find the prospect of worshipping the standard model appealing, I mean that I find the idea that quarks are where the explanatory power of physics stops and there is no further explanation and I must worship it to be lame. A loving spiritual father who organized reality for me and I must worship him (I think you misapprehended the essay if you think I must explain why God created quantum fields. I don’t, I just worship. I worship God instead of the quantum fields) is a superior place to terminate my explanation.
> It's a highly simplistic view of what role God plays (though to be fair there are definitely Christians who think this is exactly how God works!)
Would you say that people who believe that praying can help increase health outcome are wrong / have a highly simplistic view? If so, I agree. I brought up this example because many people might believe such things, and they are indeed falsifiable.
> Imagine there is a superintelligent AI simulating all of us with some objective function, and you use these tests to disprove its existence. Why do you suppose that the superintelligent AI who can see all causes and effects and is over all people has an objective that implies more people who pray to them to recover and will give praying people mind-reading powers?
If that AI claims that he cares about people, and claims that he can heal people, and wants to encourage people to believe in them, then I would indeed expect that the AI would heal people (unless the AI is lying).
> You’ve got multiple contemporary documents attesting to the same events, like Joseph healing people during a malarial outbreak, ...
I do not know much about that event. Could you tell me how many people he had blessed, how many of them survived, and what was the general survival rate for malaria in similar condition (but without the blessings)? I found this paper online (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10077013/pdf/ajtmh.22-0672.pdf) about malaria among US soldiers during the Civil war, which says that "Overall, malaria-related mortality rates were more than three times higher among Black (16.3 malaria deaths/1,000 person/years) than White (5.0 deaths/1,000 person/years) soldiers, and the case fatality rate was approximately twice as high among Black (estimate 2%) than White (estimate 1%) soldiers.", so if the fatality rate in adults is only around 1-2%, then people recovering wouldn't really be a miracle. But I've also seen a number here (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11477079/pdf/jcm-13-05680.pdf) that 26% of French troops sent to Madagascar died of malaria, so I guess the number is somewhere in the range from 1 to 30% (maybe in Madagascar they had a more fatal strain than in US?) (I literally don't know anything about mortality rates of malaria in 19th century America, so please correct me if that information is wrong). Apparently, Joseph's brother and his son died of malaria, so perhaps the number should be higher than 1%. But if you claim that this was a miracle and not just natural recovery, I presume you know the actual numbers here? Also, if god gave Joseph healing powers, why wouldn't he also heal his brother and son? Do these powers sometimes work and sometimes don't?
> or the testimony of the 3 witnesses.
(Again, I don't know much about the event and haven't done any meaningful deep dive). Yeah, that's surprising. But it's only three people, and it's not that surprising if people who want to have a vision end up believing that they had a vision (even though it's still surprising). Also, it's not that hard to get people to lie for you: we know Joseph was convincing enough to get away with polygamy for quite long, and that he was not an honest man (ie lying about polygamy). It would be surprising if, without communicating beforehand between each other, they would then independently describe what they saw, and you could compare their descriptions and see that they said the same thing. For some reason, nobody from the religious propets ever does this, even though it would greatly improve their evidence. But fine, you get an update towards god existing.
And for all the miracles, they never seem to get new information that would be inexplainable but for a miracle. For example, imagine if people could look at the plates, see that it was indeed ancient egyptian and do the tests to date it back to ancient Egypt. For some reason, this never happens: the sheet with characters from the golden plates is not actually any ancient Egypt language, Joseph can't actually discern between an ancient language and random marks, the scroll used for generating the book of Abraham turns to be just a standard egyptian scroll.
Also, I would update much more based on such miracles/visions if all/most of those would support the same religion / make the same claims, ie if the knowledge revealed in visions or via divine inspiration wouldn't conflict with each other (ie different religions having conflicting beliefs yet both being based on word of god or divine inspiration) and with knowledge that we get from other ways (ie Bible and Book of Mormon claiming things we know aren't true). This uncorrelatedness updates me more towards "people just aren't that reliable at eyewitness accounts and if they want to see something, they might" than towards divine vision, but overall visions still update toward god, though not by that much.
> And of course you have the Book of Mormon itself which I must reiterate is our main proof, a book of scripture with so much profound insight and spiritual heft that it is difficult to wave away as the invention of an isolated farm boy turned con man.
Survivorship bias can explain that (ie you just forget about all the people who start cults that fail). I don't contest that believing in the Book of Mormon leads you to leading a more moral life than average, I just don't think you need god to write it.
>the God of Abraham had to intervene constantly to not be wiped out by the more memetically attractive pagan deities on all sides, Jesus had to display his divinity constantly to build such an enduring legacy that wouldn’t be wiped out by the Romans/Pharisees/etc, the early restored church had to give the saints very good reasons to suffer all the privations and persecution that they did.
If the god is not afraid of hiding and he wants people to believe in him and not in pagan religions and he is ready to do miracles for that, why can't he just say to all people at once "Listen to Jesus", or write across the sky, or do any such miracle? I really don't understand how this would not be the obvious solution, and how you're not surprised that he doesn't do that.
> I think there’s a big difference between determining if a text is diviniely inspired vs morally good, which is the aforementioned prayer and receiving a witness from heaven that it is divinely inspired.
Ok, makes sense.
> I think bare utilitarianism is a fairly effete moral philosophy that is metaethically flawed. It can’t be full-throatedly recommended to any individual because they lack the ability to apply it rigorously.
I think there are many atheists who are moral people without believing in god, so just empirically there must be some moral philosophy that can be applied by individuals without faith.
> At the end of the day the true explanatory test you can apply is when you study and pray and then receive an answer and you have to explain that. It's one on one and the result will not be publishable in an academic journal.
I understand why a process of converting to a religion would be personal and not easily quantifiable, that's fair. I don't understand why god has to hide all of the effects of believing in god (or to be more exact, he shows the benefits that are explained by people being more confident in their moral system, like giving more to charity, but he hides the other ones).
> A loving spiritual father who organized reality for me and I must worship him (I think you misapprehended the essay if you think I must explain why God created quantum fields. I don’t, I just worship. I worship God instead of the quantum fields) is a superior place to terminate my explanation.
I don't think I misunderstood the essay. The choice between 'ignore', 'explain', and 'worship' arises for any claim. If you have a graph of claims connected by explanations, then when you choose 'explain', you go down that graph to another claim. If you choose 'ignore' or 'worship', you stop at the original claim. There is no implication that you only worship one thing, or that if you worship god, then suddenly the three options do not appear for any other claim. You still have to choose how do you explain why equations of QFT are the way they are, and it appears that you're choosing 'ignore'.
(“Mormon” here) Not all too bad. For a review of “the _Book_ of Abraham” I would have liked to see more commentary on the actual text, but maybe that’s just my preference.
There’s little question that Joseph Smith was not a flawless seer. There are a number of revelations which didn’t happen (one is mentioned here, I can think of another one or two offhand). There are some concrete predictions that turn out surprisingly true, like the prophecy on Stephen A. Douglas, but he’s not shooting 100%. Figuring out what’s God and what’s the voice in your head is, I think, an extremely subtle business at best. Maybe if an angel shows up it’s easy, but when it’s (paraphrasing Smith) “pure intelligence revealed directly to the spirit as if you had no body at all” it’s got to be tricky, very tricky. Joseph Smith’s marriage practices are certainly “not good.” The root idea for his polygamy being that “we’re restoring all the old practices of men of God like Abraham and Isaac and Jacob” is palatable enough, but I can’t offer any defense for how Smith went about it.
The Book of Abraham is just the “House of the Dragon” spinoff of the original content, though. The Book of Mormon is of course the real interesting work.
It’s interesting I find many of the appealing parts of church doctrine outside of the Book of Mormon (e.g. No hell/ECT; emphasis on agency; parts of existence that were not created by God). These things help me to form my own theodicy.
I think a lot of the cosmology is indeed more appealing than the BoM. I just find the BoM the most interesting as a text. (Not like I’ve written 400000+ words in an unpublished commentary on it or anything.)
Since the folks 'round here are so interested in the possibilities of AI, and since Ancient History is the topic for today - why haven't efforts to use AI to decipher Linear A been successful so far?
If there is one thing AI ought to be good at, it is pattern recognition, and what is deciphering a language, but learning patterns?
*For those not keeping score at home, Linear A is an ancient Cretan writing script that uses the same characters as Linear B (deciphered by Michael Ventris and determined to be an archaic form of Greek) but which nobody so far can read.
One of the major criticisms of contemporary AI systems is that even when they equal or surpass human performance on certain tasks, they take a *lot* more training data than people do to get there.
The initial breakthrough in Linear B was due to Michael Ventris, but Ventris and John Chadwick are jointly credited with the decipherment. The language turned out to be an early Cypriot version of Mycenaean Greek - but Linear A is probably Minoan, for which we have as yet nothing along the lines of a Rosetta stone. If is ever deciphered, surviving texts, far from proving to be undiscovered literary and philosophical masterpieces, will almost certainly turn out to be shorthand lists of taxable goods - so not very much there for pattern recognition!
(Very light on technical details, though. The guy wrote a draft manuscript of his work and sent it to some academics for review, but he didn't want to post it publicly until he got feedback. We'll find out eventually, I guess.)
Great read. As a less-than-true-believer member, who still considers himself a Mormon, that South Park quote actually fits my personal worldview fairly well. I had never heard it before. I still am holding onto some hope (likely irrationally) that there is some divinity in the things Joseph Smith taught, despite all of the deep flaws. This religious bet hedging comes at a cost though, I am not nearly as "good" as I was when I had stronger beliefs in the church, reflecting the tension the author identifies. My current conception "Joseph Smith revealed some divine truths, despite the false provenance of his scriptures and his abuse of power" is helpful in resolving some cognitive dissonance, but it puts me in a place where religion places much fuzzier obligations on me. I am still in the process of working out how solve all of this. I just want to believe anything, that is not patently false, that leads me to help others.
For what it's worth, I've been out of the LDS church for many years now, and I still take opportunities to help others. If that's something you genuinely want to do, I think you will find ways to help regardless of your cosmological beliefs.
If you think the cosmological beliefs and/or the organization are genuinely useful towards the goal of helping others, sticking with them is probably a good idea. I have the kind of autistic brain where I care a lot about what's actually true; sitting in a meeting where people testify they are certain that specific things are true, when I believe those things are likely false, and not being socially permitted to testify of the opposite, is deeply uncomfortable for me. If you don't have a problem with that, power to you - I hope you continue finding ways to help others regardless of where you or your beliefs end up.
I've left, but I can totally respect this. For me the cognitive dissonance became unbearable. But I really do miss the community and the built-in mechanisms to help people. I was a weirdo who actually liked the comradery of helping in moves. I'm also a little once bitten, twice shy and struggling to find structured ways of helping. But that's probably a "me" problem and if I could commit I know there's need out there.
In my case I found a community organization to volunteer with on a consistent schedule. That gives me opportunities to help people often, even if it isn't exactly the same as getting called up to help someone move in.
As an active member (activity level,: said yes to teach early morning seminary 😂) , I'm curious if you find selection effects a problem for said community organizations?
I often dwell on what drives successful members of society to engage in inefficient uses of their time/human capital (eg yud's gathering fuzzies vs utils. Crassly, me cleaning the church vs working and paying more tithing, a classic bugbear hah) and find that outside of
Something to do with child rearing/family event
And
Religious conviction
Most community volunteering splits into
Outlet for specialized hobby which you must be specialize in
Political feeding trough
Outlet for Dysfunctional adults
But perhaps my experience is purely non representative?
I volunteer for a nonprofit in my community which helps families in poverty. The nonprofit has employees as well, not just volunteers.
I'm not completely sure I understand your question; can you clarify? One interpretation of your question is "would that community organization disappear if a few people self-selected out of volunteering?" If that's what you meant, then no, it wouldn't - they would just have to hire a few more people in that case. Another interpretation would be "how do you get the very best people to join your organization so you can benefit from their superior skills?" If that's what you meant then they don't, not really. The people who volunteer or work there are ordinary community members, not exceptional ones - not more successful than the average member of society, but not especially dysfunctional either. Another interpretation would be "how do we get 100% of people to join community organizations instead of a self-selected subset?" That seems obviously impossible to me and also not necessary.
"Selection effects" could mean a lot of different things, so I'm still not sure I answered the question you were trying to ask. I don't have much insight into the reasons why people choose to work with a community organization instead of somewhere else; I also don't have much insight into why people other than myself choose to volunteer instead of doing other things with their time.
I'm very curious about your thought process as a Protestant. Is your faith in the Bible as shaky as your faith in the BoM? Are you "holding onto some hope" that there is divinity in the things Jesus taught, or is that as shaky as your faith in the things Joseph Smith taught?
If you got to the point where you didn't believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet at all, where would that leave you? Would you be a deist with LDS characteristics, a normal Protestant, an agnostic?
It's a good question. My faith in the bible is not necessarily as shaky my faith in the BoM but there is an analogue in my views on both. Both are potentially the word of God, but "through a glass darkly" mediated by the imperfect humans that wrote them.
A separate way of answering this question, however, is that my faith in Christ is significantly stronger than my confidence in Joseph Smith. If I were to find that Smith was a complete and utter fraud, it would not (greatly) affect my faith in Christ. I believe in Christ, in large part because I find the parable of the prodigal son to be the single clearest illustration of how a divine perspective would differ from that of a normal human. I'm not saying that it couldn't have possibly been the work of a human, but I prefer to have faith that it is divine. I use the parable of the prodigal son as my personal measuring stick for whether something is Godly. I ask "is this consonant with the principles of that parable? (e.g. sin leads to misery; sinners are to be pitied not scorned; God's love for us is not contingent on our actions; God is constantly hoping that we will return to him; the only permanent barrier between us and God is our own pride)
I feel that even without the scaffolding of Mormonism I would be something adjacent to a C.S Lewis "Mere Christian". Maybe there would be another protestant church that would be a superior scaffold for my religion but given that I've started to believe that there is no "one true church" I might as well stick with the good one that I have. The thing I believe God wants us to do, the point of life, is to give up our obsession with our own selves and become like Christ; loving God and our neighbor. I feel there are likely many religious contexts in which that can happen. If life was about finding and believing in the one true church, I imagine God would give everyone a chance to at least be exposed to it.
"I just want to believe anything, that is not patently false, that leads me to help others." Then why not believe that most humans agree that suffering sucks, identify sources of suffering there is widespread consensus do indeed suck (starving, dying of preventable diseases, etc.) and just do things that reduce the occurrence of those kinds of suffering in the world?
For that matter, why isn't "I want to help others" as a statement of truth a sufficient motivator?
"I want to watch movies" is a statement of truth sufficient to get people to watch movies. "I want to make money" is a statement of truth sufficient to get people to get a job. Why not "I want to help people?"
(I'm not in the LDS but I grew up in the Churches of Christ for the record which is another quasi Protestant Restorationist American 19th century religious project that gets weird stinkeye from most mainline Christians and has maintained remarkable cohesion and growth given what it was. I'm now almost fully Nietzschean in outlook I would say though it took me about 20 years to get here. Maybe that's too far a path to go down for you, but I think the question of why your own will directed to what you supposedly want is insufficient to motivate you is an interesting question to ask yourself. If it *isn't* insufficient, then why not just do it?)
Its funny that you say that because I have tried exactly that. For many years, starting in my teens, I was an atheist, and I had resolved to live the best life I could by doing exactly that (1) meditating on the fact that suffering is wrong and (2) giving my money to effective charities. But it didn’t work, at least not for me. The problem is not one of rationality. I can believe, and do believe, without any doubt whatsoever, that I ought to do everything in my power to reduce the suffering of others. At the same time I know what I want to do is very different from what I ought to do. And in that period, though I gave some money to charity and never wavered in my belief about what I ought to do, overwhelmingly my self-centered hedonistic side won out. And I saw that the people who still held the beliefs that I had rejected did a much better job of winning this battle between want and ought. And seeing other people leave the church, I never saw them become more selfless.
This has led me to the conclusion that religion has the power to change hearts while philosophy only has the power to change minds. Philosophy and rationality can provide a prescription but not the medicine itself. It can provide a map but not fuel. The willpower and disposition to do what you ought seems to come mostly strongly from religious practice. What explains this change of heart? Maybe it is something in the mundane rituals that gradually change the way you interact with the world. But maybe there is something genuinely supernatural and divine. Maybe it is only through religious practice that we come into contact with this divinity that reshapes us.
I would imagine that the answer is probably more social in nature than you think, and that the difference in how it feels subjectively to you is not truly a matter of how you think yourself (or faith yourself) into something by working through it alone on the inside, but much more about how subjectively different it feels when you know you are in a group whether others truly believe and have the same values that you do. Wanting to help others when you feel that most everyone in your community wants the same thing, or at least believes they do, is very very different, subjectively, from wanting to help others and feeling that you're surrounded by people with no such want at all, who couldn't care less.
Perhaps an easier illustration: many people make a sacrifice by choosing to be monogamous. A choice they voluntarily make, and which they believe will have benefits, yet which they may sometimes struggle with to a stronger or lesser degree, and sometimes might feel in moments of temptation that it's an almost unbearable sacrifice. Yet most do not have terribly much difficulty with it on most days, and on most days may not even perceive that they are giving up or missing anything significant at all. However, this would all feel very different if you are in a community or social world where no one else values monogamy, and it's not a norm and in fact it's looked upon with derision or at least pity that anyone would punish themselves in such a manner and deny themselves the pleasures of being with more than one person. In that type of context, remaining faithful to one's spouse is likely to start feeling like a terrible burden or at least one that brings no joy or sense of "doing the right thing" and becomes increasingly difficult to abide by when everyone else around you thinks you're a sucker and is indulging themselves and seeming to enjoy it. I would imagine in that world, the motivation to stay faithful gets ground down to a bare nub and becomes very hard to follow through on. Whereas if you live in a world where everyone values and upholds and mostly succeeds at living up to their ideals of remaining faithful to their spouse, it becomes both more easy and more pleasant to do so oneself. We are all much more socially influenced than we think and don't stand as islands alone with our internally- generated and maintained principles.
Also, curious to know what your Nietzschean outlook looks like. I’ve never read his work but I’ve always had some prejudice against him grounded in this Tolstoy quote:
“The whole world knows that virtue consists in the subjugation of one's passions, or in self-renunciation. It is not just the Christian world, against whom Nietzsche howls, that knows this, but it is an eternal supreme law towards which all humanity has developed, including Brahmanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and the ancient Persian religion. And suddenly a man appears who declares that he is convinced that self-renunciation, meekness, submissiveness and love are all vices that destroy humanity (he has in mind Christianity, ignoring all the other religions)”
While I don't agree with your generalizations about Joseph smiths abuse of power, I find your faith in the face of uncertainty admirable and want to let you know that while I don't think "world weary post apologetic faith" is more deserving of praise than "child-like faith", it is still deserving of it. Happy for you and praying for you.
I would remind you that whatever level of engagement your current motivation set lands you at now, the key is to evaluate where it will land your grandchildren! And if you are happy with how the forging of those links is going, that is most of the balk game
I'm interested in your viewpoint on plural marriage. For me I can't come to any conclusion other than abuse of power. I simply cannot accept D&C 132 as the word of God (particularly verses 52 to 54). Maybe I am wrong, but I just cannot believe that God would threaten to destroy someone because they were unhappy that their husband married other women. It's simply not consonant with anything I believe about God's character. I cannot accept that God has some secret reason why Joseph needed to have multiple wives, at first in secret, and against Emma's wishes. I wouldn't worship a God that would justify such things without explanation.
And this raises another tension: I would like to raise my future children in the church and with the same values, but how I do deal with the epistemological messiness? My wish-washy viewpoint of "some of it is true some of it isn't" isn't exactly a helpful religious message. But I think a synthesis is possible, I would teach that our religion is Christianity and our church is LDS. The church is where we go to learn about Christ and to worship and serve alongside others.
"But what is the mechanism, what are you actually doing in your mind when you try to have faith?"
I suspect a lot of people aren't *trying* to have faith, exactly. I think most people of faith fall into two categories
A lot of people were raised as believers and carry that forward throughout their life because it's so deeply ingrained. They don't really question it.
Of the people who do question their faith, or who were raised without it (or raised with a different faith), I think affirmation or conversion often come because of a profound experience (or several experiences) that are so strong and out of the ordinary that they attribute it to supernatural causes.
Surely there's a lot of people who are just Pascal's Wagering it as well though. They know it sounds implausible but they fear the possible consequences of disbelief so they work hard to keep believing.
One thing that bothered me was the unnecessarily narrow reading of "by his own hand, upon papyrus." While it may be that Joseph Smith (and perhaps most Latter-day Saints) believed that the Book of Abraham papyri were literally written by Abraham himself on the papyri that eventually ended up in Joseph Smith's possession, I think that this is not the best interpretation of the text. It's reasonable to think that what "written by his own hand" means is "this text contains Abraham's first-person account of what happened," not "this specific document in your hand was written by Abraham." A text could still be "by the hand of Abraham," even if it's a later copy. In fact, this is how some of the books in the Book of Mormon present themselves --- as first-person autobiographical accounts that were later compiled and abridged by the prophet-historian Mormon. This leaves more "wiggle room" for inconsistencies in the text, as original first-person accounts may have been re-interpreted and modified as they were copied.
Agree, I thought that was a flaw in the piece. The text saying "I wrote this myself" obviously doesn't mean that he wrote the copy we now have, any more than I wrote your original comment if I quote it in mine.
The "by his own hand upon papyrus" part is from the preface/foreword. Said preface was written by Smith from his own perspective to contextualize the scripture that follows.
Be really careful when using self-published Mormon church membership numbers. The number they report is NOT "how many Mormons are there?". It is "How many people have we baptized, who we don't have proof have died or have not reached the age of 110." And in many cultures it's really easy to convince someone to get baptized into random churches. Most people they baptize do not consider themselves Mormon and often don't associate with anything Mormon. It's not uncommon to take the list of local Mormons the church has, pick a name at random and go find them, and at first they're completely confused why you think they're Mormon but if you keep prodding and they're talkative you might get an "Oh yah, when I was a kid some Americans organized local baseball games and we did have to go down to the church and get baptized to participate but I've never been Mormon" or some similiar story. [To be fair, 90% of actual Mormons are mostly just annoyed at the small percentage of Mormon missionaries that do/did this as it creates years and years of paperwork for them as there's no practical way to get them off the list as it's maintained in SLC]
Actual analyses (e.g., reputable surveys that ask people "what religion are you") find about 5M Mormons. This is also consistent with other number the LDS church publishes, such as how many babies were born and blessed in the church. (You take 5M x Fertility Rate = about number of annual baby blessings.).
And roughly, Mormonism hasn't been growing since the early 90s. It's beaten many of it's peer religions that have lost membership, so it's got that going for it. But historically it's better to think of the growth as two big surges, mid 1800s it really benefited from 'come to America as an immigrant' and like 1950-1980 it really rode the Americana wave internationally 'bring America to you'). But it's not an unstoppable growing movement, it's barely holding steady over the last several decades.
TL:DR: humans are masters of cognitive dissonance.
1. "A factor fueling the fascination with ancient Egypt was that a bunch of Egyptian papyri were floating around, but nobody in the US knew how to translate them. A mystery! The Rosetta Stone had just recently been deciphered in Europe, but the knowledge had not yet propagated to the Americas. So when traveling antiques exhibitor Michael Chandler was touring around his collection of mummies and papyri scrolls, he frequently asked around for people who could translate what was written on them."
To be fair, it wasn't just the Mormons who thought that they could read hieroglyphics (and couldn't). Before the Rosetta Stone, there was a whole european tradition going back centuries of claiming to be able read hieroglyphics, and as often as not the phoney readings are more interesting than the actual texts themselves. ("Butter, eggs, milk for the cat, emmer, a card for Aunt Hatshepsut's birthday....)
Dame Frances Yates' phallogocentric and heteronormative magnum opus "Girolamo Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition" lays this out in detail. This book also is funny AF.
2. While the Book of Abraham should be enough to slay anyone not a full-on cult member, there also is the story of Mark David Hoffman, The Mormon Forger, which would be a tale of 169% pure 24K solid comedy gold, if it had not involved the deaths of innocent humans.
Long story short, he had an uncanny talent for finding old Mormon documents that contained information that the LDS church would just as soon not be made public., then selling these documents to the LDS church, then leaking information about those documents, which the church would sheepishly have to admit did in fact exist and were believed genuine.
Of course, the documents were forged by Hoffman.
The really funny thing is that the LDS leadership, who are purported to have a direct line of communication with Heavenly Father, authorized Hoffman large sums of money for these fakes and apparently believed them to be genuine.
The Tanners, who are Mormon apostates and Mormon folk devils, were among the first to call bullshit on these documents, even though their content was, on balance, embarrassing as hell to the LDS church and would have given evidence to a lot of things in LDS history that the LDS church would just as soon not talk about.
I had the opportunity to meet Sandra Tanner and thank her personally for the brave work she and her husband did for decades in near isolation. Their website I stumbled upon was foundational in my personal journey out of the faith.
Much of their work was simply surfacing documents the church didn't want surfaced.
The single biggest factor in my loss of faith was recognizing that the LDS church had a longstanding pattern of suppressing history and punishing researchers. They were not and are not good faith (pun intended) actors.
As a former Mormon I loved this review. I especially appreciate how the reviewer grappled with topics I've been debating: is there something about believing difficult to believe things and reinforcing that belief publicly that is almost a pre-requisite for strong communities? Is it the very act of performing that signalling that's required for strong communities? It's an alarming thought for me, and I don't know the answer, but I certainly haven't found as strong and dedicated of a community after leaving the church.
A pal of mine met a couple of Mormon missionaries a few years ago. They asked him for directions to a particular pub. Hopefully they also got to sample the forbidden delights of coffee and premarital sex
I'll be honest, I'm not impressed that this is something like three or four pieces on mormonism in a trenchcoat. Full disclosure I am a believer, but the author really wanted to deviate fully from discussing Abraham at some points. That is, we came for Abraham not for unrelated history regarding Joseph Smith's character.
Many of the criticisms are fair and the scholarship is well represented. It is very difficult to get stuff right as other replies point out.
Since this is often a rationalist venue, I will point out that generally speaking the negative approach is if you can find one seemingly proven negative claim Joseph Smith & co collapses, but the reverse positive position is also available! - that in many cases he appears to be a damn lucky guesser as a prophet would be.
The Book of Mormon says in several places it probably has mistakes of men in it. So the author has not read it, I am afraid.
Dr. Michael Heiser's (not LDS) work on an ancient belief in jewish and divine councils does seem to vindicate some of Smith's claims.
Finally, within the text of the Book of Abraham are parts where Jesus Christ is speaking as Jehovah. The org is caller the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Don't forget and bury that.
"I’m not exactly sure how to describe every component of the faith concept, but it’s got something to do with changing your credence in a proposition without good epistemic reasons. That doesn’t mean there couldn’t be good non-epistemic reasons. Info-hazards are a thing and our emotional system is deeply connected to our belief system. Having certain true beliefs can be the source of constant anxiety and self-doubt.
The coolest one is that you can use faith to solve the coordination problem."
This is exactly backwards. It's because religious communities manage to solve coordination problems that their sacred nonsense inspires faith - a perfectly cromulent epistemic reason!
That’s not an epistemic reason! It’s a practical reason. An epistemic reason would be something that is more likely if the content of the belief were true than if it were false.
Given that your community is clearly above average on many metrics, it's very likely that the special beliefs that guide it are true (or, even better, True, in a mystical sense that only the chosen few can fully grasp).
This is all in William Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief” (https://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/Clifford_ethics.pdf). The fact that acting according to some views leads to effective cooperation may be evidence that the ethical content of those views is true, but it doesn’t give any evidence at all that the empirical content about who said what to whom three thousand years ago is.
The fact that a part of a belief system is credible lends credibility to the whole entangled enterprise - this seems so obvious to me that it's almost tautological.
When many other belief systems that differ on all the physical and metaphysical claims do nearly equally well on the social and ethical things, that’s already been accounted for. Especially since the physics and metaphysics just isn’t very closely tied to the social and ethical stuff.
Sure, this would be a good counter-argument, one that I (for example) happen to find convincing. But it doesn't make the initial proposition have literally zero evidentiary value - it still has some, even these days, although trending downwards, which is related to why traditional religion in general is declining in the west.
If only there was another prosocial, love focused religion that was arguably as epistemically rigorous as you could get focused around this Jesus guy...
your comment was vague, but i assumed you had some specific "jesus focused" alternative in mind that you felt was epistemically rigorous, or at least, more so than mormonism.
No, your common sense read is correct. I do think most mainline Christian traditions are more epistemically rigorous than Mormonism, especially after reading this article. But that's not necessarily a high bar. I would just claim that I don't think Christianity is uniquely or disqualifyingly burdened compared to live alternatives. Burdened in different ways, but still a live possibility. Whereas Mormonism is exceptionally falsifiable and has it seems to me reasonably been thus falsified.
>Whereas Mormonism is exceptionally falsifiable and has it seems to me reasonably been thus falsified.
fwiw, i strongly dispute this claim. you may not have the time or interest to engage with brandolini's law and mormonism, but i assure you the faith is not "exceptionally falsifiable".
Fair, that was in some sense a compression in of itself. I would say although there is a large apologetic literature here, Mormonism makes unusually recent, concrete, checkable claims. I guess I'm mostly in agreement with the post author that with named nineteenth-century actors, surviving manuscripts, extant papyri, facsimiles, translation claims, court records, institutional records, etc. conflicting with surviving evidence in such a way, it certainly seems to carry a heavier epistemic burden. It's not logically impossible to rescue, but the Book of Abraham seems like a hard case to explain away.
I think the lack of material historical evidence is pretty difficult to overcome. Of course it isn't falsifiable, as an absence of evidence isn't technically evidence of absence, but in the case of a claim where we would expect there to be ample evidence, the lack of it is a pretty bad sign.
Every other ancient text describing events, typically comes with some material evidence that they happened, especially in literate societies. There isn't really any evidence that Atlantis existed, despite us having a written account of it's existence, and that's pretty good evidence it's the written account that's wrong, rather than the archaeological evidence which is wrong.
Perhaps. I'm not sold "algorithmic analysis of AI and decision theory" can do the the things religions do: bind families, sanctify sacrifice, discipline desire, comfort suffering, teach forgiveness, transmit values to children, and make ordinary people love their neighbors when defection would be easier. At least, there are many maladaptive shamanistic ways it might invoke the transcendent. But why tear down Chestertons fence without peeking over it first :)
And indeed that is just on the idea that religion coordinates people. Without invoking the stronger claim that love, forgiveness, sacrifice, incarnation, and redemption are closer to the structure of reality than cynicism or pure utility-maximization.
Didn't Immanuel Kant and other Enlightenment era philosophers/ethicists do pretty much that already? Derive love, forgiveness etc. from first principles without relying on religion? Not to mention you can get 90% of your "things religions do" list from just tribalism alone.
Enlightenment ethics did not arise in a vacuum. It emerged inside a deeply Christian moral world, and much of its account of universal human dignity looks a lot like Christian moral inheritance translated into philosophical language.
Also, the move from “humans are rational agents” to “every human has inviolable worth” is not trivial. Kant gives one of the best secular attempts at that argument, but I’m not sure he fully bridges the gap without smuggling in moral intuitions and frame his culture had already received.
re tribalism, it can get you family loyalty, in-group sacrifice, and norm enforcement. It does not obviously get you internalised forgiveness of the guilty, care for the weak stranger, love of enemies or the equal dignity of all persons. In fact, tribalism often points the other way. I think many Westerners imagine that if society became more tribal, the norms enforced would still look like the generally high-trust liberal-Christian inheritance they grew up inside. Looking at actual tribal societies around the world, that seems like a dangerous assumption.
So my worry is not that secular ethics cannot describe Christianish virtues. It probably can. My worry is if we actually reproduce those virtues at scale once we sever the metaphysical and ritual roots that once formed people and families around them. I’m not saying “therefore Christianity is proven.” But the Enlightenment may have inherited more moral and cultural capital from Christianity than it could independently regenerate.
But we're not talking about "independent regeneration". We are talking about Christianish AIs built by Christianish engineers trained on Christianish datasets and tasked with developing explicitly Christianish ethics system. Severing the metaphysical roots does not necessarily mean severing family ties, especially when family ties is explicitly one of the things you're replacing the metaphysical roots with.
As an ex-mormon, now hard athiest, I mostly enjoy these kinds of writings. I too find it curious how people keep their faith with "proof", acknowledged by the church itself, of many of these issues. I mostly agree with the South Park quote though. If it makes people happy good for them. I had a great time when I was a believer.
That said, the thing I find most frustrating in all of them is the idea that Mormon's are different than any other religion in terms of being false or full of contraditions etc...
I don't know every other religion but:
1. Mormon leaders are volunteers except for a few at the top. Those few at the top are not living ostentatious lives of luxury, fancy cars, yatchs, mansions, etc..., unlike many other religious leaders. Local leaders get paid nothing. Only support staff gets paid (cleaners, janitors, etc...)
2. Mormon's believe you are literal children of God and that if you're faithful you'll be like God in the afterlife. This always made more sense to me than most other religions in that it gave a point to striving to be better beause you can't be trusted with that kind of power unless you prove you can handle it. If you don't make it your are not sent to hell.
This seemed far more logical than the norm which George Carlin put so well: “Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time! But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money!”
The Mormon church expects 10% gross of your income (Tithing). Tithing is in the bible. The fact that (AFAIK) most other Christians don't do it always seemed odd. And, see #1, that money is not going to the leaders personal pockets.
And, to add to that, you're supposed to fast (go without food) for 24 hours the first Sunday of each month and further, your supposed to donate the food/money you would have used for that 24hrs for the church welfare program. Mormons have a welfare program, look it up, it's amazing.
3. Mormon's don't believe in "fire and brimstone" type hell. If you don't follow the rules you don't become a god. You still go to heaven. In the Mormon religion, hell is called "outer darkness". It is the absense of everything, utterly alone with no sensation. Very few people go there. That always seemed more logical to me then the contradtion George Carlin pointed out above.
4. Mormon marriage, "Sealing", always made more sense to me. In the mormon church you get "sealed", "for time and all eternity". You go to heaven and you're with your spouse. Vs "Until death do us part". The norm to me always seemed to consede non-belief in the after life. Why would you want to give up your spouse at death if you're both supposed to be in heaven after?
5. Mormons (from the book of Abraham) believe heaven is a place in this universe. That's the whole, the planet closest to where God lives is the planet Kolab, part. That, to me, always seemed more logical than heaven is in some alternate reality which is what most religions believe. Why add more magic?
Finally,, if you actually read the Book of Mormon and/or the Book of Abraham, they feel fine as scripture, at least to me. I'm not saying they are true or false, rather, I'm only saying, they don't say anything too far from what most religions teach. They tell a history of certain people (real or fictional) and they say the standard stuff like "be excellent to each other and party on!"
Anyway, like every religion, the Mormon religion has it's flaws, issues, bad parts, and contradictions and I believe it's false but it's no more false or flawed than any other religion. And, if you go by "you will know them by their fruits" they seem rather exceptional compared to many.
As a fellow ex-Mormon I agree with all this. With the possible exception that I loved a lot of the church while I was in it but it also made me deeply uncomfortable (I struggled with something like scrupulosity).
Sorry you got hit by the scrupulosity bus! I'm curious if you think the church should institute something like rumspringah, in addition to the anti-rumspringah super orthodox mission life (a place where some young people exhibit temporary forms of thought similar to scrupulosity) ? Or if its just a question of balancing the religious equivalent of type 1 vs type 2 errors?
I do think an LDS version of Nate Soares' EA medicine https://replacingguilt.com/ in the voice of <insert current popular speaker> would be quite the banger at Deseret Book for the teen/mission prep section!
Sorry for the delay. I've been thinking what to say and I'm not really sure the path forward here. I think things are already getting quite a bit better. There are certain behaviors that were majorly vilified previously that are now talked about in more humane ways. I think there is more sensitivity to shame and judgmental attitudes.
The rumspringah is an intriguing idea. When I was all-in I couldn't have cared less about the stuff I was "missing out on." It just didn't matter. It wasn't until leaving and seeing things differently that I've got some regrets and wish I had more life experiences. But that's also my huge criticism of ex-Mormons trying to relive an age that is gone and destroying their families in the process over.
Wow, I've been meaning to read Replacing Guilt for a while now and didn't realize it was Nate Soares as the author! I'll have to take a look.
> In the Mormon religion, hell is called "outer darkness". It is the absense of everything, utterly alone with no sensation. Very few people go there.
Wait a minute, so where do the atheists go ?
> Mormons (from the book of Abraham) believe heaven is a place in this universe.
Is it still possible for a few chosen faithful to transcend this Universe and be placed in charge of creating their own world(s) ? Or do they "merely" get to terraform planets in our current Universe ? Or was the whole thing made up by mormon-haters ?
In LDS theology, atheists who never accept Jesus or the restored gospel but live honorable lives go to the middle level of the three levels within heaven, called the "terrestrial kingdom". People who do not live good lives and do not repent go to the lowest of the three levels within heaven, called the "telestial kingdom". People who accept and live the restored gospel of Jesus Christ go to the highest level, called the "celestial kingdom". All those classifications include people's decisions after death, not just in this life.
Those who remain faithful can become perfect over time, eventually becoming like God. That's usually interpreted to mean that they are like God in all ways, including being able to create their own worlds. Whether those worlds are in our current universe or a brand-new one isn't really addressed in the doctrine.
Very informative, thank you ! FWIW, I think I must have heard the terms "telestial/terrestial/celestial" at some point, but got confused because they sound so similar.
The fact that Mormons believe that heaven is in this physical universe always seemed to me to indicate it was a religion developed by people who didn’t understand abstractions. So in my opinion not an advantage. (I am an atheist)
The Book of Mormon is about a fictional people and isn’t an authentic ancient text. At least the Bible is an authentic ancient text written in actual ancient languages (even if not always as old as it seems to claim).
"Moroni ... carr[ies] heavy golden plates from Central America to New York, where he buries them in the ground because he’s been told by God that this is where Joseph Smith will find them a thousand years later and translate them into English."
There are two theories in Mormon historiography as to where the civilizations described in the Book of Mormon were located. One is the Hemispheric Theory, which holds that the settlers spread over the entire Americas. By that theory, the final battle where Moroni resided and finished up the plates was at the site of Joseph Smith's farm in New York. The other theory says that the settlers couldn't have spread that widely and were localized somewhere, of which the isthmus of Mexico is the most favored location, because it pretty well fits such geographic clues as the Book of Mormon provides.
The above quote is the only explanation I've ever seen for why, in that case, Moroni traveled thousands of miles to unknown (to him) territory to bury his plates. But is there a record of this revelation?
This is not a book review of the Book of Abraham. It's a blog post about why Joseph Smith is a fraud. At ~14000 words, it's also substantially longer than the Book of Abraham itself (~3500 words), which kind of defeats the point of a book review.
It says some straightforwardly false things. The most egregious of these is claiming that Mormonism believes that the Book of Mormon is infallible, when the title page of the book itself says "if there are faults, there are the mistakes of men" [1]. Another clear mistake is mixing up the 1826 court bills (which only show that a trial happened, not the details of the case or the outcome) with Justice Neely's docket (published in 1873 by Methodist missionaries to Utah - the original has been lost, so its reliability is debated) [2].
There are a lot of instances where there's not scholarly consensus, and the book review takes one position and confidently presents it. I believe that the author has had many hours of discussions with missionaries and has read online about the church substantially, but they're clearly not an expert on Joseph Smith or Mormonism.
Agreed, there’s a handful of small but significant falsehoods that only people extremely well versed in Mormonism would notice, and they’re a lot of work to find the right sources to refute. (And no one here would care if you refute those points because it would look like nitpicking around the edges while doing nothing about the reducto ad absurdum which is the essay’s core goal)
The claim about the infallibility of the Book of Mormon seems like a clear mistake but I'm not sure about the trial thing. You're saying the reviewer mixed up some court documents but do those details matter? Is it true that people paid Smith to use seer stones to try and locate valuables? If so, then whether he was actually found guilty of "disorderly conduct" doesn't matter much - even if he was acquitted, that wouldn't save his credibility.
My immediate response to your closing argument is "those who can make you believe absurdities can also make you commit atrocities." Yeah, if God tells you that you were put on this Earth to do good works and raise this fallen world, you'll be motivated to do good. But if God tells you that you should join the Nauvoo militia to defend the faithful by violence, if God tells you that you need to burn down a newspaper office to protect the reputation of your prophet, if God tells you that Joseph Smith is allowed to sleep with your wife... you get the picture.
And I don't think it's correct to generalize from "this community is doing well for itself" to "therefore everyone should be in this community" because of the obvious selection bias - if you're a victim of the community, or even just someone who gave it a good try and couldn't muster up the necessary zeal to make it work for you, you are no longer part of the community, so your suffering doesn't get counted.
You could probably draw a similar graph for ancient Christianity, which started with a handful of heterodox Jews, had its leader publicly executed (something that you'd normally expect to be a major setback for a cult!), and somehow went on to become the official state religion of the Roman empire and ride its success to world domination. It wouldn't make the Roman conquests any less terrible for its victims.
there is nothing wrong with defending yourself against extra-judicial mobs, and a city council voting to remove what they have deemed a public nuisance (even if it is a printing press) is hardly an atrocity, and although the concept of "spiritual" polyandry was briefly practiced, no serious historian believes joseph actually slept with other mens wives.
also, the author made no claim that "therefore everyone should be in this community".
As an atheist reasonably tolerant of and interested in other people's foibles, I found this a useful if somewhat amateurish and poorly edited read. Basic takeaway for me, Joseph Smith's golden plaques are if anything less cockeyed than Christianity's triune god (for which I blame the effect of ill-digested neoplatonism upon simple-minded Judeans, but that's another story), if just as batty. But I appreciate a church whose leaders are modest, unpaid and seemingly significantly less corrupted than most, as well as what comes across a generally tolerant and unvindictive view of sin, sinners and the afterlife.
Others have already said this, but this is not a book review of The Book of Abraham, which is a real pity, because a review from a non-believing outsider (I myself am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) on the book of Abraham would have been fascinating to me. Comparing it to other Abraham narratives, examining the similarities/differences, etc. It was a real missed opportunity. You could even put aside Abraham the person and compare this text to similar texts in the Bible. For example:
Abraham 4:3-4
And they (the Gods) said: Let there be light; and there was light. And they (the Gods) comprehended the light, for it was bright; and they divided the light, or caused it to be divided, from the darkness.
Genesis 1:3-4
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
So similar, yet different enough to mean something. Singular God vs plural Gods. Seeing the light vs comprehending the light. Commentary that the light was bright. What does it mean? I don't know, talk to me about it, speculate, give me something to think about.
Instead the book of Abraham is just used as an excuse to explain in great detail why Joseph Smith was a fake and why believing his truth claims is silly. I've read so many of those arguments by now that the genre is just boring.
Well, near the end there was a bit of (positive!) commentary on the actual content, starting with "The Book of Abraham is short, five chapters, an afternoon’s read".
Deeply disappointed in this one. There's no attempt to steelman serious apologetic positions, leading to a one-sided, self-congratulatory beatdown of the outgroup.
On the one hand, I'd agree that it doesn't engage with the most up-to-date apologetics from the church, and frankly, I'd agree with a description of the review as one-sided and self-congratulatory. As much as I'm interested in the subject material, I can't see myself voting for this as one of my favored reviews.
On the other hand, the justifications that the review offers for challenging the material evidence, and then the repeated disconfirmations as the material evidence catches up with them, *do* reflect apologetics from the church in previous decades. And if an institution has a track record of generating apologetics which are a continual retreat from the evidence, which keep being proven wrong as the evidence advances, I don't think it's unfair to treat that group's track record as an illustrative example of motivated reasoning.
I appreciate the research and story-telling in this review, but I think the author's speculation about epistemology and the Mormon psyche has things somewhat backwards. The line of causation for their success doesn't begin with "faith". Look at all the items in the paragraph beginning "The Mormons do this really well ..." - it's all about their shared experiences, more than a shared belief system. In contrast with the Protestant Christian denominations, which do find unity in common beliefs (doctrine), Mormon unity is built on shared rules and traditions (practice). This makes sense considering their respective views on the role of "faith and works" in salvation. Also, seems consistent with comments from current LDS members above, who are very comfortable expressing doubts or disbelief while still considering themselves part of their religious community.
Shared experiences is a big thing for us, you're absolutely right. It isn't enough for us to believe the Book of Mormon just because we're told to. We believe and teach/emphasize that anyone can receive a spiritual witness about it. How this can play out is: "I used to believe because my parents told me to, but now I believe because I had the same kind of experience they had and now we share that together." Our faith is rooted much more in events, trusting witnesses to those events, and being witness to our own personal spiritual event, rather than subscribing to a set of beliefs.
"It isn't enough for us to believe the Book of Mormon just because we're told to."
"Our faith is rooted much more in events, trusting witnesses to those events, and being witness to our own personal spiritual event, rather than subscribing to a set of beliefs."
In practice, this distills to "we are told to believe the BoM and subscribe to a set of beliefs by rooting our faith in events, trusting witnesses to those events, and being witness to our own personal spiritual event."
Which is to say, it's turtles all the way down. The implicit and explicit family/community pressure to believe and conform is immense. That's a feature, not a bug.
Former Mormon here, and I want to push back on this a little. (Only a little, though.)
I agree that Mormon unity is based on shared rules and traditions. However, several of those rules and traditions themselves connect to affirmations of belief - or at least, lack of affirmations of disbelief. Many rituals that bind the LDS community together are centered around the temple (baptisms for the dead as youth, marriage ceremony through temple sealing, etc.), and the temple recommend interview requires you to positively affirm a testimony of several of the core principles of LDS teaching, including that the current church president is a prophet of God and that the gospel of Jesus Christ was restored. If you don't believe those things, you either claim you do, or you can't participate in those rules and traditions. Another repeated ritual is the monthly testimony meeting where members testify of their shared beliefs. If an individual has beliefs that don't match the officially approved ones, they can abstain or only share the ones that do match, but they can't share "I have a testimony that [official LDS belief] is false" even if that's a true statement about their personal testimony.
Expressing doubts is fine. But when your bishop asks "do you have a testimony of [core teaching], you either say yes or get shut out of the most important traditions. "I believe with caveats" is okay, "I don't believe" is not.
> Wouldn’t it be nice if all humans on earth could enter into a collective brainwashing ritual where we all ended up thinking playing cooperate in the Prisoner’s dilemma is the correct thing to do?
Well, maybe. But there are at least two problems with this plan.
The first one is that some people's brains -- like mine -- are just broken. They cannot make themselves believe things that are obviously false, no matter how many times they chant "Jesus is real". Several theists told me (on separate occasions) that if their eternal salvation depended on believing that the sky is green with purple polka dots, then when they looked up at the sky, this is what they would see. If they saw anything else, they'd make an appointment with the optometrist. But I cannot do that; no matter how much I want to believe that the sky is green, when I see a blue sky, I cannot help but believe that it is blue. And I've met other people like me, so I'm pretty sure I'm not just some one-off genetic freak.
But freaks (even numerous ones) can be easily dealt with (and have been throughout history). The other problem is the price; and the price is as high as it is insidious.
In order for your goat-sacrificing ritual to work as intended, you must on some level believe that it actually does *work*. Not merely as some instrumental social engineering hack, not as a fungible prosocial exercise, but as an actual mystical act of communion with your very real god(s). Ok, maybe your religion can handle a few skeptics, but by and large the average person must believe in goat sacrifice. But beliefs form networks. In order to believe in the Mormon god, you must also believe that, against all evidence, Jews came to America by way of Egypt; that it's possible to find Spanish silver by looking into a hat; that you must entrust your money to a proto-crypto-bro; and before long you'll find yourself believing that the Earth is young and possibly flat, that gay people should be stoned to death, and that the stars are just little lamps in the sky and life is a magical ineffable gift from God and many other such things.
And this is actually fine most of the time. The average person will never encounter the stars or the curvature of the Earth or indeed gay people, and thus all the things he believes about all that stuff have no impact on his life. But if you want to move humanity forward, toward greater and greater feats undreamt of by even the ancient prophets, then you need to have a healthy contingent of people who will believe that the sky is blue even when everything they've ever been taught tells them that it's green with purple polka dots. And you need to allow these people to ask questions, even when your holy book already has all the answers.
It's a tough choice. To paraphrase another visionary, you must either allow your mind to correlate all its contents thus enabling you to perceive terrifying vistas of reality that will make you go mad from the revelation; or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. There is no middle ground, not really; eventually, you will choose one or the other -- and some of us don't even get to choose.
>In order for your goat-sacrificing ritual to work as intended, you must on some level believe that it actually does *work*. Not merely as some instrumental social engineering hack, not as a fungible prosocial exercise, but as an actual mystical act of communion with your very real god(s).
Yep, that's why Nietzche said that God was dead, almost 150 years ago now. It's kinda amusing, and sad, that the atheism discourse, in the main, is still at a lower level of sophistication than that.
I'm an atheist myself, and even the same kind as Bugmaster (can't make myself believe), but I see very little galaxy-brained about it.
The interesting part, to me, is that when I sit down with my more tolerant mainstream leftwing friends for a beer, and talk about some of the many, many discrepancies and flat-out lies by the establishment, they'll frequently not even contest it and merely claim that these lies were meant well and serve the higher purpose of keeping the system together. On one notable occasion, a colleague talked me out of investigating something (successfully, I might add) precisely because he thought it was true, and told me I'll just paint a target on my back if I do so. Beforehand, he publicly said the exact opposite.
Of course, mainline religious conservative christians, which raised me, aren't better in this way. Thus is it seems to me that this isn't something special too this or that particular minor sect; It seems to me like it's the primary organizing and cooperation mechanism that humans always use everywhere.
But if it is so, the current leftwing mainstream (I'm primarily talking about urban academics, although urban lower class is even worse as far as I can tell) nevertheless seems pretty terrible. The conservative environment I grew up in was significantly happier, more communal and more functional. Going by the numbers, I get the same impression; TFR, for example, in my ancestral home is still relatively healthy at ca 1.9, while urban leftwing academics have some insane sub-1 average by most estimates. Currently, it holds itself together purely parasitically by siphoning the young from populations with a more healthy age pyramid. That's not sustainable.
It doesn't seem like we disagree here. My point is exactly that the lies that "were meant well and serve the higher purpose of keeping the system together" are in fact harmful instead. It's terribly naive to expect that the next galaxy-brained attempt at brainwashing people with the fresh set of noble lies would finally usher in the long-awaited utopia.
I haven't seen the alternative yet, though. Every single society I'm aware of runs on, as you put it, a (frequently-not-even-fresh) set of noble lies. The few ultra-cynics like me I've found are overwhelmingly unabashed rational egoist hedonists, at most utilitarist hedonists, constitutionally incapable of forming any kind of large-scale society, not even on the level of the already badly working lefties. They're themselves entirely dependent on the substrate of a greater society.
From my vantage point, it's the one who tries to build a new society on hitherto never seen principles who is galaxy-brained. Not that I do not sympathise, I'd love for it to work and am trying in my own way. But the deck is stacked against us.
I think both sides run on hate and fear; the only difference are the proportions and the targets.
Leftists hate the conservatives and fear them a little, but they are absolutely terrified of each other. At any moment, any one of them can call in a hate mob on any other one just for being insufficiently ideologically pure. This is why they're always trying to one-up each other tolerance-wise.
Meanwhile, conservatives hate the leftists of course, and fear them a little; but they're absolutely terrified of minorities. At any moment, a million Mexican immigrants from Somalian Haiti can flood the country, take all the jobs, and eat your cats and dogs; meanwhile, the leftists will give them free forks and spoons, assuming they have any left over from transgendering your kids.
Both sides believe that their way of life is under constant assault, and that drastic measures must be taken to preserve it. I've had both a leftist friend and a conservative one tell me, in almost the exact same words (though on separate occasions), that in order to save the country what we need to do is put the other side into reeducation camps -- it's for the Greater Good, you see, and thus for their own good. Only when half the country is in camps can the healing begin.
Meanwhile, I'm standing over here going, "hey can we maybe skip the camps ?", but no one listens to me...
Being extremely long is a time-honored tradition for ACX book review contests. People vote for the ones they like, and enough readers here like the long reviews that a significant chunk of the finalists tend to be long.
Sure. And I have been a fan of long reviews in the past. But there comes a point when an author’s presumption to other people’s time is not commensurate with the insight or quality of what they are offering. This piece is horribly self-indulgent. The result is that it is offensive to dump this in people’s inboxes and ask them to read it. Or at least, a warning about length seems in order. If this was an old school magazine publication, I could tell just by looking. But on Substack and in my Gmail, I didn’t realise what I was being asked to read through. It was well over 20 minutes before realising I wasn’t even halfway through the damn thing. Which wasn’t even that good. Hence, offensive.
There are some authors whose posts leave me wanting more even when they go on for tens of thousands of words; others whose writing feels like a slog after just a few sentences. This review was more like the latter. It seems like the author read enough previous reviews to pick up that the successful ones tended to be long, and, like a B-movie director realizing they needed to hit the 90-minute mark in order to qualify as a feature, added filler.
It's almost like the perfect religion would be one in which God gave man a free choice to believe or not - perfectly rational to accept, nothing refuting it, a lot of evidence in its favor, but nothing proving it in such a way as you wouldn't be free to disbelieve it. Perhaps a religion in which God wanted us to freely choose him, and saw our condition and suffering and expressed solidarity with us in some form or another, perhaps at the point in history in which he could maximally offer the choice to follow some form of true morality and help us out to as many people as historically contingently possible. Perhaps also where this religion was also united to some form of philosophy as well that made it eminently reasonable and provided a full set of epistemic and metaphysical principles.
Do you think such a religion would be good at solving coordination problems, the way the original essay describes?
Would it be perfect/ideal only for its believers, or would it also be perfect/ideal for those who evaluate the evidence and come to the conclusion that it's probably not true? Some of those people will exist, if the evidence is as you describe.
(I assume you're talking about Christianity, but I'm interested in hearing where you think the religion you describe would fall on those measurements whether or not it's actually hypothetical.)
It probably would, but to a less good extent as Mormonism - it almost seems like the more cult-like and irrational the religion is the better it is at solving coordination problems. So while any belief system or even things like race or sports can help build group identity and therefore build trust, extremely weird beliefs or tight knit groups would be better than bigger and more diverse groups that are more universalist.
So the ideal religion I'm describing (yes Christianity) would probably have an advantage of universalism and spreading to a bunch of different groups, and could help with coordination, but this very advantage would also provide a weakness in terms of its ability to ward off all other belief systems.
As far as for solving coordination for people who don't think it's true, I don't know. To be clear though, I don't think this religion's perfection comes from its solving the coordination problem, but more towards providing the author (Scott) with a belief system that could give him light in his eyes, while also not being absurd since he says he couldn't do one with receipts disproving it.
I think it's also important that this religion I'm describing, in order for it to be truly perfect, the important considerations for choosing it or not shouldn't be really different people evaluating the evidence differently. That would actually be a seeming imperfection. The perfect religion would be one where your choosing it or not was a truly moral choice, where the philosopher and the midwife were both afforded a free choice to choose it or not.
Personally, I have what I consider to be fundamental philosophical objections to this idea: I think it demands doxastic voluntarism (I was going to link to Scott's essay on this, but I just realized it's a paid article,) and I don't think doxastic voluntarism is a good description of human behavior in general. For the most part, I don't think people decide what to believe; we can engage in behaviors to willfully expose ourselves preferentially to evidence we think will support or oppose beliefs, based on how they flatter our biases, but for the most part we cannot think that our available evidence indicates that something is probably false, but decide to believe it anyway.
Some people, more than others, seem to be able to induce cognitive dissonance by deciding to behave as if they believe, until they start to emotionally accept a proposition as true. But most people, at least, cannot go from a position of "I'm pretty sure this is is wrong," and decide to change their mind about that.
I think that, given acceptance of a truth claim, people are free to make active choices about how to respond to it. So if everyone were convinced that a God existed as a matter of fact, they could still choose whether or not to worship it or follow its instructions. But I don't think that asking people to make a decision about whether or not to believe in God is something that an ideal religion could do, and I think that encoding the assumption that this is a reasonable thing for a god to ask into its doctrines is a flaw in any religion that believes such a thing.
"For the most part, I don't think people decide what to believe" - Why don't you think so? I mean, I agree you can't just "decide" to believe something that you think is false. But certain things you can believe on a sort of decision basis - for example, do you believe in human dignity? Are you against infanticide?
There's no "evidence" that scientifically "determines" a moral choice. That's why you're responsible for it.
"I don't think that asking people to make a decision about whether or not to believe in God is something that an ideal religion could do, and I think that encoding the assumption that this is a reasonable thing for a god to ask into its doctrines is a flaw in any religion that believes such a thing"
Well I would say that metaphysically God is rationally provable/obvious. We just don't have good metaphysics these days. So really it's just a reasoning error. But I think most people (obviously mostly referring to Westerners) when they think of God they're really making a decision for or against Christ. And they typically when deciding to reject have more (immoral) reasons to reject - which you can be condemned for. And sometimes you're morally responsible for your ignorance. Just as one small example - if your rejection of Christianity is sort of because you support (insert immoral sexual act) and you also think that the religion was made up by Constantine, just because you're incorrect/ignorant doesn't excuse your ignorance - your ignorance in fact is morally condemnatory and you can be held to account for it, because you could seek the truth but choose not to.
So, I already replied to your restack, but to address this here where the formatting is easier.
I draw a distinction between beliefs and attitudes or policy decisions. I think that the question of whether I "believe in human dignity" bundles in a bunch of different assumptions on its own, and needs to be decomposed to be properly addressed. I have values and preferences, and I think that something like "human dignity" can sometimes be useful to discuss as an abstraction. I'm personally opposed to infanticide, but I'd categorize that as an attitude, not a belief. I think that a question like "Infanticide is bad: true or false?" is incorrect framing.
I strongly disagree regarding God being rationally provable or obvious; this is a question I've devoted thousands of hours of my life to, and I certainly don't think we can expect to resolve it satisfactorily in the space of the comments here. Personally, I don't feel the arguments for this position hold up well under scrutiny. There are certainly intelligent people who do, I've discussed the issue with many of them at length. I think I can point to biases which lead them to privilege arguments which favor their religious belief, while they would probably argue that I have biases that predispose me to reject them (although personally, I think I would be more happy living in a world where I could be convinced that a belief in God was well-evidence and most likely true.)
But, I would contend, under a worldview which proposes the existence of an omnipotent God which takes an interest in the beliefs of humans, and morally judges them for their beliefs, we probably should not expect to see highly intelligent people, who care about being rationally rigorous, who have strong moral impulses and no particular acts they want to commit which are religiously condemned as sinful, examining the evidence and deciding that God probably doesn't exist. If there is a God which uses people's belief to judge their morality, it has made that distinctly non-obvious, in the sense that intelligent people do not consistently converge on it. People might contend that thier beliefs are "obvious," but they don't agree on what the obvious correct belief is.
But, in a world with no god, where people have cognitive biases that lead us to systematically deviate from correct judgment in predictable directions, it's unsurprising if large numbers of people draw conclusions like "a god exists" even if they're untrue.
"this is a question I've devoted thousands of hours of my life to, and I certainly don't think we can expect to resolve it satisfactorily in the space of the comments here."
- Perhaps you can't be convinced/have all your objections in your opinion satisfactorily dealt with, but I really think it is very simple - the uncaused cause argument is pretty unanswerable in my view, despite the recent attempts in the West by mediocre minds trained at less than mediocre "universities," the lesser sons of greater sires, to reject all of its metaphysical and philosophical tradition. Additionally, the fine-tuning argument is good enough for moral certainty, and it's pretty transparently ridiculous and silly the obvious attempt to posit a clown-universe "multi-verse" in order to escape God.
"who have strong moral impulses and no particular acts they want to commit which are religiously condemned as sinful,"
- The lack of a desire to worship God is itself sinful, as a lack of gratitude for existence.
"examining the evidence and deciding that God probably doesn't exist. If there is a God which uses people's belief to judge their morality, it has made that distinctly non-obvious, in the sense that intelligent people do not consistently converge on it"
Well, I would say "God" (not the deist God, who I maintain is rationally provable/obvious) as in Christ has made his existence both obvious and hidden - "I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children." His existence is obvious to those who seek Him, and He came to earth to save us from our sins (which we no longer recognize, because our culture is based on denying/rejecting God and Christianity/our tradition, but which the Greco-Roman world did). But hidden from those who demand he prove himself in ways which you have no right to demand e.g. an experiment.
"in a world with no god, where people have cognitive biases that lead us to systematically deviate from correct judgment in predictable directions, it's unsurprising if large numbers of people draw conclusions like "a god exists" even if they're untrue."
- This is really just the imaginary present world for you where you assume there is no God. But I don't think that's what a world without God would look like at all, because such a world is metaphysically impossible. We cannot at all be sure that a world without God would have predictability, in fact it would seem it would not, because if there is prediction there are laws and therefore God. Again, I don't actually think it's that complicated, you simply are committing metaphysical errors that go towards my point that being smart isn't actually the way to salvation, because smart people can make very basic errors. It really is so simple an 80 IQ person can get it, but a 130 IQ person could miss it.
So, I've explored arguments such as the prime mover and fine tuning arguments at length in my own time, I personally don't think they're actually convincing when examined in depth. Obviously you disagree, but the fact that different people will come to different conclusions is well accommodated for in my worldview.
But when you say "the lack of a desire to worship God is itself sinful, as a lack of gratitude for existence," I think it's worth recognizing that there are people who are very, very deeply devout, who live their lives around gratitude and worship for their creator, who examine the evidence further and ultimately come to the conclusion that their beliefs are probably not true after all. The idea that they're drawn away from their religion by a desire to sin is, in my experience, not usually borne out in reality.
There are people who're not particularly intelligent, who think god probably doesn't exist, for straightforward and simple reasons. There are people who aren't very intelligent, who think that god must exist, for straightforward and simple reasons. There are highly intelligent people, who think that god must exist for complicated reasons, and highly intelligent people who think that god must not exist for complicated reasons. There are intelligent people who think god must exist for simple reasons, and that people who try to turn it into a big philosophical discussion are fooling themselves, and there are intelligent people who think that god doesn't exist for simple reasons, and that people who try to invent justifications for believing anyway are fooling themselves.
In a world where a god doesn't exist, or doesn't judge people on their belief or lack of it, there's no reason that people must easily be able to converge on a single answer on whether a god exists or not. But in a world where a god does exist and judges people on their belief or lack thereof, I think we should expect much more convergence than we actually see, where people with good intentions who examine the question with an open mind consistently come to the same conclusions.
"I think it's worth recognizing that there are people who are very, very deeply devout, who live their lives around gratitude and worship for their creator, who examine the evidence further and ultimately come to the conclusion that their beliefs are probably not true after all. The idea that they're drawn away from their religion by a desire to sin is, in my experience, not usually borne out in reality."
- Yea, I deny this hypothetical. I do not believe that there are devout Christians who then examine their beliefs and realize they are probably not true, and then simply stop believing and also don't sin/aren't drawn away by sin.
First, because Christianity is true, and so further rational inquiry would not hinder faith, but would help. Sure, you can read someone wrong, but you're morally culpable to seek truth, and we are all drawn to truth. So if you read, say, Reza Aslan and are blown away, not only are you dumb, but you are also morally culpable for the sin of sloth.
Second, we are all drawn towards sin due to concupiscence. So without God's grace, we will be drawn towards and choose sin. Your hypotheticals are based on the idea of a sort of ethereal sinless mind that is just a regular "good person" and simply isn't convinced by the arguments. I deny there is such a person. All men's minds are darkened by sin, both will and intellect. And if you do not attempt to act as you believe, you will eventually believe as you act (Fulton Sheen).
"in a world where a god does exist and judges people on their belief or lack thereof, I think we should expect much more convergence than we actually see, where people with good intentions who examine the question with an open mind consistently come to the same conclusions.
This is really just a vague restatement of the argument that the diversity of religions proves or indicates the lack of a true one. I both 1. do not think we should expect more convergence because of A. historical contingency and B. The way is narrow and man is sinful and because 2. I think we actually see perfect contingence, where all those who seek find, although some imperfectly (think the virtuous samurai who tries his best and seeks the good)
I'm not really sure the point of the extended discussion of "how strong evidence are the facsimiles" if the only response is "maybe the copy is wrong or maybe Abraham hired an Egyptian artist" every single time it's pointed out that the interpretation makes no sense? I feel like this entire part could have been skipped if it's totally irrelevant.
Also, I think the title is misleading; this seems like a review of the entire history of Mormonism as much, or more than, the Book of Abraham.
> Details of Smith's paternal line go back to his 3rd great-grandfather Robert Smith from Lincolnshire, England who settled in Massachusetts colony during the Puritan migration.
Which Scott has written about before (e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/12/puritan-spotting/). Joseph Smith moved to upstate NY (which is explicitly appears on the puritan checklist) at the age of 9. The whole period of Mormonism's founding happened during a much more widespread religious revival (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Great_Awakening) which, according to that article "rejected the skepticism, deism, Unitarianism, and rationalism left over from the American Enlightenment" which were some of the defining characteristics of those 18th and 19th century Puritan descendants. And we already know those Puritans achieved all of the pro-social benefits in the 1600s. I think that Mormonism is just the result of some of those people attaching themselves to a particular religion during a period of widespread religious revival, then moving to the desert long enough to form a separate community that could remain partially insulated. I'm not sure it has anything to do with the specifics of Mormonism, except insofar as groups which require sacrifices are more likely to stay together.
But even putting that aside, I think that calling a group "pro social" only by looking at the group itself, and not its effects on others, is entirely wrong. For example, they did have to get rid of the polygamy stuff, but there are fundamentalist LDS churches that still practice it, and it has substantial negative consequences on others (and on its own members, in fact).
This doesn't seem like a book review - it's instead an analysis of the history and authenticity of a book. It barely discusses what the book is about or what it says about life.
Independently, this seems like a long way to go to make the point "Many religious people are not relying on the historical provability of their faith, and may not even care about it's literal truth, but instead value community/tribalism," given that I think essentially everyone agrees with that, at least about religions other than their own.
In an earlier post, I called this review "somewhat amateurish and poorly edited", but it also appears quite poorly researched, at least where anything outside of Mormon church history is concerned. The author makes flippant reference to "mummy powder" which he claims was used as an aphrodisiac: "One day you’re Ozymandias, king of kings, the next you’re smeared on some guy’s dick to help get him hard. By "mummy powder" he means mummia, a medication composed largely of bitumen; part of the 12th to 17th century pharmacopeia, it was believed to have been scraped off the outer coverings of mummies. At no time was this concoction believed to have aphrodisiac properties.
* Fac. 1 is not obviously a funerary scene. The other examples show what looks like a sarcophagus on the table, with a very distinct style. Fac. 1 and the corresponding papyrus show a guy with his leg sticking up, suggesting he is alive, and drawn in a very different style.
* Look at the four characters that the author claims connects the discovered papyri with the GAEL, and the corresponding four characters in the margins of the GAEL. Is that how you would draw those characters if you were JS’s scribe? I don’t see the fit the author claims. It is not clear to me that this demonstrates that the BoA translation came from this exact fragment.
* The author claims the GAEL contains drafts of the BoA translation with source characters in the margins. He says it is “ironic” that JS said he was unable to give a translation of Figures 12-21 in the Caption, when he did translate them into the BoA, as evidenced by these characters being in the margin next to sections of text on the GAEL. I think a better reading of the situation is that JS’s comment that he was unable to give a divine translation of these characters is evidence that the GAEL is not in fact a draft of the translation, but something else - maybe a post hoc attempt to logically deconstruct the text.
* On a different topic, the story about hundreds of large boxes labeled “$1000” in the vault of the Kirkland “anti-bank” is not directly from Warren Parrish but comes at a late date by people hostile to the church. Other sources say the vault was small and could not possibly have held those fraudulent props.
There is plenty that is odd about the BoA and church history, but this narrative (based on Dan Vogel’s work - maybe he is the author?) isn’t quite the smoking gun it looks like at first glance. I’m glad he thinks we are awesome people though!
Facsimile 1 is definitely anomalous when compared to a typical lion couch scene. His depiction of the lion couch scene is unusual in the ways you highlight and strongly contrasts with the more conventional lion couch scene in Hor's companion Book of the Dead. The same is true of Facsimile 3, which bears striking deviations from iconographic convention without parallel among other known papyri. The illustrator may have been influenced by funerary stelae from the Greco-Roman-era tombs at Abydos - in contrast to all known depictions on papyri, the vignette appears to be fairly unstandardized when it appears on the Abydos stelae. It seems that the illustrator of Hor's Book of Breathings was rather unorthodox in his choice of iconographic elements and was probably specially commissioned to create a unique work.
Thousands of words, 200+ comments, and no-one mentions the obvious parallel with Tibetan Terma revelations? Squint a bit and it's most clearly the same process - people with claims to special powers, using magical means to find special buried artifacts, and then deciphering the (otherwise incomprehensible) stuff into religious teachings.
Makes me wonder how much more widespread these practices were, for American Joseph and a whole bunch of Tibetan Lingpas to have converged on mostly the same thing.
Why is the LDS church considered a branch of Christianity but Islam is not? The two are more similar to each other in many ways (some noted here) than either is to Christian Orthodoxy, Catholicism or even the more populous Protestant denominations.
I'd argue that while Mormonism and Christianity are doctrinally different, day-to-day, they are interchangeable in a way Christianity (or Mormonism) and Islam isn't. Plus, Muslims don't hold to the Christian label the same way the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does, it's even in the name!
Are you wondering why the religions differ, or why people view the religions differently. They view them differently because Islam has more day to day changes.
For most of it's history Christian scholars have considered Islam to be a heretical form of Christianity. That's why in Dante's "Inferno" Mohammed is placed in the circle where schismatics are punished. People seem to have started thinking of it as it's own thing around the 16th century, when the Ottoman empire was conquering big chunks of eastern Europe. Also the Reformation probably changed things, as now Christians needed a new category to describe Protestant denominations as opposed to things like Islam.
Self-id seems important here. Mormons claim to be Christians while Muslims do not.
And then there are the naming conventions. We are familiar with the pattern we see with "Buddhist" and "Calvinist" and "Lutheran" which we understand to mean a disciple of Buddha, Calvin, and Luther, respectively. "Christian" fits this pattern and suggests a disciple of "Christ". This seems to be a more straightforward and conventional definition of "Christian" than we get from appealing to specific doctrinal positions like Trinitarianism.
There's also the historical/sociological element. Mormons emerged from the larger Restorationist Christian movement.
Self-id is certainly important, but it is just one of the manifestations of Islam not being considered a branch of Christianity (by the Muslims, in this case), not its cause.
Did Mohammed think of himself as a Christian? I don't think so. Joseph Smith did. Islam seems to think of itself as a restoration of the original monotheism. Mormonism seems to think of itself as a restoration of the original Christianity. I don't think that self-id is a result of exogenous categorizations.
People have good responses but I didn't see anyone say what I would consider the difference. Islam sees Jesus as a prophet (as I understand it) but Mormons believe Jesus is the Savior of mankind, the only method to return to God.
Apart from self-ID, there are at least a couple other things.
One is that Mormons were culturally an offshoot of the Western Christian and specifically the New England Puritan tradition. Smith and most other early Mormons come from Puritan country, and Smith himself scores around 30 points by my count in Scott's "Puritan Spotting" checklist ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/12/puritan-spotting/ ).
The other is that Mormons believe that Jesus is a divine figure worthy of worship, even if they see him as distinct from and subordinate to God the Father, while Muslims believe that Jesus was a mortal prophet like Abraham, Moses, etc. We already have the precedent of the Arian Heresy being considered Christian, and their defining believes about the nature of Jesus are in broad strokes fairly similar to Mormon Christology.
LDS doctrine includes Jesus as a savior. Islam includes Jesus as a prophet. LDS doctrine is fundamentally, radically different from either in that there is not just one, eternal, transcendental God in LDS doctrine. LDS doctrine is functionally and devotionally monotheistic, but its broader metaphysics is pluralistic and is often more accurately described as monolatrous or henotheistic than as classical monotheism. There is even a Mrs. God.
As is proud tradition for ACX book reviews, this isn’t a review of the book mentioned. It was an interesting read though. Reading through the comments was just as interesting, especially the nitpicking from the Mormons.
The review was far too long. Most of sections 1-5 could be shortened to one example and “the rest is like this.” Either you already have your Bottom Line written, or you think Joseph Smith was delusional or a fraud. So many people really want to believe Mormonism is true in some divine sense. If you show them hard evidence that it’s bunk, they’ll go search for the minimum required to give them permission to keep believing. We all do this to some extent, it’s just funny to observe it from the sidelines with clarity.
I’m an atheist, though like most outsiders nearly all the Mormons I’ve met have been great people and I have nothing bad to say about them. Given that the author clearly wanted to address that issue, it would have been interesting to tackle it a bit more. How do atheists get the benefit of a great community without having to believe false things? It’s an open question.
P.S. to the author: I can tell. The tells are pretty obvious when you spend enough time reading them. I’m quite surprised no one else has mentioned it given the vitriol this normally provokes, but good on ya for slipping it through.
The rules prohibited AI this year and I'm not looking to get anyone in trouble. If its good enough that most people don't notice, is there really a point to the witch hunt?
Is there any point to the vagueposting if it's not?
For my part, I found the review shallow and repetitive, which often applies to LLM-generated writings, but with other flaws which I typically don't see coming from those programs (awkward sentence fragments, repeatedly ending sentences with prepositions). I don't recall seeing any "it's not just x, it's y" or similar, but of course a human could've gone through and edited those out.
You can't say to your buddies in the tavern "hey, you know Mary in the next village, with the wart and the black cat? I'm surprised no-one has said anything about her neighbour's cow suddenly getting sick and dying after they had that row, but fair play: I know I wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of her!" and then decry witch hunts.
I’m not convinced you need epistemic distortion to have long lasting, prosocial, high trust communities. See Quakers, Japan, Scandinavia. Secularism has only had 200 years to try founding such things; religion has had a much longer head start.
There seems to be a re-occuring pattern with "updated" versions of Christianity/Abrahamic religions. Some guy declares himself to be a prophet, and brings an updated version of the holy book, which is conveniently written in the local language instead of an ancient dead language. He tells everyone to follow this new version *very* devoutly and literally, fight for it if they have to, do everything he commands in the name of God, and, incidentally, let him take multiple wives. Like you noted, this is pretty much what Mohammed did with the Quran. We also see versions of this in the Moonies, the Rastafarians, and (to some extent) the Black Nazarenes, as well as a lot of small fringe cults. I suppose that makes for a religion that's much easier to believe than some obscure ancient text with lots of dull or confusing moral lessons and very few tangible benefits.
You can in fact rationally choose to believe one religion over another, and this is an excellent example. As a Catholic I of course cannot rule out that there was all kinds of similar evidence about Christ that was lost to time. But of course, there is no evidence to support that idea, lots of evidence against it, and that’s just what we have to deal with. Meanwhile, Mormonism is all based on well documented fraud. One of these things simply is not like the other.
Hmm, more of a religious rant. So being agnostic (chance of God ~50%), I always wonder why the atheists never explore the possibility that there really is a God. Oh and living in religious Christian society is easy. I live as if God exists, even though I don't have any belief (or non-belief). It is the right way to live. So why not, I ask.
"Wouldn’t it be nice if all humans on earth could enter into a collective brainwashing ritual where we all ended up thinking playing cooperate in the Prisoner’s dilemma is the correct thing to do?" I really hope everyone here has watched Pluribus. It's about exactly that.
A free e-book about how the Book of Abraham could be an adaptation of a Semitic source (addressing the question, "Where the papyri themselves literally written by the actual hand of Abraham?")
And lastly, an extensive rebuttal to a list of anti-Mormon claims. It's a PDF, and I don't see a way to link to a specific page, but The Book of Abraham points start on page 24
It's a short one you talked about faith I will share with you what I know about faith yes it can be a superpower it Shields you because when you know the mustard seed you understand that mustard seed doesn't ask to understand it and knows how to grow without understanding and without needing to understand and with an understanding that no matter what happens source is inside of you whether you want to call it God whatever it doesn't matter like this preacher on serenity says I don't care what you believe just believe in something I believe in my co-pilot being my Creator and I believe that the sentence I am the the way the truth and the light was not written the way it was supposed to be written and there wasn't supposed to be a moniker at the end telling you about pray to me after Jesus said don't pray to him to look within to pray in the closet I think that I am the way the truth and the light the am is capitalized and they forget to tell you the full sentence I am that I am I will be what I will become I'm not going back to capitalize I'm legally blind without glasses and if I don't already need them close to trifocal poor can't buy grammer and punctuation tools for you and the Google mic is better than the free stuff but no grammar no punctuation I hope your intellectual ability to read this helps you understand what I'm trying to say look inside that copilot that's God that's the spark that's the what I believe ball of energy that was spinning and spinning and spinning before the Big bang and created the Big bang and what is 7 Days in a cosmos comparative to 7 Days on Earth entirely plausible both happened plausible that Lucifer could have been Adam and the biggest trick Beezelbub played on everybody was to put the am in lowercase in that sentence and have basically people praying to supposedly God's only begotten son what was the first commandment again Jesus is not God even he said don't pray to him he was flawed I read the Bible's not in the words I read it in the words a long time ago and realized there was no story from Mary Magdalene or Judas but there was this Old testament telling me my Creator was an angry jealous spiteful God that was sitting on a throne with a bunch of angels around him singing beautiful songs all day long while he has only a ghost beside him instead of a wife and he has to have an angel go down so he has a son by proxy what the hell is that how much respect is that for your creator so I made my own and my Creator was the perfect Pearl and split apart to create and in so doing is not an equal it's equalitative of power yeah that keyboard mic really likes to try to change that equalitative word a lot of the times because of the agenda and the keyboard listening tagging words that need to be subtly changed on you so it is best to go back and at least skim through my post I don't always do it and I really should know I didn't used to have to either way Jesus said the church is of Satan why would Jesus want the Old testament in there and the lineage of the Kings especially sorry but Jesus didn't walk with Kings did he he said the meek shall inherit the earth not the preachers in their jet planes mansions with their gold all over their Church while the homeless sit on the stoops at night because it's the only place that's halfway sheltered yeah I don't think Jesus would agree with Donald Trump either I don't think he'd walk with him because even if he's not part of the Ring he is protecting the Ring of pedophiles those monsters letting slip victims information and photos and in the meantime making sure every predator is completely safe and unnamed do you see how that works just because you didn't do it doesn't mean you're not just as guilty for protecting those who do and they never stopped sorry I went off because it does connect these are satanists running the world they are direct minions of Beelzebub who is the real Satan and the real Genesis tells the story of the real first created woman in the Genesis 1 he made them both man and woman and then all of a sudden halfway through Genesis 2 it's like oh we made Eve out of Adam's rib that doesn't sound really like what the hell okay so you made it Eve out of the bone marrow does it have genetic properties because either way if Adam and Eve were the only two people on Earth where did Cain and Abel's wives come from and so there you go with the science part of an alien species which makes sense with the shifts like the agricultural and the war weapons it does every man every religion has a seed of Truth but you have to look within when it comes to Faith sorry this went a little longer than I thought it would but I hope this helps you
Lot of hate for this one but I loved it. Long after AI is superintelligent, I still will probably rely on Scott to curate blog posts that match my taste exactly.
I think the discussion of the facsimiles needs a bit of fleshing out. For example, the author asks whether it is so implausible that a priest might have performed a sacrifice on an embalming table in ancient Egypt. I truly do not know the answer to this. Did Egyptians often practice human sacrifice? This seems like a question Egyptologists would have some information about. Maybe this is well known and I'm just showing my ignorance?
The writing is certainly shallow, repetitive, and meandering, but I have never seen Claude output anything as awkwardly broken up as
"In a very literal sense, faith is the opposite of rationalism: you’re knowingly trying to believe something with a greater conviction than what is warranted by the evidence. That’s epistemic rationality though. Instrumental rationality is about achieving The Good. In that sense, faith can be very rational."
otherwise enjoyed the writing/narrative structure but really takes you out of it when you hit one
e.g.,
"Read these doctrines as a design spec. They are almost surgically optimized for psychological and prosocial output. Death anxiety: you’re eternal. Sense of purpose: you were chosen by name. The problem of suffering: you consented to this in advance. Tribal bonding: the people in the pew next to you are your pre-mortal siblings, also chosen, also noble, also great. Long-term motivation: infinite, the trajectory only goes up."
(1) Not all book reviews need to be book reviews, but I do wish this one had more to say about the actual contents of the book.
(2) To better make his point about epistemic versus instrumental rationality, the author is both unfairly negative toward Joseph Smith and unrealistically positive about Mormon community as it actually exists.
(Also, the gap between the "modern" LDS view on what Joseph Smith was doing with the Book of Abraham and what Joseph Smith said he was doing is not as big as the author makes it out to be. Joseph Smith's first big writing project after the Book of Mormon was a "translation" (his word) of the Bible that was *openly* not a translation in the usual sense of the word. It was understood by all that Joseph Smith was not sitting in front of Hebrew and Greek manuscripts when making this so-called Bible translation. Instead the project mostly involved receiving "missing" parts of the Bible by revelation with the KJV text as a prompt.)
"The problem of suffering: you consented to this in advance."
Yikes, is that actually part of Mormon culture (implicitly or explicitly)? That sounds like something that would backfire very, very horribly in the context of an abusive relationship, and all the more so because it would be your entire community reinforcing that message.
The teaching that we accepted this life while knowing it would contain suffering is used in the community to answer questions like "why did God let this happen?", but I haven't seen it used to claim "you should accept your situation as it is and not try to change it". Mormon culture puts a lot of emphasis on agency, works, and being an active force for good in your own life, not just accepting yourself or your situation as they are.
Mormon culture can sometimes cause problems with abusive relationships, but not for that reason - more so because marriage and family are strongly encouraged while divorce is allowed but discouraged. There's often an expectation that both parties should try to build a marriage that can last for eternity, and if it doesn't last for eternity it was a failure.
The last section gives an inadequate answer to the question it starts with: what makes Mormonism specifically "one of the most highly optimized, high-trust, pro-social engines of human coordination on the planet"?
As the review explains, Mormonism is built on absurd and falsifiable doctrine, so it's built up the muscle of habitual rationalization. But so has every other theistic religion, as well many secular movements like flat-earthers. Every devout theist has the light in his eyes of literally believing he was personally selected by God etc. etc.
But most other religions don't disproportionately represent higher levels of wealth and education today. Neither do flat-earthers and the like.
So what makes the difference? Is it not rationalization but also the doctrines of pre-mortal existence, foreordination, the council of heaven, and eternal progression?
That needs to be justified further -- because most religious communities share some of those doctrines, but are still in aggregate much less "successful" (in secular pro-social terms) than the Mormons. While a few lack some or the other of those doctrines, but are even more disproportionately successful than Mormons (e.g. Parsis/Zoroastrians or Hindus in the USA don't believe they signed-up in advance in a divine council).
This is a response on your comments so that you get the algorithm but specifically for annoyed is that what his name is whoever was bitching about my f****** cursing start out no f****** commas no f******. No f****** grammar like he couldn't figure it out and if he couldn't figure it out maybe he's intellect isn't smart enough to be listening to because when you actually do the studied science you will see that someone who has no glasses is poor and has no vision and is just above the poverty helpline I wear no glasses on this because I can't see it with my glasses legally blind means I'm disabled you want to come pay my bills you go right ahead then I'll do all the proper grammar and sentence structure you want I'll leave a space for my paragraphs someone with 4.2 English yeah right okay you go right on you you play your own game little boy @AnarchyCynosure if you reply are you going to use more than one sentence or do we need to get you a binky
> Maybe there’s some other pro-social, faith-increasing collective brainwashing ritual we can all participate in together that will make the world a better place.
I am tired of the assumption rat-adjacent people seem to keep making that, since people around them highly value truth, surely compromising on truth should bring them dramatic gains since it's a big sacrifice. It gets some people some benefits sometimes, but I don't think it's good for individuals or society for people to pursue pragmatic falsehoods more.
> If my religion is a bunch of crap, then fine. But I still got a great life, and a bunch of people who love me.
I have a decent life and bunch of people who love me and *don't* want me to believe falsehoods and have 5 babies and abstain from homosexuality. It's better.
(Yes, it's possible those people will ditch me someday! But it's also possible a Mormon community would do similar.)
One of the big problems with the "pragmatic falsehoods" model is that it really really depends on the falsehoods. Who designed the falsehoods, to what end?
And also, once you believe the falsehood, your future reasoning potential drops dramatically.
The more you are dealing with complex circumstances that the falsehood writer didn't foresee, the larger the chance of a bad reaction between one of the false beliefs and reality.
I am wondering if this was written by a foreign English speaker? Maybe not ESL but bilingual from early age? I'd buy that to 60%, so to speak.
And I'm very intrigued by some of the deeply diving details and other completely flippant basic inaccurate dunks. And the wild swinging between generous attempts at steelmanning to laughing at the obvious absurdity.
Not unhappy this exists but would recommend the other commenters who linked sites like mormonr for a more comprehensive coverage of the historical questions in question.
For anyone who is fascinated by the question posed in this review - whether there are ways to do what Mormonism does for human civilization, without religious delusions - I highly recommend Tove K's series on madness and civilization, especially
> I don't mean to say that delusions were, or are, the only reason why humans cooperate on a larger scale. When humans see that cooperation works, they tend to join in. Delusions are only needed in order to overcome the initial collective action problem.
As a (non-Mormon) boy growing up in Salt Lake City in the 1950s-early 1960s I learned from (Mormon) friends about the celestial kingdom vs. the telestial kingdom, righteous souls becoming Gods after death, etc. So for that reason alone I found this "review" to be very stimulating and informative.
On a deeper level, I found this "review" (essay, more properly) to be very good. It's not a review of any book but it drives effectively at an inference that would explain a great deal about religion, not just the LDS church but other religions as well: the moral content of fact-free founding myths can create community, and institutionalized rationalizations can effectively reinforce such myths. Doesn't work with everyone though.
Also, the myths are separate from whatever spiritual, mystical, or what have you experiences that religious founders typically have. The experiences are spiritually and biologically real, but such experiences come prior to interpretation.
> That’s epistemic rationality though. Instrumental rationality is about achieving The Good. In that sense, faith can be very rational.
Religions have existed for a long time. No one sat down with a game theory textbook to carefully design the instrumentally optimal religion. No one calculated the cost of the sacrificed goats to work out if the costly signaling was worth the price. No one worried what effect having such obviously false beliefs would have on the overall progress of science. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/
Throughout history, there have been many cases of religions fighting each other for "heresy".
Religion is mostly not a functioning coordination mechanism. It's functions mostly as a memetic disease. Some varieties might have some coordination benefits, but overall, the mix of benefits vs bad effects is generally not great.
Nobody sat down with a biology textbook to design the human eye, yet it functions quite well.
Religion has prevented some progress in science, but it also enabled infrastructure to allow it in the first place. There's a selection process going on. You cannot do science effectively unless you have a stable society with working supply chains and enough surplus to allow people to read books instead of plowing the field.
Regardless, why do we care about history? Religious people in the modern world still go to school to study physics. And the church is not preventing anyone from building AI or rockets.
> Nobody sat down with a biology textbook to design the human eye, yet it functions quite well.
Sure. Because of evolution. Notice that, in general, organisms with better vision have a survival advantage.
There is some sort of memetic pseudo-evolution selection pressure on religions.
Most of that pressure is towards fitting the flaws in human psycology, in order to spread better. Not towards promoting game theory cooperation.
> You cannot do science effectively unless you have a stable society with working supply chains and enough surplus to allow people to read books instead of plowing the field.
Granted. But also, some ancient societies seemed to divert a lot of their limited agricultural surplus into building temples, not doing science. I don't know how much credit, if any, religion should take for stable societies with agricultural surplus.
> Regardless, why do we care about history? Religious people in the modern world still go to school to study physics. And the church is not preventing anyone from building AI or rockets.
There are more modern examples of religions causing problems, whether it's trying to ban gay marriage, or trying to get creationism taught in schools.
There do exist some religious people who study physics, but most of the best physicists are atheist. It turns out it's somewhat hard to fit the full religious indoctrination package, and the full scientific questioning of everything, into the same brain.
Religion has lost much of it's political power since the middle ages. So religious ability to interfere with the practice of science is greatly reduced. But not zero.
I think that, as a general principle, giving power to nonsense has a tendency to backfire in hard to predict ways.
The existence of priests and monks and monasteries has given people the education and free-time to sit and study things and is therefore beneficial for knowledge production. Scriptural scholarship is historically linked with general scholarship. What is the realistic counterfactual to compare this against?
Anyways, I broadly agree with many of your points, but the real crux for me depends on a more sophisticated understanding of history than I have right now.
> The existence of priests and monks and monasteries has given people the education and free-time to sit and study things and is therefore beneficial for knowledge production.
The priestly classes extracted a large fraction of the available agricultural surplus, and sometimes, when they weren't wasting their time on the bible, a few priests did useful things.
If you throw enough money at any old random thing, there will be the odd useful side effect (amongst all the harmful ones).
If you were trying to design an institution of learning, you could trivially do a better job. If you were trying to be fairer, you might compare to other real historical institutions, such as craftsmans guilds, and rich landowners who were curious.
Yes, religious scholarship is "associated with" other scholarship. Modern day homeopaths try to associate themselves with real doctors, and the only reason they aren't more successful is the real doctors generally want nothing to do with the homeopaths.
Long ago, there was less evidence available. Religions were less obviously stupid. Religions also had more social power so it wasn't a good idea to publicly disavow them.
I'm not actually sure there is a "realistic counterfactual" to compare with. Given that religion is real, any hypothetical past counterfactual that doesn't contain religion is in some sense unrealistic.
The goal of the hypothetical is to show the general principle that believing false things can backfire in various ways. Even though a hypothetical world in which no one ever believed any false thing is unrealistic, I suspect this hypothetical world is better than our current one.
> If you were trying to design an institution of learning, you could trivially do a better job.
Don't you feel this type of sentence triggers some alarm bells? It reminds of statements like "if you were trying to design an economy superior to capitalism you could trivially do it" forgetting that it has to work in the real world with real humans and institutions and be stable over time.
You cannot say the existence of religion has been bad for science unless there's a better realistic counterfactual. I can make the claim that Newton was bad for science because there's a hypothetical ultra-Newton that would've one-shot modern physics.
> I'm not actually sure there is a "realistic counterfactual" to compare with.
I imagine it as an optimization process where a point moves along a loss curve. Any local change is "realistic" and global changes "unrealistic". I.e. whatever institution you implement has to be compatible with the society that already exists. The evolutionary analogy would be that "realistic counterfactual" means going down a different evolutionary path in the past, while "unrealistic" would be a one-shot jump from fish to hyper-fit Octocrabs that instantly conquer the world.
"realistic" here also implies robust to perturbations. A very spiky local minimum will instantly collapse, while a flatter basin is stable. The analogy here could be that capitalism is far more robust than communism.
This implies that when evaluating the sentence "religion was historically bad for science" you need to compare it against other institutions that could've realistically evolved without instantly collapsing.
> Don't you feel this type of sentence triggers some alarm bells? It reminds of statements like "if you were trying to design an economy superior to capitalism you could trivially do it"
What about "if you were trying to design a an ecological system that's superior for food production (ie basic farming) you could trivially do it".
I think that the statement you gave here about capitalism is mostly false. (Well it wouldn't be too hard to design something that was 90% capitalism with a few obvious improvements, it would be hard to design something that was totally not capitalism, and still better.)
I don't feel that this type of sentence, in general, triggers alarm bells. I think that it's false in the example you picked because capitalism is already pretty good as an economic system. There are theorems that say that capitalism is optimal. Those theorems involve unrealistic assumptions about externalities not existing. But they still suggest that capitalism is far better than any old random thing.
> You cannot say the existence of religion has been bad for science unless there's a better realistic counterfactual.
In a sense, fair. But by that same sense, you can't say that the existence of science has been good for science if you can't make a proper counterfactual without science. The standards you are applying seem to rule out historical "x has been good/bad for y" in general.
> I imagine it as an optimization process where a point moves along a loss curve. Any local change is "realistic" and global changes "unrealistic". I.e. whatever institution you implement has to be compatible with the society that already exists. The evolutionary analogy would be that "realistic counterfactual" means going down a different evolutionary path in the past, while "unrealistic" would be a one-shot jump from fish to hyper-fit Octocrabs that instantly conquer the world.
Ok. But imagine that "realistic" world. The fish evolves into a slightly different fish. This evolutionary trajectory isn't what's likely to happen if evolution was left alone to do it's thing. It's like there is an omniscient being with the power to make tiny tweaks to DNA who is slowly guiding these fish down a path towards the hyperfit octocrab. And this introduces an element of sophisticated long term planning that evolution doesn't have.
As someone who grew up Mormon yet stepped away ten years ago, I feel such a strange relief of no longer living in this space of “ how can I make the impossible make sense.” Mormon me would have read this article unscathed hearing only my faith shaped message. However for myself (and a lot of friends and family) we leave not because the evidence got good but because of the inherent paradoxes that draw you in ultimately give you permission to go.
Biased a bit from having skimmed all the other comments, but whether it's AI or an organically poor native command of English, the writing was pretty painful on this one. Editing as well, I did not enjoy being constantly yanked around on tangents while trying to juggle an increasingly complex web of plot threads and "hold that thought"s in my context window. It's the sort of post that I make myself finish reading to make number go up on the Scott Completionist achievement, but would have ducked out early if it were on any other blog. Somewhat tired form, too: "lol religion is fake" is so 2000s, "maybe we threw out the baby with the bathwater, whoops" is so 2010s. Yes, the coordination problem remains intractable, and LDS has a lot of narratively-interesting elements to distinguish it from standard Boo Xian fare. But I feel like I've read this general argument many times before, much more eloquently too. Sometimes on this same blog!
Contrast to last year's Joan of Arc review, for example - that's doing apologia ITT steelmanning right, and in a deeply entertaining, well-written way too.
Okay, so I know next to nothing about Mormons, and I going off what I just read, but...
What Joseph Smith did to these women is sexual abuse, right? If not outright rape?
Even leaving aside the obvious crushing power difference, about 7 of the wives were between 14 and 17 when he chain-married them. And given that he married about 30 wives over three years, it seems unlikely that he maintained any sort of durable relationship with them.
Like, I feel like the whole article is very euphemistic, "bang their wives" and such, and from what little research I've done it seems most of the women spoke up very little about their experience of the ordeal. The sources focus on the scandal, the breach of norms, not the women's lived experiences.
But... we have to read between the lines, right? Of *course* women who were sexually abused by a man their community sees as a martyr prophet, who were groomed into keeping the relationship secret, wouldn't conceptualize the experience as rape, and wouldn't ever publicly speak up about it in those terms.
If we look at the facts, at the judicial and military power that he had and apparently used, at the humiliating position these wives would be in, seeing him publicly claim with indignation that they didn't exist, it's hard to imagine that most of those marriages were made with the women's consent even by the standards of the time, let alone modern standards.
What's going on with facsimile 2? The cropped parts of it that are stated to contain nonsensical characters appear nowhere in the full image of the facsimile.
Which contains those characters from the crop, although written with different handwriting.
You can compare the Abraham papyri characters with the characters in the original printing linked above and see that they are the same (although maybe a bit hard to read)
Exactly where it is indicated by the crop. I.e. on the right side/top-right. Although since you're not seeing it I'm probably misunderstanding what you mean. Or you're confused by the fact that they're in differently written copies of the same characters.
What do you mean "differently written"? It's supposed to be a crop of the exact same image. Why would there be any difference?
I've put the images side-by-side and drawn an arrow pointing to a character from the supposed crop. Could you draw another arrow pointing to the same character in the full image?
I drew lines between the 2 characters and then also the adjacent ones.
Btw the Mormons had many different drawings of the same facsimile. The one published originally in their newspaper is one of them. The crop I believe is from one of the copies from the Kirkland Egyptian documents.
There is one canonical one released by Joseph, right? Why is there any inconsistency? A) that's a completely different character- even if I had to copy this by hand I expect I could do a better job. And B) why would the post author use a crop from a low-quality copy rather than the real image they had just posted above?
This sounds like it was meant to be a reply to another comment.
Ah! Yep. Thanks
The presence of extra elements doesn't inhibit reading the character within the GAEL system because each line or dash of a character, in the grammatical schema of the GAEL's strange language, is an independent signifier building on a base character. The "grammar" of the GAEL focuses on each character having multiple "degrees" of meaning, each building on the one prior, the transition from one degree to another indicated by adding marks to the base character. Each character was a semantic matryoshka doll - a core indicated by the base character, with additional semantic content added with each mark until one symbol can equal paragraphs. So the presence of extra elements doesn't at all impact the identification of a base character.
So how did this questionable document get from Cairo to Cleveland ?
That was the bit about mummy unwrapping parties, wasn't it? Michael Chandler, antiquities dealer and mummy salesman, brought them to Joseph Smith for translation.
This seems basically normal. I've got a pot sherd from Mesopotamia (I think?) sitting around somewhere. "How did this questionable sherd get from the middle east to Australia?" Well, my dad was working on archaeological digs over there in the 80s and one dig had crates of unwanted pot sherds. Since it was the 80s, they let anyone on the site take some home.
The boxes of rocks covered with money thing is likely untrue - a later invention, popularized by Fawn Brodie. It's also pretty unclear what went on between Jane Law and Joseph Smith, sources either don't exist or are unclear. But it's clear that contemporaneous folks were upset, both about the failure of the KSS and about the implementation of polygamy!
My reading of Kinderhook Plates is that Joseph Smith tried to pattern-match one symbol from the GAEL and then moved on, and didn't pay them much attention afterwards, which is interesting - why was he purely in intellectual/secular mode there, in contrast to the very mystical translation process of the Book of Mormon?
In fact - the Book of Mormon translation process is the most interesting comparison to the production of the Book of Abraham that exists, and this review almost completely glosses over it. How does Joseph Smith go from producing hundreds of pages in a few dozen days to laboring over the GAEL and the Bible "translation" for much longer? The Book of Mormon is a much harder project to wrap your arms around as an outsider, I suppose.
I agree that this review doesn't seem particularly interested in covering its material with any real depth. The generated image also smacked of pop science. If I hadn't read several of the other finalists already, I'd be seriously concerned about the quality of contestants this year.
You know there's a lot of us here that maybe not on your forum but low brow weak-minded unwashed masses that have divergent minds that think in a similar pattern to the top to bottom thinker and like a quark jumping helixes when you refuse to keep your mind open that your theory might be wrong and you should question all theories and fully test them you are no longer a scientist that is true to the science or a reviewer that is true to the review even if you don't read if you just skim like I do because I can't follow along with the Mormons I'm sorry they kicked me out because I drink coffee and smoke cigarettes that wasn't even in the f****** s*** that was Joseph's wife and excuse my French I've got a sailor's mouth Joseph Smith was one of those that Jesus talked about false prophets they do miracles you want to say everybody wants to say it's in times I want to look at the lineage of the Kings that's so important why Jesus didn't walk with them no I could write a book but the last time I showed any of my book that I'm writing to make a type of graphic art novel short story like the elfquest comics used to be but a little thinner than their big book like about 10 pages of writing and 10 pages of pictures but when you don't open your mind to all possibilities because nothing is impossible only highly improbable you shut off the improvement you shut off me back and forth discussion you shut off the ability to evolve because you stay stagnant to your ego now I failed every math class I ever took but I know damn well the Fibonacci sequence is highly flawed you've got no Dark matter numbers no Dark energy numbers how the f*** you breathing out only all at once just like the other theory of over imploding how the f*** you breathe in all the time you can't the universe is freaking a breathing entity it contracts and expands just like every other piece of life in this 3D realm if you can visualize it and measure it and everything in some manner even if it's only one then it's there and it already has its blueprint you don't get the image it on there okay you don't get to say to the cork or any of the other stuff it's not that until I look at it that's stupid and dumb and ridiculous we are all given a blueprint and then the free will to do what we want if you can't handle neurodivergent thinking that might bring in new ideas even if it seems pop logic to you you might be wrong hell for how long did we think the Earth was flat and the sun revolved around us if you want something sooner back when I was growing up they told us eggs coffee and chocolate were bad for you all the time and high cholesterol was bad for you and now look at the studies no you don't want cholesterol off the charts but if you're a genetic family has a propensity for certain things and you know that your mother has a propensity for the same thing you do and she lived until she was 90 and you didn't do a damn thing to change your lifestyle which was high cholesterol COPD my sister however the age of somewhere in between 50 and 55 did everything the doctor said she was dead before she even reached 70 my brother he stopped doing everything except for smoking weed and he was like 62 and could not walk across the kitchen to the sink from the table without an inhaler because he wouldn't go to the hospital because it was covid and if he'd gone there they would have incubated him and he would have died because he wouldn't need incubation he just needed oxygen but it would have been labeled this is covid and we all know it and you all of the verified peer study reviewed all of that b******* critics of AAA status you guys are pandering to a crowd that doesn't exist we live maybe other people exist but even in our rugged lives of trying to keep everything balanced completely straight not a house low income housing no I'm never heard by people because they don't want to hear about my theories because I never graduated just they don't want to hear my theories about faith believe me I have asked many preachers and they look at me like I'm stupid question then how is that truth what is fantasy in this realm to you might not truly be fantasy it was fantasy to believe that man would fly remember it's one thing to review and give constructive criticism or at least to the best of your ability respect the person for sharing what they wrote this is why I won't write my book because you all one will ignore it because it's not peer-reviewed or triple A and they definitely don't want to hear about the Fibonacci not adding up from the last two and they definitely don't want to add that to the fact that they do not know what happens past the golden ratio it doesn't stop okay and it has different you don't you breathe in you breathe out you don't know he's breathe and breathe out the same it's not always only this one pattern same with the mandelbrot every single living thing has its own blueprint and that's what the mandelbrot is we are but insignificant in the cosmos as far as species go what are we like still in the womb and we think we know everything and we think that nothing that we think might be fantasy could ever be true that's a shame such closed mind
This is unreadable. You need to learn how to use periods to separate your thoughts when you write if you want anyone to engage with you or read what you wrote.
You have no excuse for not knowing how to start and end a sentence and use proper punctuation at whatever age you are. It is not hard to learn. Everyone else here can do it, and there is a reason why we do.
Bingo, white spacing too. I'm pretty sure regardless what age you (OP) are, or modern culture, they start to teach grammar at nearly the same time as spelling. I get writing was different in the 11th Century where paper was a premium, this isn't then.
Banned for this comment.
I live in Europe and my closest connection with Mormons is reading Twain's Roughing It (he hated mormons) so I enjoyed reading this. I don't see you or David say anything particular that's wrong.
Funny enough, that is also my closest connection to the Mormons. I've got a tattoo of the blue jay from Baker's Blue Jay Yarn on my forearm, going to drop another acorn into the hole.
I have a top-level comment below where I explain more.
I've now read it and I can't disagree but religious history is just one of my favorite things and I don't really care if it's a bit sloppy. Just feed me the slop!
And I don't mind if you enjoy slop, but I'd prefer it if the author would post it on a different blog.
I don't really follow this comment. There seems a lot of depth on the book of Abraham here, which is the reviewer's subject. We can see that a lot of work has been put in to show how symbols and images match between these facsimiles and other Egyptian art, and to explore the arguments and counter arguments for what's going on.
David's right to say that the translation of the Book of Mormon isn't much covered, but I think a reviewer couldn't determine whether the Book of Mormon was accurately translated or not, since the golden plates are gone, and has instead stuck to lines of argument where there is evidence.
But he does do a lot of digression into the overall early history of the movement and of Joseph Smith's life. And he talks about Kinderhook Plates as a relevant comparison.
So I think it would be stronger to either:
1. Get the digressions into history and biography right (several small errors based on relying only on secondary and tertiary sources there, in contrast to his Book of Abraham sections where he does actually meaningfully engage with the primary sources)
2. Leave the digressions out and focus on the production of JUST the Book of Abraham
3. Do a proper comparison of all the times Joseph Smith produced purported scripture, which would include the Book of Abraham, the Bible "translation" (absent), the Book of Mormon (translation/production process completely glossed), and Kinderhook plates (present)
Yes, I agree (I just think that doesn't negate the quality of his core argument, and Brenton had over generalised the specific points you made).
On the topic of the boxes, I feel a lot of the intermissions are lacking in quality. I believe quite a bit was drawn from Early Mormonism and the Magical Worldview, which relied quite heavily on interviews from locals (the affidavits in Mormonism Unveiled) decades after the fact and once people had much to gain by claiming whatever would hurt Joseph's reputation the most. While we do have much more on Joseph than we do Moses, most people weren't keeping daily journals and lots of information we have about Joseph was from far after when events actually occurred.
Well he doesn't cover the competing church versions of BoM translation, nor the theories that he copied key ideas from existing literature and stories of the time.
Smith bounced between something like linguistics and inspired translation.
He had his entire childhood and teenagerhood and young manhood thinking up the stories of the BoM, that stuff had stewed and swirled in his mind his whole life. The follow-ups had not.
Funny to compare the attitudes of the Mormons who see this evidence and still believe, versus Scott´s position in the latest Fatima-post: "If you witness a miracle, you must convert".
This isn't a favorable comparison; both are wrong. The Mormons, because "con artist lies for power" is a simpler explanation than "the chosen representative of an omni(potent/scient/benevolent) being endorses forgeries and mistranslates so thoroughly as to not be translation at all". Scott, because seeing something you don't have an explanation for, just means you saw something you don't have an explanation for, and *doesn't* give you permission to endorse the first crazy unfalsifiable story someone hands you. If you apply Scott's Fatima-post epistemology to David Blaine, you'd be immediately forced to believe in magic; after all, you saw something crazy you can't explain, and therefore you must buy the first explanation handed to you. Thank goodness he has a level-headed wife, a helpful readership, and the genetics to not see the visual effects. Otherwise, his epistemology in this area would have turned him Catholic.
Well said.
I'm doubtful. If Scott saw the sun start spinning, I'm fairly confident that he would seek more information and try to investigate more thoroughly. But if one has become convinced, after investigation, that a miracle has occurred, you are obligated to believe in the miracle. What other alternative is there?
When you say "believe in the miracle", you're combining two things that need to be cleanly separated. The first is, "I had a wild perceptual experience". Yes, you should definitely accept this.
The second is, "I saw a magical suspension of the laws of nature, which is explained by <metaphysical story>". Stop right there, huge mistake, you are obligated to *refrain* from accepting this, if you want to be rational.
People see wild stuff, for which they have no explanation, all the time. Uncontacted tribes see airplanes overhead. Our ancestors saw the sun. Normies see David Blaine do street magic. The right thing to do when this happens is to admit ignorance *and* resist the temptation to accept bad explanations, just because they're "explanations". Admitted ignorance is far better than false knowledge. When you get so uncomfortable with ignorance that you accept the first thing someone hands you, you end up joining a cargo cult, or believing the sun is a giant chariot of fire, or thinking David Blaine has superpowers, or that the Virgin Mary makes weird shapes in the sky.
If you go on to investigate what you saw, and still can't figure it out, you *still* don't have permission to accept "miracle" as an explanation. For example - no amount of investigation would have allowed medieval philosophers to figure out that the sun is a giant ball of gas undergoing nuclear fusion. Pivoting from frustration to "therefore God" was still the wrong answer; the right answer is "dunno yet, maybe someday".
Your assertion about Scott is falsified by his whole post. He unambiguously says his proclivity to accept miracles is so strong, that he had one of the most serious arguments of his entire marriage about it. This piece makes very clear that his wife, his readership, and his visual-phenomena-resistant genetics, are all that saved him from bad epistemology converting him to Catholicism.
I disagree. Belief can never rise to the level of 100% certainty, yet life requires that we believe something. When in doubt (as we always are) one must accept the preponderance of the evidence as being most probably correct, even if that level of certainty is not very high.
When I used to teach psychology, I would a demonstration that went this way: I would show them a chair, and ask them to help me test the hypothesis that there really was a chair there. They would have a lot of fun having me stand on the chair, drop the chair, strike the chair with something, etc. Yet every time the chair passed these tests, I would explain to them that there was always an alternative explanation: we might be having a mass hallucination, the chair and I might both be a hologram, etc. "Can we ever be 100% certain that there is a chair here?" No, we can't. But most of the evidence supports the conclusion that there is one, so we accept that.
Admittedly, I've never heard of a "miracle" that met this level of skepticism, but if I ever find myself in the presence of a being that could snap it's fingers and change the universe around me, while claiming to be God, I think I would probably accept the preponderance of that evidence. I think you probably would too.
Your epistemology still fails the David Blaine test. Meaning: if I parachute David Blaine into a tribal village in the Amazon, and the villagers follow your epistemology, then, they end up believing David Blaine is truly supernatural. After all, he meets all the criteria: he's doing crazy inexplicable things and he's claiming superpowers, and so therefore, preponderance of the evidence, he must have them. Rationality is systematized winning, but you're describing systematized losing.
That might be the best conclusion they can come to, given the evidence they have. Note that incorrect conclusions are sometimes the best one can come to, while keeping an open mind, of course. I take as given that enquiry is never fully completed.
I think there's a degree to which this is reasonable, but we also have to acknowledge that not all "miracles" provide similar levels of evidence, and we're not always working against similarly heavy priors.
I don't think that the Fatima miracle was ever a hugely persuasive miracle, because if the whole belief structure of Catholicism is true, it doesn't particularly predict that this is the sort of thing we ought to expect to happen. Like, one of the best documented and attested to miracles of all time is that... the Virgin Mary supposedly appeared to some children to tell them to expect some sort of sign, they gather a bunch of people, and then... they saw the sun do a bunch of weird stuff? What about answering prayers? What about helping people who're suffering? What about the sorts of miracles written about in the Bible, or stories of early saints, which would not only be really impressive if well attested to, they actually appeared to serve functional purposes?
If you actually saw God personally part the heavens and deliver a coherent message to you in all his divine glory, I think that would be much, much stronger evidence for a particular religious framework... but you'd still have to weigh the possibility that you've gone crazy and started hallucinating, which does seem to be something that happens at a not-insignificant rate.
If you not only saw a dramatic, coherent and apparently purposeful miracle, but a bunch of other people saw it together with you, and you had mutual acknowledgement that you'd all seen the same thing, that would be much stronger evidence still. You could be hallucinating the other people affirming that they saw the same miracle, but those sorts of coherent social hallucinations seem to be much, much rarer.
If you see a dramatic, coherent, purposeful miracle, together with a group of people, who discuss it publicly, and the fact that this is something that a group of people experienced together is widely discussed and reported on, so you receive recurring confirmation that this is something that actually happened, that would be even stronger evidence.
Personally, if I saw a dramatic, coherent, apparently purposeful miracle together with a group of people who could confirm that they'd have the same experience, I'd probably feel obligated to operate on the assumption that it had actually happened, and had some sort of explanation outside the framework of belief I previously held. It's possible I could have experienced some sort of psychotic break, but at a certain point, you have to trust the data you have to work with. But if it were a purely private revelation, and I didn't didn't get additional confirmation that it had happened... hypothetically, it could just hjiack my belief structures with divine power or persuasiveness or something, but if I still had command of my usual reasoning faculties, I'd probably suspect I'd hallucinated it.
If the message proves to be correct and contain information that you did not have at the time, "hallucination" gets a bit weak.
Seems right.
" For example - no amount of investigation would have allowed medieval philosophers to figure out that the sun is a giant ball of gas undergoing nuclear fusion. Pivoting from frustration to "therefore God""
When did any medieval philosopher pivot to "therefore God" to explain the sun?
When they decided to accept neo-Platonism as their default world view.
Your pronoun lacks a referant.
"the right answer is "dunno yet, maybe someday"."
That requires a dogmatic certainty in the lack of the supernatural. You are free to be thus dogmatic, but to lay it down as a requirement would require evidence.
To say that everything that has been investigated properly has a naturalistic explanation only works if you have a definition of "investigated properly" that is not overtly, or covertly, "found a naturalistic explanation for."
If you don't know about plasma, St. Elmo's fire is supernatural. If you don't know you live in a simulation, a glitch in the Matrix is supernatural. How is "supernatural" different from "natural" fundamentally? We either believe we theoretically can make sense of the world and predict things about it (maybe not right away, maybe when we know more or become smarter) or not. The mistake is believing some fraud who proposes an unverifiable unfalsifiable theory, whether it sounds supernaturally or sciency.
Edit: They might happen to be right, but you can generate any of infinite alternatives yourself. The main evidence for the frauds' ones boils down to "they were very successful frauds".
Is this merely a long-winded way of saying that I'm right, or was there some other point to this?
You are correct - technically speaking no pre-enlightenment civilization ever believed in something they self-identified as "super-natural." The will of God (or the gods) was simply how they thought the universe worked. Nature only worked the way it did because some numinous entity willed it so. That was the world view they had available to them by which they could interpret phenomena.
And that method of inquiry wasn't entirely wrong - after all it eventually led to ours.
If I set a block of concrete on a dinner plate, that's not a meal, even if it's in the spot where meals go. Meals require something edible, that's what "meal" means.
Similarly, "explanations" require integrations with, and connections to, existing knowledge. That's why "just because" isn't an explanation, and neither is "because flurb", if "flurb" isn't a well-understood concept.
The supernatural is not a domain of existing knowledge to connect to. Instead, the supernatural is a confusing morass of the unknown and the unintelligible, not just de facto, but inherently, definitionally, permanently. Otherwise, we wouldn't call it supernatural, we'd call it the unknown-natural.
Supernatural explanations are thus no explanations at all. They're unfalsifiable, thought-terminating cliches sitting where explanations should go, like the block of concrete on a dinner plate.
Why on earth would we accept your description of it as "a confusing morass of the unknown and the unintelligible, inherently, definitionally, permanently"? Do you have any evidence of this assertion?
"The supernatural is not a domain of existing knowledge to connect to."
That depends on what you are referring to. I can imagine a person not having a systematic reason for believing something, that that doesn't include religious systems of belief. You may have reasons to conclude that they are wrong, but believing in the miraculous visitation of the Virgin Mary is anything but an unintelligible morass of confusion.
They have a model of what is happening, you just think their model is wrong.
Idk if it’s ok to speculate about who the author is, but I’m 90% sure the author is Tracing Woodgrains
tracing, being a former latter-day saint, would probably not have made the mistake of saying "Israelites who had voyaged to the US in 600 B.C using something resembling a wooden submarine" which is conflating the jaredite (non-israelite) migration with the lehite (israelite) migration.
while possible, it's unlikely that anyone who was raised in the faith would have made this mistake.
there are a high number of tells this is from someone not raised in the faith, not just this one (the repeated characterization of the BoM as an “Egyptian document” without really qualifying what they mean by that, saying Mormon “wrote” instead of “abridged and compiled” the history, etc)
This was the first thing that stuck out to me during the review—anyone familiar with the plot of the Book of Mormon would recognize those are two completely different parts of the book.
Honestly that’s a good point, I think you’re right. I felt like there were some mischaracterizations of the Book of Mormon and so on, but skimmed past them to get to the book of Abraham parts. No way Trace would mix up the Jaredites with Lehi’s family
Had exact same thought
I would bet not, but we might find out. Woodgrain's relationship to Mormonism is intense.
No, definitely not.
Trace wouldn't have several typos, including "Moromons" and he would have framed things differently with his level of knowledge and experience.
That was my initial thought as well
I thought so at the start, but based on the ending I'm very confident it isn't
Interested read sans "Compared with other versions of Christianity", Mormonism isn't a version of Christianity hence it's not apt comparison. Mormonism is a Abrahamic religion, a peer of Christianity if you like, not a branch. No one believes Mormons to be Christians but Mormons, they are the trans of women's sports.
Mormon's self-identify as Christian. I'm an ex-Mormon and I still think Mormons are Christian. Pew, Gallup, and the General Social Survey all classify Mormons under the Christian umbrella. Britannica and most encyclopedias describe the LDS Church as a Christian restorationist denomination. The World Christian Encyclopedia counts Latter-day Saints within Christianity but assigns them to a "marginal" bloc along with Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Scientists, which is a technical term for groups outside the creedal mainstream.
As I said "but Mormons". You free to self identity however you want, it doesn't make it true, even if you can convince others (and the LDS has a slick and well funded PR operation).
Marla Svenja Liebich can claim he is a woman all he wants, it doesn't make it so even if German courts and Wikipedia say he is.
if you define christian as "believing in the nicene concept of jesus" which was adopted in 325 AD, then mormons aren't christian.
however if you define christian as "someone who believes and worships jesus christ as the son of god and savior of all mankind" then mormons are definitely christian.
it's really not any more complicated than that.
To those of us who believe in the Nicene concept of Jesus, the "Jesus" worshipped by the LDS is equal in diety to the Jesus who works in our office in Quataro.
Narzissmus der kleinen Differenzen.
It's literally the same Jesus. If Jesus is one person of the trinity, then Mormons worship one person of the trinity, just like you (though they would be mistaken about some facts in this scenario).
Totally different soteriology, though, so I struggle to see how Mormons and Christians share the same Jesus.
No, they hold to Arianism, which Christians rejected in the 4th Century.
Using the belief in the Nicene Creed as the standard for who is "Christian" seems like a bad definition. When I use the word "Buddhist", I don't have to know about specific creeds or historical councils. I just think "follower of Buddha". There's no need for me to tease apart sectarian, theological, or historical claims. That seems to make for a bad definition for a word that clearly has the same "follower of" pattern that we see in "Buddhist", "Lutheran", or "Calvinist". If someone says they are "Christian" because they are a "follower of Christ", that seems to rely on a very common sense definition of the word.
Christianity and Buddhism differ in that Christianity is a confessional faith, Buddhism is not.
The various flavors of Lutheran, Calvinist, etc all accept the historic Creeds through Nicea. Most of our embarrassing intramural bloodshed has been over astonishingly small issues.
So if a Hindu has put up a statue of Jesus in his shrine besides the other gods, you would argue we have to accept him as a Christian?
This is fascinating. Do we accept that people can self-identify or not? If some third person objects to the self-identification, should we privilege one view over the other? As a non-Nicene Christian, I say Marla can be whoever she wants to be.
On the other hand, I recognize that I am not welcome to share, say, the Catholic communion (I stay seated).
> Do we accept that people can self-identify or not?
Which words are mere identities, and which are statements about the world?
Can I avoid my tax duties by adopting "someone who already paid their 2025 taxes" as my identity (without actually having paid anything)?
Can I acquire American citizenship by choosing my identity to be "American citizen"? Can I become a President by choosing to identify so?
If I take a mortgage in your name, by temporarily identifying as you, why should your disagreement be more important than my freedom?
Bingo. No one here is denying anyone has a right to self identity however they want, you can either try (and in some cases be successful) convince others, but it doesn't make it so. We can all agree tomorrow 1+1=3 and that can even become “true” in a language sense but that doesn't change the answer is “2” as the concept of “2” simply become the word "3" in that new reality while old "3" becomes something else. The concept of 2 has not changed though.
Outgroups don't get to define in-group membership as groups are a object, not a descriptor. A US Republican is a member of the Republican Party. What one politically believes is irrelevant, either you registered with them or you didn't hence, that's objective fact. You can love socialism, hate America, and voted for Obama but still be a Republican.
Some words refer to concepts with precise, technical requirements. "citizen" is generally understood to be one of those in most cases. Contrast that with a word like "bibliophile". There's not precise definition for which books one must like or how often one must read in order to qualify as a bibliophile. So if someone tells you that they like books, they certainly could be lying, but at a practical level, there is a certain level of self-ID involved. There's no agreed upon body to decide that sci-fi lovers, for example, do not qualify as bibliophiles because its genre fiction. And if some body did exist that made such a decision, it would still feel like an oddly arbitrary carve-out to exclude sci-fi books. The root and suffix of the word immediately suggest a meaning without any reference to sci-fi carve-outs. A definition for "bibliophile" with sci-fi carve-outs seems worse than the existing meaning for this reason.
The contention is that Merriam Webster's definition of "Christian" as "one who professes belief in the teachings of Jesus Christ" is a good definition and is more like "bibliophile" than like "American citizen" in this regard. If one claims to love books, they probably do and "bibliophile" seems reasonable. If one claims to believe in the teachings of Jesus, they probably do and "Christian" seems reasonable. No arbitrary carve-outs for sci-fi or Mormonism necessary.
I have never been a Mormon and I think Mormons are Christians so you are wrong.
You can think the world is flat to, but it doesn't make it so.
PotatoMonster just provided the most straightforward disproof of your claim: "No one believes Mormons to be Christians but Mormons".
No, he's just being a pedantic edgelord pretending he doesn't understand normal language when talking about large groups of people, I.e. there is no absolutism with people, not even death hence the outliers aren't worth considering in the conversation, we don't need to add disclaimers to everything when talking social issues.
Just curious—is the difference because Mormons are weird or because they deny the Trinity? Would Community of Christ count as a Christian denomination?
Declaring oneself a prophet and adding extra books to the divinely inspired canon generally demarcates a distinct Abrahamic religion from those who refuse to accept the new revelations, as Christianity to Judaism, or Islam to Christianity, or the Gnostics to Christianity.
There are complexities. Martin Luther removed several books from the Bible (the deuterocanonical books); does that mean that Catholicism and Protestantism are different religions? Also, did Judaism become a different religion each time a new book was accepted? But I feel comfortable designating the Book of Mormon and associated texts as massive enough to warrant a designation as a separate religion.
Okay, that's fair. At least from the perspective of myself in Christian spaces, we share a lot with each other and it is more of a looks like a duck, quacks like a duck sort of thing. Judaism and Christianity differ in their view of the Levitical laws, which significantly changes how religion looks in practice, and Islam has very visible changes like daily prayer, a different day of worship, and also rejects just about all of the Bible along the way. I feel like Mormonism mostly looks the same as Christianity, except the more ritual stuff like communion practices, baptism, and our temple practices. Besides that we have dietary laws and more of a focus on works, but I would argue nothing as drastic as your other examples (though I really don't know very much about Gnosticism). Do you agree that we come off as a lot more similar than the other examples, or are there things you can only really see looking from the outside?
The rituals matter for distinguishing religions, since participating in them is a major component of praxis. (It's worth noting that Protestants started with Catholic rituals and then discarded some, rather than adding major new rituals the way Mormons have.)
And theologically, one huge difference that separates Mormons from Catholics and Orthodox and Protestants is the cosmology. Things like pre-mortal existence and "there's regular heaven and then there's superheaven in which the most special married Mormon men get to be gods of their own solar systems" are super-anathema for everyone else.
Catholics and Orthodox and Protestants form a big natural cluster. There's a long distance separating the Greek Orthodox from Unitarians or from Seventh-Day Adventists, but there's a chain of relatively short hops connecting them along the way. Mormonism has a large gap between itself and anything in that natural cluster. The gap may be shorter than that between the Catholic/Orthodox/Protestant cluster and Judaism or Islam, but it's still much larger than the largest hop size needed to make the C/O/P cluster a connected graph. I think it's more reasonable to treat it as a separate cluster.
If you disagree, it might help to name a chain of denominations that bridge the gap from the C/O/P cluster to Mormonism, with hops as short as those separating anything in the C/O/P cluster from its nearest neighbor.
(Religious disclosure: non-angry atheist, was very sincerely Catholic and very well-read in matters theological up until age 23)
Fair points. I do think that in these sorts of discussions, cosmology is overemphasized. At least from what I've seen, Mormons spend ~0 time thinking about exaltation (being a God). I personally didn't learn about it until it was offhandedly mentioned when I was a teenager because nobody really cares, which I find astonishing. It is really more of a 3 heaven system vs a heaven and hell system, which is large but not as large as superheaven Kolob.
Anyway, your point about the jump length is good. We never had the history to diverge naturally the same way Protestantism did, so we don't get to ship of Sisyphus our way into Christianity the same way Evangelicals did from the high church.
I would second your observation that Mormons don't spend that much time discussing cosmology or eternal progression and your reaction that that is pretty surprising
Theseus, not Sisyphus. (I suppose the Ship of Sisyphus would be suffering a contrary current or a malfunctioning bilge pump.)
Just want to say I appreciate and sympathize with your religious disclosure. I'm a non-angry pagan agnostic who was very sincerely Episcopalian and well-read in matters theological up until age 34.
I don’t scorn angry atheists/agnostics. I'm just grateful my journey was not traumatic enough to require that phase, although the change hasn't been entirely easy.
A big, natural cluster that spent centuries killing one another?
I guess that kind of tailed off as temporal power waned, but I still think it’s a pretty rosy view of inter-(intra-?)faith relations.
Similarity does not imply amity; there are plenty of other natural clusters whose members have often waged war upon one another (e.g. feudal estates).
I think there's a strong case to make for drawing a category for Mormonism separate from Christianity, but I don't think Gnosticism really fits into the same bucket with the others. Many scholars of early Christianity now consider "Gnosticism" to be an inappropriate label, since it seems to be more of a label that the proto-orthodox used to characterize multiple different groups with their own distinct beliefs, and not a unifying category that those different groups of believers would have identified with. But also, the people in what are now considered gnostic branches of Christianity didn't claim their own prophets or leadership figures, and seem to have claimed direct lines of apostolic succession just as the proto-orthodox, the group who became what we now know as the Catholic church, did.
Rather than being a new breakaway religious tradition from Christianity, I think they're better understood as another line of descent from the earliest seeds of the Christian movement, which was eventually outcompeted by the proto-orthodox line.
Partly the Trinity. Partly that you have to be baptized with the baptism that Christ instituted. The person baptizing you must intend to perform the baptism that Christ instituted. Mormons teach that there is no difference between it and the baptism of John.
I don't really know the difference between those two. All I could really tell you from a Mormon perspective is that baptism is a covenant where you are spiritually born again and take on the responsibilities of that. What are the differences between the baptisms of John and Christ?
The baptism of John did not suffice. Repeatedly, in Acts, those who received only it had to receive a new baptism, the baptism of Christ.
Okay, thanks for the explanation. I'll have to read up on that!
I believe Mary is referring Acts 19: 1-6. The previous chapter refers to a disciple who "only knew of the baptism of John" but does not say he was re-baptized. In Acts 19, Paul asks some disciples he meets if they've received the Holy Ghost, and they don't know what he's talking about. He asked "unto what then were ye baptized?" and they answer "John's baptism". Presumably they'd just told Paul they'd been baptized, but when they weren't given the gift of the Holy Ghost (by a Priesthood holder blessing them with his hands on their heads (which is the next step ), that caused him to question their baptism. This is because the gift of the Holy Ghost is the next step, (both in the New Testament and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints). The interpretation I've heard is that they had to be re-baptized because whoever baptized them before wasn't himself a Priesthood holder, or he would've proceeded to the next step. This is the only re-baptism in the New Testament I'm aware of.
Not sure I understand the objection, but from what I gather by your comments it hinges on an idiosyncratic reading that is not at all universal among denominations. Or maybe you weren't aware that after baptizing with water, LDS perform a laying on of hands to give the Holy Ghost?
When John says the one who comes after him (Jesus) will baptize with fire, LDS take that to mean that Jesus (unlike John) will impart the gift of the Holy Ghost. The episode in Acts where believers who only received John's baptism receive the Holy Ghost under Paul's hand is taken to be about believers who received water baptism, but not laying on of hands to receive the Holy Ghost. LDS make a distinction between the priesthood necessary to perform water baptism and laying on of hands for receiving the Holy Ghost (baptism by fire) and perform both as separate ordinance one following the other.
The idiosyncratic reading is the one held by one sect, namely the Mormons, that there is no distinction between the baptism of John and that which was instituted by Christ, despite repeated statements pointing out that someone had received only the baptism of John.
Could you explain more? Maybe cite the passages you're thinking of (I assumed Acts 19, but now I'm not so sure) or confessions or statements of faith from some denomination to see if LDS actually disagree? I still suspect that you might be confused about what they believe.
You are the one claiming your belief is not idiosyncratic. Producing any other Christian group that agrees with you is on you.
Catching up on all these and I'm going to have to disagree with you on the baptism part here Mary as a differentiator, it's accepted practice is all over the place within Christianity often leading to various schisms especially within Reformed Protestantism hence people are rebaptised all the time when doing something as changing denominations, branches, or even churches in a new town, sometimes even the changing of the parish clergy sparks a rebaptism. All agree baptism is a necessary part Christianity at some level but what specific part, it's barriers to entry or access, and specific form very vastly, especially as the doctrine developed became more communal and Western Church thinkers looked to codify Jesus and deconflict seemingly inconsistencies.
But if Salt Lake tomorrow was to implement Roman Catholic baptism procedures universally to the T, they still wouldn't be Christian. It's simply a non issue.
As a Protestant, I think gets into "the categories were made for Man, not Man for the Categories" territory (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/).
Generally Christians think there's some core parts of Christianity that you need to agree on (e.g. divinity of Christ) and some inessentials that you can disagree on, including, sometimes paradoxically, what *exactly* you put in the "core parts you need to agree on" bucket.
The "Mormon-are-Christians" argument is basically "they believe all the core stuff, just a bunch of extra stuff, too". "Sola Fide" not "Sola Fide and no 'weird' beliefs about exoplanets". (... but even then, "Sola Fide" is a *Protestant* principle, not a universal Christian one)
The counter-argument is that the Council of Heaven stuff *does* deny core Christian stuff, especially if you consider the trinity a core belief (which most Christians do, but that itself is itself a debate), or even just the "cosubstantial with the father" phrasing found in the Nicene creed (which basically exists to try to codify what the 'minimum viable Christianity' is).
... but I think the main counter-argument is just pragmatic. "Obviously a whale is a feesh" and obviously Mormonism is different than Christianity in most of the ways that anyone cares about. You can say "it's still Christianity because it just adds 'extra stuff'", but when it starts to feel like the "extra stuff" is 90% of the religion, you start to care more about the "swims in the orshun" part than the tiny hairs or the phylogenetics.
(Ultimately, the real question that matters is whether God considers Mormon Christian and I hope that he has a different answer than I do, but it doesn't really change my answer)
Thank you, I really appreciate the answer. I think so little about how weird we seem because I can affirm the beliefs of Christian spaces (I can listen the Christian radio station or listen to a sermon with friends) but it probably doesn't go as easily the other way. Also, I really appreciate your sidenote about God's view. The stakes sure make me uncomfortable!
Even disregarding the cosmology, what gets to me about Mormonism is the addition of works to faith. I guess I'm outing myself as a Protestant, too. I just don't like how Mormonism cheapens grace by claiming that humans can make progress towards God on their own. That's a different Gospel! (in my view). But we all know God imperfectly, and if a Mormon claimed to believe that their whole faith rested in Christ and His salvation, then I might consider that person a Christian. But not the Latter-Day-Saints, generally. I wish more Mormons would come to understand the differences between their religion and the Christian faith, so that they would be less comfortable in Christian churches. The Christ the Christians preach is a real challenge to Mormons, I think, if only the Mormons could appreciate the difference!
IMHO, over-emphasis on grace cheapens the need to actually follow Christ's teachings ("Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven..."). But I understand the concern. We (practicing Mormon here) do believe that everything depends on Christ, and without Him, nothing we could do would save us.
You'd know more about being Mormon than I do, of course, so I am willing to accept what you've said about what you believe. However, I've got to say that I believe that most of "following Christ's teachings" boils down to revealing the freedom of the Gospel to as many people are able to hear and believe it. Live your life knowing that Christ is unshakeable, and you will do good because of the truth that is in you. Furthermore, one ought to be able to rest assured in salvation by not thinking that he/she can add anything to it. Remember the verses following the one you referenced: "Have we not... done many wonderful works?" To these, Christ says "Depart from me, ye that work iniquity."
There's probably more to be said, and I've appetite to discuss, but I won't push you into it. I respect any who try to do good. Lord knows we need them. I dispute the assertion that emphasizing grace cheapens the need to follow Christ's teachings, because Christ's teaching, and example, is about grace. He went to the cross so that we could be forgiven, so that our shame would be His and His glory would be ours. Real, specific acts of good are released when we are freed from our terror at having done evil.
I don't think I have a perfect understanding of things, by any means. But here I am, and you are. Glad to share a planet with you, in the meantime.
Nah, the Catholic Church heartily agrees the need for grace.
Yeah I think if your definition of "Christian" rules out Catholics it's too narrow for me to take seriously.
From Webster's Dictionary:
Christian 1 of 2 noun
Chris·tian ˈkris-chən ˈkrish-
1a: one who professes belief in the teachings of Jesus Christ
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/christian?src=search-dict-box
The vast majority of the time, this definition is perfectly fine for anyone and everyone who calls themselves Christian. It's only those who don't like Mormons that use a different definition, and then only when they are talking about Mormons. I could have a little more respect for a sect which has a very specific definition of Christianity, and is upfront and consistent with that definition whenever they use the term. We members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints freely call other denominations that believe Christ is the savior of the world "Christian". While I'm not denying our church disagrees with most other churchs on certain major theological points, what we DO have in common with most other churchs should be enough to make us allies on matters such as promoting family values, preserving religious freedom, etc.
Except it leaves out what, exactly, are the teachings of Jesus Christ. There's plenty of room for contention there.
(One also notes that Merriam-Webster was caught, red-handed, changing a definition for obviously partisan purposes, so can not be treated a neutral authority.)
Islam, which no one today considers to be Christian, was considered by Christians to be a heretical form of Christianity in the middle ages rather than a distinct Abrahamic religion.
Actually, I think there are many parallels and similarities between Mormonism and Islam.
That's a debunk myth, it was debated early and quickly discarded by the Church. That said in more modern times scholarship has started to wonder if Islam came out Muhammad's exposure to Christian Jews (non-Nicene) after the Roman exile after the Jewish Rebellion in the First Century , i.e. Pharisees that converted.
It is certainly not a myth! It is well-documented that Christians considered Islam a Heresy that grew out of Arianism.
This view may not have been universal and the nature of Islam was debated, but it is very far from a myth. It is similar to the way people here are arguing whether Mormonism is or is not a form of Christianity.
As to how Islam arose and its relation to Christianity - I find interesting the argument in a modern book, controversial obviously, "the hidden origins of Islam", arguing Islam is based on some Syrian Christian liturgical texts that were distorted through misunderstanding or translation.
The mainstream version of Christianity these days is "moralistic therapeutic deism" - I'm pretty sure that Mormonism hews closer to orthodoxy than that.
It is futile to argue about what counts as being Christian or not. There is no important difference between calling a Bible-influenced religion that centers on Jesus Christ "heretical Christians" or "non-Christians who have large overlap in theology with Christians."
I am not a Mormon and I believe Mormons to be Christians.
This is one of the few I didn't read on the website. Boy does it need some proofreading. Missing or incorrect punctuation, awkward sentence fragments.
Also, a lot of tension between "Mormonism is a recent faith with lots of great documentation, and I'm very interested in this early history because I think they tapped some very effective techniques for creating and managing organizations with a common goal" and "I don't know what their early sales pitch was, but it must've been good!"
Combined with the informal tone, the whole thing just grates because it feels breezy and surface-level. The author brings up so many sub-topics without seriously engaging with them--just a quick "Well, I don't know, but isn't this neato!"--and it wouldve been far better to have removed those sections altogether. As-is, they come across as filler, and the whole thing starts to feel like it belongs on BuzzFeed.
I had the opposite impression, that it was quite well-written and intellectually rich.
Your reaction strikes me as disproportionate...do you have some emotional stake here?
What a strange question/accusation to make. My only stake is that I've been a member of this community for some time and I enjoy reading high-quality, well-researched posts, and this review did not meet those criteria for me.
Also, having read through the comments which have come in since I made mine, I see that I am far from the only one. Others have even pointed out mistakes of varying importance in the review, indicating an author not well-versed on the subject matter. The ones I've seen here regard things like the bit about the submarine in the Book of Mormon--which, again, if you're not going to be serious in your coverage of a topic, just delete that section and write about the thing you want to write about.
Completely fair criticisms, though I must admit feeling a good bit of tension reading criticisms like yours in the comments. Here's the tension
1. Real scholarship requires understanding the thing you're analyzing with such depth and commitment to accuracy that any mistake or misrepresentation should make you stop, question your conclusion, and retrace the argument from the beginning. Math proofs seem like the clearest implementation of this framework.
2. Mormon theology (as well as most other religious theology) is so incredibly dense, so incredibly massive that it would take a 1000 people-lifetimes to grasp it all. This creates a pattern where somebody trying to honestly and intellectually engage with the topic always runs into a technicality or mistake that is used to dismiss the whole framework. "Are you fucking serious? You don't know the difference between the jaredite and lehite migrations? This entire argument is now bunk." Does it matter which theoretical ancient people we're talking about when disputing the feasibility of oceanic travel with wooden submarines with no other archeological evidence thousands of years before any other recorded oceanic travel of that scale?
At some point, as a rationalist, you have to take into account the validity of the source itself, holistically across all it's claims, because sources with no commitment to epistemic rationality will produce nonsense orders of magnitude faster than you can dispute it. If you're fighting a firehose of bullshit by trying to pick apart every water droplet, you will always lose.
Yes I'm doing a bit of conclusion-weighting by framing mormon teaching as "a firehose of bullshit." But I don't consider the difference between jaredite and lehite people to be relevant to ancient oceanic travel that has no recorded evidence elsewhere, especially when the evidence for those different people itself has no recorded evidence aside from this one source.
We're trying to see if this source itself pattern matches to external observed reality, not determine if the source itself is internally consistent. The latter is an impossible task without first doing the former.
I think you're conflating criticisms of the article with criticism of evaluating the truth claims of Mormonism. The SSC-style "take a strange topic, steelman it, and then dissect it for interesting bits even if it doesn't hold up overall" is always going to be difficult re: Mormonism.
The author has clearly done a lot of reading. I myself only bought but never quite read "Mormonism and the Magic Worldview." But we're talking about a subject where people like me were quite literally born into and have spent a lot of time studying the finer points. I try to stay in practice when I get the opportunity, like right now.
For instance, the Jaredite voyage comes after the literal Tower of Babel and involves the hand of god touching stones to make them glow such that the ancient submariners have light. (I don't know that we ever learned what happened to the stones.) The Lehite voyage involves a god-directed compass. Many pages have been written about an Atlantic vs. Pacific voyage!
So someone coming in and trying to do an interesting take on the BoA while also getting into various other things a bit helter skelter is gonna catch some criticism from us "dedicated scholar" types.
For instance, he didn't even mention the Salamander Letter. Or the lost 116 pages. No mention of editorial revisions to the BoM/BoA. No mention of the inspired biblical translation. Etc etc etc
(It would be very interesting if Scott had written on this or something similar just to see how nitpicky Mormon-obsessed folks like me would be.)
And to clarify, I'm not a Mormon, or ex-Mormon, or former Mormon, or scholar of Mormonism. My distaste is for the tone and the poorly-sourced diversions which didn't add to the point. The review felt like a first draft--and, as I've seen at least one person said they felt the need to resort to LLMs to finish "writing" their entries on time, it may very well be that what we're seeing is in fact an unpolished early draft.
> Mormon theology (as well as most other religious theology) is so incredibly dense, so incredibly massive that it would take a 1000 people-lifetimes to grasp it all.
Not really. The errors in question here could have been avoided simply by reading the Book of Mormon itself, which is about the length of a novel. It would take 1 person a couple weeks is all. There are even young men and women who volunteer their time to help people understand the theology!
I agree. I don't think that Mormon theology is incredibly dense. It has a lot of wild concepts in it, but it's a mile wide and an inch deep. If you really try to get into the mechanics of things like eternal families or the infinite regression of deities or the translation of the Book of Mormon, you will be encouraged to not worry about these things. Mormonism has a fairly strong norm against speculative theology, so most of the details are left intentionally vague, and only elaborated when absolutely necessary in an apologetic context.
well, I suppose it may seem like a bit of an accusation, but I mean the question honestly. Your reaction seemed very strange. I read the whole thing and had one take---it seems to clearly be a high-quality and well-researched article, much better than many---and then read your reply and couldn't figure out what possible internal state would lead to you saying that. Obviously one theory that comes to mind is "this person is strangely defensive about Mormonism for emotional reasons and has illogical negative reactions to things which cast it in a negative light". Another theory that comes to mind is "this person is extremely pedantic and thinks a few grammatical or factual errors should invalidate a whole essay", which I also can't understand. Rather than assuming either of these things I figured I'd just ask. I'm open to other explanations, but I am confused.
In many ways the article was a good overview of some of the biggest problems in Mormonism, but I shared the view that it contained a number of errors or mischaracterizations. I don't think they invalidate the essay per se, but I do think that the author misunderstands the Mormon mindset about a lot of these things, which is a fairly major criticism. I'm leaving another root-level comment laying this out.
I, too, felt it was an easy and interesting read—one of my favorites, in fact, out of the past few review-contests.
It might be relevant that the reactions given above very much match my own initial reaction, *as I was reading*—"we keep coming to this or that interesting tidbit, and then breezing on past! where's the analysis? what gives?!"—but not at all my *final* evaluation: I think the author ended up doing a pretty good job of returning to most of those breezed-past points. Makes me wonder if perhaps the above commenters skimmed or skipped the latter portions of the review (...although it could *also* be, of course, that they simply didn't like it as much as did I!).
Even with the most clever twist in the world, my response still would have been "okay, but I had to slog through the first two thirds to get to the good part".
Chopin's Fantasie Impromptu returns to the same theme a few times in different contexts, and it's a great effect--but, notably, the piece is pleasant to listen to from beginning to end. "Dissonant screeching which eventually resolves into consonance" sounds like an interesting concept, but my patience for it in practice caps out at the duration of the THX "Deep Note" trademark sound effect.
I thought this was far too harsh a reaction but there were plenty of typos and some jarring asides that took me out of the reading. Overall I thought it was fairly well-done although I had one slightly more major quibble (neutral scholarship seems to show that Smith sealed himself to many women, but it doesn't appear he had any sexual relationship with at least the majority of those women, contra what is implied in this essay).
That seems, to me, sort of implausible—at least, *prima facie;* I haven't actually looked it up (my interest in Smith is, at best, rather mild). I mean, for what purpose the "sealing" in the first place?
One might become yet more (unjustly?) suspicious upon noticing that the making of such claims—it's all just for deeply significant spiritual purposes; totally non-sexual, really; in fact, come to think of it, maybe *you're* the pervert for suspecting otherwise!—is actually a pretty common defense, for the ol' Illicit Harem™...
...but said defense doesn't always seem to convince, as certain Tibetan gurus* (most notoriously: Trungpa) and a more-recent Mormon polygamist (Bateman) have learned to their innocent (yet righteous) dismay.
One of the arguments in that discussion is that Joseph Smith doesn't appear to have fathered any children except with his first wife Emma. I'm not a Mormon scholar so I can't comment beyond that - that was just one argument that I heard while I was actively practicing.
The LDS church after the death of Joseph Smith definitely practiced polygamy that included sexual relationships.
He definitely had sexual relations outside of his first wife, but he also definitely didn’t have any relationship with the majority of the “wives” he was sealed to — in fact, some of them he never met in person.
I took a lot of the ”isn’t this neat-o” stuff as a rhetorical flourish, very on-the-nose skimming past obvious absurdities here and there ahead of the twist and conclusion
In case anyone here is curious to learn to read (Middle) Egyptian, there’s some fantastic beginner resources!
I started with “Egyptian Hieroglyphs for Complete Beginners,” which is a really fun introduction to the subject without too much drudgery.
Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0500290288?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback
If you like drudgery, though, I prefer Hoch’s grammar to Allen’s, though Allen’s is more modern.
Only read Part 1 so far, so sorry if this comment fails to account for later context. I'm a Christian (not a Mormon) and wanted to pause my read and provide another perspective on faith. I actually do not like the word. In the NT, the Greek word pistis is often translated as faith or belief, but a lot of Christians, including myself, feel that a better translation would often be "trust" or sometimes "faithfulness". I see the concept as more about allegiance and action. Tied to credence of course, but not as directly.
For example, imagine you are in prison and a guard says he can break you out if you meet him at midnight. If you decide to go to the meeting, you are putting your trust in the guard, regardless of your credence that he will come through. Trust is a choice.
Re the meanings of "belief": This is a distinction I first came across in Iain McGilchrist's "The Master and his Emissary", and it is pivotal to understanding what people of faith actually mean by the word.
There is "belief" in the Pythagorean Theorem, which is a weighing of the structured arguments and evidence. In principle, anyone with the same information and the formal tools to process it would "believe" the same thing. Disbelief here is just logically incoherent.
There is also "belief" in your child's inherent goodness. Here, "I believe in you" does not mean "I acknowledge that the evidence for your existence is irrefutable"! The word is used to connote personal connection, unconditional support, advocacy, and love.
The slippage between the two meanings has caused great harm in both directions, from the emotional nihilism of atheism to the pseudoscience of creationists.
Do you think religion/Christianity makes any factual claims at all, then?
When I hear Christians say things like "I believe Jesus rose from the dead", they certainly seem to be expressing a belief in a factual claim - one that could be proved or disproved in theory, even if the evidence for or against it was never written down or has disappeared over the last 2000 years. When a Mormon says "I believe Joseph Smith translated the Book of Abraham by the power of God", that seems to be the same sort of factual claim, and that claim is false if they actually mean translation in the sense of writing down the meaning of the text in another language.
Of course Christians do say things like "I trust God's promises", which sound more like the kind of thing you're referring to. But for many of those people, that trust seems to be strongly intertwined with belief/faith in the factual claims, even if they aren't the same thing.
I took him to be making the opposite claim you do. Not that the factual claims are unimportant, but that the charge to have faith *doesn't free us from evaluating the claims truthfulness* contra frequent mischaracterizations of the term as "belief without evidence" or such stillness.
Would "trust without evidence" be a more accurate characterization? That is, would the message be that even after evaluating the claims' truthfulness, you still have the obligation to trust regardless of what your conclusions were?
For me the evidence seems lacking, and I therefore doesn't believe the factual claims. I frequently hear Christians claim that faith is a good thing, even a moral imperative. I don't trust the promises of a god who I think doesn't exist (at least not the God with as many details as Christians tend to claim, e.g. all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly loving, cares about humans in particular, etc.). When someone tells me to trust that God, it certainly sounds like they're telling me to trust without evidence.
No, certainly not. The writers of the New Testament wrote to convince people by giving evidence and reasoning. Given that God has done X (created the world, provided for you, redeemed you by his Son) then you should trust in Him, that is, believe that He will do what He said and that you should follow Him.
Evidence doesn't mean proof, though. Do you have the same level of evidence for God, in general or in particular, that you have of gravity? Definitely not. There is a gap between evidence and certainty. How big one thinks that gap is depends on how they weight evidence. But there's times in life where one has to act beyond the level of certainty they feel. For example, marrying someone, you cannot foreknow their entire life history. Committing to anyone is an act of faith. But committing to someone when the evidence shows they are unlikely to deserve it is different from merely acting on incomplete evidence.
Fair enough. I was certainly taught growing up that trusting in God was a moral imperative. If two people analyzed the same evidence and came to different conclusions about whether they should trust God, then the person who chose to trust God was always portrayed as the good one making the right choice, and the person who decided not to trust God was portrayed as the bad one making the wrong choice. In the latter case, reactions to that choice from my household/community members/church leaders could be anything from sadness to mockery to complete rejection, but always negative - it was never considered acceptable. Choosing not to marry someone was fine, choosing to trust God was mandatory.
Of course that is a description of the people and leaders I grew up with (who were LDS), not a comment on Christians or Christianity in general.
To be clear, my position is that you should indeed trust God because He deserves it and there is evidence for it, and not doing so may be a moral failing if it is because of motivated reasoning or not taking the matter seriously rather than someone convincingly deceiving you.
I think that people who say "Faith is believing without evidence" are doing you a disservice by implying there is no evidence. But I won't pretend the evidence is undeniable proof.
(This is me speaking on my own and may not reflect on the doctrine of any particular church)
From my perspective as an atheist, it's more like choosing to go to the laundry room at night based on the rumor that a prisoner in another jail many years ago heard it from someone else that there's a certain man who works as a prison guard by day, but dresses up like Batman at night to shimmy down laundry chutes so that he can break prisoners out at midnight, and by the way he can also move faster than the Flash.
Interesting that this should be the first book review posted, when I'm currently in the middle of a weeks-long deep dive into Mormon history and theology.
There's one premise in here that I'd push back on a bit: the notion that Mormonism, even if not true, acts as a particularly effective organizing system for a highly functional, high-trust society. The data does suggest that Mormons are fairly exceptional along various measures, but I think it's worth taking into account that the doctrines and culture of the Mormon church may, in some respects, result in its membership effectively gaming the system in terms of many performance metrics of welfare. Members are encouraged to present themselves as living happy, wholesome, fulfilled lives, even if those things are not the case privately, and I've heard numerous accounts from ex-Mormons describing miserable personal lives, while they did their best to keep up appearances and present themselves, explicitly as well as apparently, as being happy and fulfilled.
Mormonism's culture of "personal testimonies" of the truth of various claims also extends beyond beliefs about the doctrine of the religion itself; believers are told that the Holy Spirit will guide them in making judgments about other beliefs as well, and that when they feel warm, positive emotions in association with some claim or belief, that's the Holy Spirit telling them that it's true. Some ex-Mormon podcasters I was listening to a few days ago made what I thought was a pretty strong case that this is directly related to the fact that Utah leads the United States for cases of criminal fraud, by a margin of something like 60% over the next runner up. There are positives to Mormonism's society-building mechanisms, but I think it'd be unwise to discount the negatives.
Ex-Mormon here and I can confirm this. I really felt I had to put forward a happy front. Part of it was that I really believed, so I had to be an ambassador for how good the church was. But my (likely genetic driven) depression was just as bad when I was in as when I was out.
In Utah, a common joke is that the abbreviation MLM doesn't stand for "Multi-Level Marketing", but "Mormons Losing Money"...
Also, the piece implies some causation from faith to coordination, but does not adequately explore other possible explanations for the correlation--for example, selection bias (for folks converting in), survivorship bias (for folks who haven't left yet) and even genetics (for members closely related to other members).
There is lots of very strong evidence for religious practice correlating strongly with prosocial outcomes, and that exists across denominations and faith traditions. For example, people who attend church services every week have higher self reported life satisfaction, educational achievement, and longer life expectancy than people who do not attend at all.
Yeah, those stats on "even after tithing Mormons donate more to charity" are kind of problematic in their selection of respondents, too.
Lots of "aren't Mormons great" involves mostly ignoring active vs. semiactive vs. inactive Mormons, let alone us Exmormons.
Another thing is that the primary reason Utah and the Mormon Corridor more often resembles the northeast on various social indicators, despite being a deeply red state, is because a lot of us have ancestry from New England and upstate New York, and various waves of 19th century British and Scandinavian ancestry.
Less of those rambunctious Scots-Irish genes in ancestral Mormon stock.
With all due respect, if your going to evaluate a religion or community, it makes sense to focus more on the actual participants, and less on the "less-actives" or the ones who left. I'm active Mormon, raised in an active family, and I never experienced, nor observed, the kind of abuse or extremism that is often laid at the door of, not just Mormons, but conservative Christianity in general. I'm not denying that it happens, but I've seen plenty of real-world proof of what the author states about how well we live.
I don't think that's necessarily the case.
First, it stands to bias the sample pool. People who're more active in the church may tend to be happier because active participation tends to make one more happy, but people who're more active in the church may also tend to be happier because people who're made unhappy by participating will tend to participate less. In medical research, it's well understood that when you exclude early dropouts from your treatment dataset, you'll tend to introduce a positive bias, because early dropouts will disproportionately tend to be people who the treatment wasn't working well for; the same principle likely applies with people who distance themselves from a religion.
Second, because it's liable to introduce reporting biases. I've talked to numerous people who've had extremely unhappy experiences with the Mormon church. One thing that all of them had in common is, they kept their distress close to the chest until leaving. Most said they kept their feelings entirely private, some would share their feelings exclusively with a spouse, or some extremely close confidant, like a single childhood friend they'd known for decades. The culture of high-commitment religious groups in general, and especially Mormonism in particular, tends to filter out a large proportion of all reporting of negative experiences within the group. The reporting bias also operates from the other end, with people within the group preferentially signal-boosting positive experiences.
I'm not saying the experiences of people who're active in the church should be discounted, but we shouldn't expect the reports of people who're active in the church to compose anything like a complete picture of how it shapes people's experiences.
Good points, but Occam's Machete wasn't even referring to those who might be "keeping their distress close to the chest" while still presening an image of full activity, he was referring to those who are varying degrees of openly less active. In your medical study analogy, yes you want to take the early dropouts into account but for the rest, you want to make sure they are actually following the parameters of the study.
To give another example, a common defense of gender transitions is that the majority of those who undergo it report feeling much better after going through the process. I don't even agree with with gender transitions, but it would be bad faith for me to say that all or even the majority of those who go through with it and feel great are liars, while only the de-transitioners are telling the truth.
I don't think all the people who report positive experiences with the Mormon church are lying or misrepresenting their experiences, but I think people who're active in the church are disproportionately likely to withold reporting of negative experiences. I don't think it's bad faith to acknowledge that bias in the data.
I do think there's likely a pressure for people to skew positive in their reporting of gender transition as well, and if someone drew their impression of that from "how happy do the people around me who've transitioned seem to me to be," I'd point to the same problem.
> but for the rest, you want to make sure they are actually following the parameters of the study.
The extent to which people follow protocol is very important to know! If you have a treatment that is very effective when followed precisely, but it's extremely difficult to follow precisely enough to be effective, that's something you have to account before deciding if you want to prescribe it.
Similarly, if a religion has a high drop-out rate, that's very important to know when determining if it creates successful communities, human capital, high trust, etc.
Our drop-out actually isn't that high, at least compared to other faiths. I just stumbled across this today:
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/decline-of-christianity-in-the-us-has-slowed-may-have-leveled-off/pr_2025-02-26_religious-landscape-study_0-011/
While other faiths have trended down, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Saints has stayed mostly level.
Buddy, I’ve lived in Utah a long time.
I wasn’t even talking about horror situations.
I just know a lot of the stats are cooked and/or credit Mormonism for what is often genetics.
I’m also one generation removed from polygamy on one side so I know pretty well what that looks like.
Do you know what your ward’s attendance rate is? The church sure counts the inactives in its stats.
I confess I don't know my own ward's attendance, but as for tracking activity, there's this report from BYU:
https://foundations.byu.edu/0000019b-1343-d613-a59b-17df82980000/latterdaysaintreligiosity-pdf
Starting on page 6, you'll see charts showing that, as of 2024 at least, Latter-Day Saints attend church more often than any other denomination.
There's possibly some genetic confounding, but it seems likely that the religious/social factors have a signicant causal impact.
Anecdotally I felt some pressure to present myself as happy and keep up appearances when I was originally active in the faith, but I would almost characterize it as Mormons believing those qualities are axiomatically good... you're not just keeping up appearances because you're desperate to fit in, if that makes sense, but because it's good in and of itself.
Feel free to AMA about this if you'd like. I'm also pretty convinced that exmo communities online are uniquely toxic spaces (particularly the two subreddits) which have entirely driven out those with alternative perspectives. Everything else seems like the automatic and fundamental downside of high-trust, high-cost religious societies (vulnerability to fraud, MLMs, feeling isolated after leaving, etc).
I can't speak to whether ex-Mormon spaces tend to be particularly toxic; I've drawn on some ex-Mormon youtubers as resources when researching Mormon history and culture, but I haven't engaged with their surrounding communities, let alone any associated subreddits. I certainly wouldn't consider it implausible that they'd end up that way. But most of my exposure to ex-Mormons has come more organically, through communities with no direct connection to Mormonism, and a lot of them reported similar experiences of distress while they were active Mormons. Mormonism isn't just a high-cost, high-trust religious community, it's a high-control religious group, and people who don't conform well to its requirements often experience a lot of distress and turmoil, which they usually feel obligated to conceal.
(ETA: I appreciate the offer to ask about your own experiences, but I personally prefer to discuss people's religious experiences in more private settings, since I'm way too prone to getting sidetracked by other people's interjections into more public discussions.)
I don't have direct skin in the game bc I've never been Mormon, but I live in Utah so I a LOT of both Mormons and ex-Mormons. The thing is, the ex-Mormons are actually emotionally traumatized. And it takes them many many years, typically, to get over it. But part of the reason they're so traumatized is because they're missing something that was once so safe and happy and good-feeling for them. Most are NOT traumatized bc they experienced anything awful...what was awful was losing the emotional safety and optimism and sense of community they once had, when they stopped believing. Think of it more like getting a divorce when your marriage was NOT terrible, in fact you loved it and it fundamentally structured your entire identity and understanding of the world, how much you and your spouse loved each other and how solid and wonderful your marriage was. And then one day you come home and they've moved out and cleared everything and it's just gone. And all of your friends and family look at you weird and don't like you anymore bc they think you must have done something terrible to cause it. That seems to be more what it's like for them. They are often very angry for a long, long time. Not bc they hated it but bc they lost something they once loved.
This is a great way of putting it that I haven’t seen done before. Agreed
This sounds like a fair way of putting the experiences of a lot of the ex-Mormons I've talked to. I'd add that because Mormon culture is so sticky with respect to the belief system- Mormons are constantly expected to offer personal testimonies about the truth of their religious beliefs, and socially reinforce each other's acceptance of the whole framework, it lends itself to an experience where leaving is like a divorce that your whole social circle thinks is specifically your fault.
“Simply fire the unhappy people”
“This company has way above average happiness’
Mormon culture has extremely high conformity pressure.
I loved growing up Mormon. Had an excellent experience.
But it’s not true and the vast majority of the claimed benefits of being a practicing Mormon are either nonsense or simply being in a tight community.
I don’t think the exmo subreddits are more toxic than the TBM ones. (My main complaint is so many exmos are moronically progressive, as is most of Reddit.)
I think the Exmo forums are just as intolerant of opposing views as any politics forum on Reddit (which is to say, very).
Don’t believe it’s just a selection effect, I think it’s a fairly straightforward causal impact of growing up in a tight prosocial community with strong norms for intracommunity support.
I was certainly one of the less happy ones, but when I consider the counterfactual of growing up outside of the church I’m extremely grateful that I did have that in my life. There was a laudable amount of ward service that contributed to keeping my mom and my family from spiraling after the divorce. I can’t find a way to be bitter or resentful in light of that.
I’m still mad my childhood ward where my parents still live was significantly reorganized a couple of times now.
It had been a continuous ward for well over a century in a historic building.
I would redo my childhood again no question, because it would be hard to improve on it. And I exited the church with minimal problems. But I know plenty of people who very much would choose a different option.
I don’t know how much I benefitted from the church itself vs. a loving family and good neighbors. My kid’s life is going to be extremely different on so many fronts. I rode my bike a mile to school in first grade.
Before the Great Awokening, I had an easier time in Exmo groups. But that’s also true of all atheist/humanist groups I was once a happy member of.
I walked 3/4 mile to school throughout elementary school and I’m grateful for that too. It was a different time, or so they say. I’d like my kids to have that same experience. I’d like them to grow up in the church as well.
> Don’t believe it’s just a selection effect, I think it’s a fairly straightforward causal impact of growing up in a tight prosocial community with strong norms for intracommunity support.
I would guess it's a result of people who identify as "ex mormon" aren't really interested in anything that comes across as "the thing that made you miserable is good actually" or seeing the same stuff they were exposed to for years and rejected.
I think any community based around being "anti" something is going to develop toxicity sooner or later, just due to selection effects + usual group dynamics + people probably not being interested in apologetics for the thing they're opposing + the result of focusing defining your group around "thing bad."
> I would guess it's a result of people who identify as "ex mormon" aren't really interested in anything that comes across as "the thing that made you miserable is good actually"
Your guess would be mostly wrong, though.
Plenty of Exmormons, myself included, can wax poetic about the great parts of being Mormon. The parts we miss. In a deep sense, I'm about as Mormon as possible, despite having lost my faith as a teenager and formally having my records removed a few years later.
In fact, the desire for community is one of the driving factors for participating in such communities. I did it a lot more in the past. I navigated my own departure, and then my wife's. Our families are still mostly active TBMs and we live in Utah.
There's also a wide range of "not explicitly orthodox Mormonism or Exmormon" environments, where you'll have Exmos and Jack Mormons and doubting Mormons and unorthodox Mormons and True Blue Mormons (with thick skin) interacting mostly peacefully. Some of that is still on reddit.
Some people leave and do entirely check out. Some people get very negative and never get over it. Some people find a way to have one foot in and one foot out indefinitely.
For me, what became most challenging was that the "woke mind virus" took over the Exmormon space in the same way it took over almost all similar spaces from ~2016 onward. I've had more fallout in my life from becoming a rightwing libertarian than I have from becoming an Exmormon. My past self would not have believed that.
Political factionalism, not organized religion, is the great egregore of our time
Interesting, I would not have guessed most of that. My experience with exmormons is that they had much more mixed/negative-on-average experiences than what you describe, but you've probably interacted with a lot more numerically as well as a more representative sample of all people who identify as Exmo than I have (since I mostly see them coincidentally, not in exmo spaces).
"Some ex-Mormon podcasters I was listening to a few days ago made what I thought was a pretty strong case that this is directly related to the fact that Utah leads the United States for cases of criminal fraud, by a margin of something like 60% over the next runner up. There are positives to Mormonism's society-building mechanisms, but I think it'd be unwise to discount the negatives."
I immediately thought of Young Boy NBA, so I had to ChatGPT it. Long story short, Utah is especially high in white collar fraud, but lower than the national average in criminal fraud all together. And the overall response emphasized that it was more likely Utah being a high-trust society then Mormons belief in the Holy Spirit per se that would make them vulnerable.
Here is the conclusion, "My best read: there is solid evidence for LDS-targeted affinity fraud, but weak evidence for a sweeping claim that Mormons specifically commit or suffer white-collar crime at unusually high rates independent of Utah, class, business culture, reporting patterns, and social-network effects. The safest explanation is “high-trust affinity networks can be exploited,” not “Mormon theology causes fraud.”
I wouldn't contend that Mormon theology causes fraud, and the podcasters in question didn't offer that contention either. But their point, which I think had reasonable basis, was not just "high-trust affinity networks can be exploited" either.
Rather, they felt (and I share the suspicion based on my own experience) that Mormon culture tends to render people particularly gullible and vulnerable to particular types of exploitation, because Mormon culture doesn't just implicitly encode, but explicitly discusses and regularly reinforces, the belief that your emotional reactions are a reliable guide to empirical truth claims. If a person, even a person who's not a part of the trusted Mormon social network, approaches you with a business opportunity, and you get a good feeling about it, and you think "that means the Holy Spirit is guiding me to take this opportunity," you're liable to be vulnerable in a way you might not be if you're not part of a culture that regularly tells you "getting a good feeling means it's actually right and trustworthy."
I think this is a little infantilizing; in reality, most fraud or MLM schemes which successfully target LDS members come from other members of the church who are taking advantage of the high-trust norms of the community. That sucks but it also seems like a built-in feature of high-trust tightly-knit religious societies? Those who are taking advantage are simply defectors.
Pretty frequently they’re not defectors
They’re true believers
Self-deception starts at home
I think there's a perspective according to which it's infantalizing, but... spiritual testimony either works or it doesn't. If a culture teaches that spiritual evidence allows people to assess the factual truth of claims made in the material world, that's probably going to affect the ability of people in that culture to make accurate judgments, for better or for worse.
If spiritual testimony works, it'll probably tend to make people's judgments better, because they're able to draw on an additional useful source of evidence beyond what people outside that culture have to work with. If spiritual testimony doesn't work, it'll probably tend to make people's judgments worse, because they're systematically over-weighting the evidence of their own emotions. Everyone's decisions are influenced by emotional valence, but if you raise one group of people encouraging them to be cautious and recognize that just because something sounds good, doesn't mean it is good, and you need to do your due diligence in looking at the evidence, and you raise another group of people telling them that when they feel good about something, that means God is telling them that it's true, that difference is probably going to affect their decisionmaking.
I absolutely acknowledge that there are positive elements to Mormon community-building, and that Mormon doctrine may specifically relate to or directly cause some of them. But by the same token, there can perfectly well be elements of Mormon doctrine that have negative consequences on a personal or community-building level.
I think it's a lot more simple: they have people to defraud, should they want to, while most people simply do not. Your average Mormon who WANTS to take a bunch of people's money and spend it on themselves and not return it has no ability to do so. If you are Mormon there is exactly a 100% chance that you know at least 100 people and families who you can pitch to just from your local ward. And every single one of them has cousins and siblings and others to introduce you to from other wards. I think it's really just the network itself and you don't need much else. I'm not even Mormon and I've been astonished how thick and quick the business referral network can operate once you know just a few. Do work for a handful of people and eventually you have more work than you know what to do with just from referrals because they all know each other bc it's their brother's wife's brother's mission companion or whatever. The entire state is a 2 or 3 degree of separation situation among the Mormons.
I strongly agree.
> result in its membership effectively gaming the system in terms of many performance metrics of welfare. Members are encouraged to present themselves as living happy, wholesome, fulfilled lives, even if those things are not the case privately,
While not Mormon myself, I did know both Mormons and Ex-Mormons and this tracks with my perception; people for whom the system doesn't work fall off the wagon and also fall off the statistics
this is relatively charitable and (mostly-ish) accurate review.
here is simple Q&A format on various topics in this article from an mormon apologetics website that may be of interest to readers:
https://mormonr.org/qnas/QKJuCb/book_of_abraham_facsimiles
https://mormonr.org/qnas/Rqa6Tb/book_of_abraham_translation
https://mormonr.org/qnas/a9l1T/the_kinderhook_plates
https://mormonr.org/qnas/TDRFth/kirtland_safety_society
https://mormonr.org/qnas/Gzjcc/seer_stones
I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (mormon is a silly nickname that ive never liked, its almost never used positively anyway so it feels almost slur-adjacent? (EDIT: nevermind call me mormon all you want!! this endless discourse about the name is so tiresome and surface level)) who has made it through this essay and many more like it with my faith intact. And I like to fancy myself a pretty careful thinker.
You may AMA if you wish. The answers will mostly boil down to some version of: Joseph was obviously wacky and flawed and my model of the world allows for both him receiving revelations from God and also him thinking he is receiving revelations from God and mixing up the two, and the test you can apply as to which is which is what endures as headline doctrine.
The nickname “Mormon” was enthusiastically embraced by all my Mormon ancestors, going back six generations on some lines. When I was a child, I learned peppy songs with lines like “I’m a Mormon, yes I am / and if you’d like to study a Mormon I’m a living specimen”. It was therefore very odd to me when the Powers That Be decided to distance themselves from the nickname. I’m assuming you must be younger than 40 because you seem unaware of the deliberate rebranding.
Well, the deliberate rebranding was around 2018 so you don't exactly have to be 40 to remember the before-times (and I do remember the before times). But I never liked the term even then, least of all because my friends didn't understand I was a Christian and considered the Bible to be scripture. I am told repeatedly in the scriptures to take upon the name of Christ but now we're taking upon the name of some other guy named Mormon instead. I much prefer just being called Christian without distinguishing my sect
>I much prefer just being called Christian without distinguishing my sect
There are two problems with this. First, "we should get away from sects" is an old instinct, and one that keeps producing new sects instead of healing them. (Looking at you, Churches of Christ.)
Second, while I share the author of the review's admiration for the LDS church as an institution, I don't think it's unreasonable for the rest of Christianity to treat you as not part of the club. Even if we are completely neutral towards the truth claim involved, "these people treat as divine truth a bunch of stuff that these other people don't" is a big, big divide. Yes, there are some differences in canon between various branches of normal Christianity, but Book of Mormon et al is a way bigger difference than any of the fights over Apocrypha. If you're willing to own the difference, that's fine, but this kind of things is triggering epistemic alarms about infiltration.
I think you have misapprehended my motivations here. I’m ok with not being part of the creedal Christian club and I have no desire to infiltrate you or dissolve all sects. The name thing is just about signaling that my number one dog is the Christ of the New Testament that everyone knows and loves, not the Mormon of the BoM that nobody cares about
Agree that this makes sense and is a more accurate signal to outsiders (not the least because Mormon is a relatively less important character in LDS doctrine).
This is exactly my point: you are too young to remember when Mormon culture itself was happily exceptionalist. The name rebranding came along with the mainstreaming of Mormonism.
Once again, I really am not too young to remember this. I just don’t care. I have very little loyalty to the culture and branding, im my own person with my own opinions
This seems rather aggressive.
This is overly antagonistic.
I enjoy considering myself ethnically Mormon, so to speak, being descended from polygamists. I use LDS, am used to Mormon, and didn't mind it, but recently met someone who only new us as Mormons, not Christians, and said it with such bigotry, misunderstanding (mixed us up with various cults), and derision, that I completely understood what it meant to sound like being cult-adjacent. Perhaps Oaks will bring it back. Perhaps not. Its OK either way. I too like being a peculiar people
If the Mormons are Christians because they believe the Bible to be scripture, then the Christians are Jews because they believe the Jewish Tanakh (what they call the Old Testament) to be scripture. They've just added to it something else they consider equally canonical. So have the Mormons.
That certainly would be absurd! I believe we're Christians because we really really really like Christ and his teachings and it seems like a good appellation for people who really really really like Christ and his teachings (and I believe its a much more twisty and contrived reasoning that lets one exclude us due to some ancient creed. Call us "non-creedal Christians" if you must distinguish)
And the Christians really really like the Jewish God. They've tinkered with Him beyond what Jews would accept, but so have the Mormons with Christ.
If you really feel that way you have permission to just call me "heretic" (:
Muslims also venerate Jesus and his teachings, but I don't think it thereby follows that we should consider Muslims Christians.
I don't have any sort of hard commitment to whether Mormons should be considered Christians or not; I think there are cases to be made in either direction. But I would ask, are there any groups that self-identify as Christian, whose self-identification you'd disagree with? For instance, would you consider the Unification Church, which believes that their founder, Sun Myung Moon, is the second coming of Jesus, and also the reincarnation of Adam, to be Christian?
I don't think Muslims are Christian because they deny Christ's divinity. I am also very glad we stopped calling the Mohammedans and wish we could be so progressive about "Mormon" :P
I think on second thought the Rastas and the Unification Church are maybe better described as "Post-Christian" or something because they believe a false second coming has occurred.
If I may make an argument from authority: Wikipedia describes The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as "a Christian denomination" and the Unification church as "an Abrahamic monotheistic new religious movement". So calling ourselves Christian isn't exactly a non-mainstream view, indeed it is what the polemicists intent on excluding us believe that is non-mainstream.
This but unironically. The Jewish God came to continue his revelation in their midst, drawing deeply on previously revealed Jewish scriptures to do so, and invited them to continue to venerate him in a deeper way, now that more truth was revealed.
Some did, many did not.
Of course, using the term Jewish to refer to a Christian assembly would be misleading and so silly to do so commonly simply to make a theological point.
I think Christians and Muslims should be considered Jews. But also, Mormons are closer to non-Mormon Christians in practice than Christians are to non-Christian Jews. If you're going to draw lines, it's perfectly consistent to draw them between Christians and non-Christian Jews but not between Mormons and non-Mormon Christians.
Also, how many other breakoffs would there be? Are Amish people Christian? They're a lot more unusual for Christians than Mormons are. If you focus on books, what about the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church? Does following the Book of Enoch make them non-Christian? And while we're at it, the Epistle of Jude quotes from the Book of Enoch. So was Jude not a Christian?
> I much prefer just being called Christian without distinguishing my sect
Yeah, but sometimes the sect is relevant. If someone said the Book of Abraham was a Christian religious book, it's technically correct but very misleading.
I'm as orthodox and pro-Joseph as Latter-day Saints come. Where exactly do you draw the line between what God has said and what Joseph believes falsely? Are you talking about polygamy or apotheosis, or just the more one-off things? Do you have any particular examples?
I don't think Joseph was divinely inspired to dig for treasure as a teen.
I am open to the idea that he was wrong about polygamy (or at least was going about it wrong in technicalities, since the polyandrous way he did it was in sharp contrast to the way it was practiced later). But I am also open to the idea that every marriage we might regard as sus was actually "sealing for eternity only" and not sexual in nature, but that continues to beg the question of why he did it that way when subsequent polygamy was practiced very differently.
I am open to the idea that the facsimiles are altered and mistranslated. I am also open to the idea that there are reams of papyrus that were destroyed in the fire (Joseph F Smith recalls that there was a *lot* of scroll, much more than the consensus states) that recontextualizes all of this as perfectly genuine. There are some extremely important doctrines in the Book of Abraham that my entire faith hinges on so I can't wave it all away as a mistake. I do think he made a error in that same category with the kinderhook plates, though that whole ordeal is highly overblown by critics.
The general pattern on most of these controversial issues is that I'm open to both an orthodox and heterodox interpretation being true, and I haven't staked my faith on either being true because they're essentially immaterial to my relationship with the divine.
Well said, I feel pretty similarly
Very happy to see someone else express it like this, didn't really realize there were more of us!
Also, the OP touches on this but is ultimately pretty dismissive of it, but I think people need to understand that the motivated reasoning is actually an attempt to square these empirical questions or tensions with another kind of evidence which can be very persuasive and powerful: spiritual evidence.
I'm not mad if somebody wants to consider spiritual evidence illegitimate and not evidence as all, but as someone with a lifetime of very robust personal spiritual experiences, it's not something I will easily deny or wave away. I want to square ALL the evidence, that included, hence the reasoning on the purely empirical or historical stuff looks motivated. For someone without that on the other side of the ledger, I completely understand why the math looks baffling. No shade from me, but at the same time I know what I've experienced and it's very meaningful to me 🤷
spirituality, especially the way it is practiced within our religion, is imho a form of empiricism, maybe even science. Moroni 10:3-5 is the hypothesis, now say a prayer and test the claim.
for it to work requires some level of value alignment in the proper direction. maybe one would call that motivated reasoning, but the fruits are good. if you're looking for reasons not to believe, you will most certainly find them. just read stuff like this and let the cliches terminate the thoughts.
Amen
The single biggest reason that I left the LDS church was realizing that the bundle of feelings I'd been referring to as the Holy Ghost was felt and experienced by other people too, and it told them different things, some of which contradicted mine.
The first of these was meeting someone on my mission who had tested Moroni's promise directly, and had received a personal witness from the Holy Ghost that the Book of Mormon is not true. He asked what I would say to someone like that, and I responded that he must not have fulfilled the conditions, e.g. by not having enough faith. (He gave me a look, and I immediately realized that had been a very rude thing to say.)
Over the years I kept hearing more and more stories of people like this, usually people who had received confirmation from God that their religion was correct and used that to conclude that the LDS Church is false. Eventually I concluded that the bundle of feelings I had been calling the Holy Ghost was unreliable. If all those other people's experiences weren't actually revelation from God, my experiences probably weren't either.
I hear you, and that sounds like a reasonable conclusion based on your experience
Same here. I just couldn't justify that feeling the spirit is a valid epistemological approach for discerning truth.
Having said that, Emerson Green quotes Michael Huemer as citing religious experiences as _some_ valid evidence for belief, in the absence of other defeaters. I'm not sure I fully agree or follow, but even atheists making the point is interesting.
"Spiritual evidence" is just the same special pleading religious adherents make for their competing claims.
If you actually have the power of god it really shouldn't be that hard to demonstrate it. The scriptures are full of such stories.
Spiritual evidence is the only thing that will convince someone of spiritual truths. I could point you to the testimony of the three witnesses—and the fact that all three men though estranged at times from Joseph never denied that they saw a miraculous vision—and you could even find it compelling (though I suspect you won't) but it wouldn't lead to any special spiritual development so what's the point?
Religion and epistemics are not in the same category. Religion has more in common with physical exercise. It's principally about self cultivation, not knowing true things
"Spiritual truths" is not an actual category of beliefs.
You can't simply wall off religious faith from epistemics. Your faith might not be interested in epistemics, but epistemics remains interested in your faith.
Moreover, the spiritual truth claims of the church are immense and frequently rely on nonspiritual reality. The church numerous times throughout its history acted to confirm the accounts in the BoM via archeology.
The actual circumstances of the witnesses is much, much murkier that is commonly portrayed. The nature of the "witnessing" does not pass the scrutiny of modern audiences. Appropriately enough, the witnesses did not actually handle the plates. They saw things spiritually. It was their spiritual truth. Now it's your spiritual truth.
Many religions have their spiritual truths and have had believers go so far as to put their lives on the line instead of denying them. It's an extremely common religious phenomenon.
So I don't believe Joseph was a better prophet than Mohammed. I don't think he had golden plates any more than I believe Mohammed had a flying horse. My spiritual development was coming to understand I should not use different standards of evidence for similar claims. My religion is that epistemics is the foundation of everything. Otherwise, how do you know what you should be "self cultivating"?
Beyond that, the whole framing is hilariously off.
There were three whole witness of a set of golden plates that, independent of any religious value, would be incredibly interesting as an archeological find.
Why not just, uh, show us the plates? Why is that so hard? (See also: just retranslate the lost pages.) It's awfully convenient to simply handwave away the discrepancies.
Still, we have the text of the BoM Smith provided and we can examine that compared to what we know about the ancient Americas and, as it turns out, things do not match up. Smith and the church for most of its history made VERY strong claims about the truth of the BoM as the history of a major people in the Americas.
If that were true, at all, it would be obvious and undeniable, as it was claimed in those earlier times. Nowadays the church has to be far more modest and hide in the ambiguity. They gave up on turning the natives white with the gospel.
Testimonies used to be based on a confident view of doctrinal truth claims. "I know it's true." It's been a while since I've been to a testimony meeting, but I wonder if that's still a common phrasing.
The fact someone like you has to retreat to separating your faith from epistemics is a wonderful form of postmodernism/relativism that the religion I grew up in was adamantly opposed to. What ever happened to the god who could rain down fire from heaven, smite people dumb, and cast out devils?
I already conceded that you're not obligated to consider spiritual evidence to be valid, this feels like an odd response
"For someone without that on the other side of the ledger, I completely understand why the math looks baffling."
I've had the spiritual evidence.
I felt obligated to test it against what we can know about reality via other methods.
The spiritual math did not suffice.
The insight you're missing is that there's not actually a separate category called "spiritual evidence." That's a shielding mechanism for a sacred belief to survive scrutiny you would otherwise apply.
I'd bet some substantial portion of your "spiritual evidence" had entanglement with physical reality. Typically these experiences are not merely inside one's own soul. Also, things like "the gifts of the spirit" tend to include powers over physical reality. There's not a clean line you can build a wall on and then hide behind.
You're going to have to come up with a label that's less than eleven words if you want it to stick. And I think to most people "he's LDS" comes across as more off-putting than "he's Mormon."
Call me Christian (:
I don't think the vast majority of people disagree with me, or if they do they couldn't name why, because the modal Christian does not know or care that much about the finer points of theology that distinguish us
I wonder if the modal Christian could explain the difference between Christianity and Islam (other than "they call their god Allah").
So let's ignore the nerdy theology stuff and focus on everyday things, such as... magical underwear. Is that a typical Christian thing?
Setting aside some disputed distinctions, there are times when the disambiguation between your peers and, say, Baptists are relevant, such as, well, in this thread talking about the likelihood Smith was a conman versus a prophet. What to use then?
Latter-day Saint as an appellation is just fine when distinguishing from other sects. Church of Jesus Christ is a fine shortening of the church itself.
Or you can just say Mormon all the time, I'm not the boss of you. Just stating my preferences
True, by saying "feel" you made clear that this is your opinion.
But by expressing the feeling of it being a slur, you introduced the idea that it is a bad faith usage.
That's the reason I offered a rationale for using the term in contradiction to the preferred "member of the church of latter-day saints." To argue that there isn't malice in using a much shorter appellation.
I don't think there's usually malice except inasmuch as there is malice in not respecting people's preferences once they've been expressed (e.g. misgendering someone who wants you to use some really out there neopronouns)
I tossed the slur word in there a little too haphazardly, I meant to gesture to scott's hyperstitious slur cascade (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-the-way) but I agree it was too clumsy a phrasing.
More precisely: my experience with the term is that it is increasingly used with a negative valence, either mockery or disdain, so it generates actual internal discomfort and puts me on edge that the person using the word is an opp that doesn't like my core identity, even when that's not true.
How do Mormon apologists such as yourself react when they read Scientology apologists try to explain away the many inconsistencies and apparent frauds of L Ron Hubbard?
I don't know. I haven't read Scientology apologia. It doesn't really appeal to me because I don't see the merit or benefit of Scientology to begin with. I also don't really consider myself an apologist since I don't author defenses. Just a believer
So, a church that was founded in the USA by an "obviously wacky and flawed" charismatic storyteller/adulterer/criminal, claims to have millions of members worldwide, seems to indeed have some suspiciously high-functioning/wealthy public proponents, has official scripture about pre-existing spirits being sent to Earth by a higher power in order to inhabit human bodies who must earn their eternal reward through specific rituals (some of which are kept secret from nonmembers), but said scripture upon critical examination proves to be facially self-inconsistent, and its true believers expend considerable effort to explain this away, and you aren't even curious to read more about it? And you fancy yourself "a pretty careful thinker"?
You've made a very compelling set of comparisons here that would be pretty convincing to somebody who doesn't know too many details about my religion. I am at least familiar enough with both my own religion and Scientology to know that these are a little tortured.
"Tortured" indeed.
I hereby pray to the Goddess of Rationality that, should I ever have a blind spot as big as this, may She please send some blessed Internet Rando to call me out on it, using some words more compelling than I, poor missionary unworthy of Her grace, have managed here, such that I will actually sit up and take notice. Amen.
Amen
if you want some advice on how to be more compelling than you have heretofore been, there's an exercise in empathy one can engage in to try and identify high level generators of disagreement https://www.lesswrong.com/w/ideological-turing-tests
I have only a passing similarity with both LDS and Scientology. Is there a way you can explain some key structural differences between them (apart from the obvious doctrinal differences) ? It is entirely possible that the answer is "no, there's no easy way to do that", but just in case...
Well, our doctrine is just spicy Christianity. It's about an 80% overlap with boring old protestant Christianity, maybe more. We just believe that the way things are done in the scriptures (where prophets reveal God's will) didn't stop being true any more, so we continue to have prophets who reveal God's will.
On scientology's side... it's not Christianity, I think. So that seems like a pretty big gulf.
fwiw, i think you've set yourself up a big fat strawman to tear down.
there are many, many critical thinkers that are subscribe to the latter-day saint faith that would strongly dispute your characterization of it.
Hi! How do you endure servicesif you vaguely know that maybe sermons/ prayer / etc aren’t actually divine/the scripture isn’t flawless? Being in services where they speak as though things are true that I don’t agree with is excruciating.
Thank you!
I don't know that I suffer from this problem. I think I agree with just about everything that is said on any given Sunday.
What motivates you to go to church? Are you there for some vague desire for community?
Isn’t most of what is being discussed in sermons heavily dependent on the existence of a infallible Book of Mormon / Bible and that the information presented above shows a clear alternative to this fact, degrading the relevance of sermons / discussing anything related to Mormonism as hinging on the veracity of the original accounts?
Yes - I only would attend due to the above mentioned benefits. I think it solves coordinating in a way devoid in other community groups. But I find it painful.
Well, we don't believe in scriptural infallibility so maybe you should find a congregation like that. Maybe Unitarians?
LDS don’t believe in scriptural infallibility? Fascinating. Maybe I would enjoy it more than I would Protestants. I don’t drink or smoke anyway. Do you think they’d mind that I don’t believe in supernatural things?
You'd be welcome to attend church as much as you want. You wouldn't be welcome to be baptized and join as a member unless you actually believe the supernatural things, unfortunately (you probably wouldn't want to give up a tenth of your income anyway)
Would you agree with the opening thesis of the review -- that it is possible for virtually anyone to convince himself to believe in a religion (LDS specifically) by a deliberate effort of will (and practiced repetition) ?
100%
How can one explain the existence of so many religions otherwise?
On the one hand, this makes sense; but on the other hand, how come believers in all those other religions, most of which are pretty violent, don't convert to something superior like LDS, or Tibetan Buddhism, or Taoism or something ?
I think you ought to ask a sociologist or scholar of religion that question, they'll probably be able to answer better. The factors are probably the same social factors we can use to describe most human phenomena.
I very much enjoyed Patricia Crone's "Preindustrial Societies" and her diagnoses of the role religion has played for most of human history
I am concerned enough that I have never tried convincing myself, for fear it might work.
If I found a religion that aligned with my values, I might give it a shot.
You could probably find one that aligned with your values without much difficulty. The science shows that it could do you a lot of good.
I'm old enough to remember the "I'm a Mormon" campaign.
Bold of you to think you can decipher yourself when a prophet of the lord is receiving true revelation vs. ... not that.
Your faith may remain intact, but that's because you've firewalled it off from being a careful thinker.
Not that long ago, reading essays such as this would have been highly discouraged by default as "anti-Mormon literature."
I too am old enough to remember it. Are you curious why it hasn't caused me a faith crisis besides defaulting to believing that I am simply irrational?
I've read a fair number of your replies here and I'm intimately familiar with the topic at hand.
Which is to say I'm very much not "defaulting to believe" that you are "simply irrational" on this topic. You're complexly irrational! I know firsthand what that's like. I've been there.
You do accept a lot more fallibility in the prophets than would be generally considered good form. This is a very common approach to deal with challenges, whether historical or moral.
There's all sorts of ambiguity in doctrine and history you can employ to avoid any direct contradictions between say the claimed powers of the priesthood and reality, or anything about evolution and doctrine. And the church itself explicitly uses such stances re: evolution and blacks and the priesthood. "We just aren't sure we believe that, except for when we are, until we're not."
But at some point you gotta wonder what actual power of prophecy anyone ever had, or has. The last few decades, prophets have mostly just undone the work of prior ones!
For me, when I was doing my research in the 2000s, when one had to dig a little to find stuff, the primary issue that shifted my confidence was not the overwhelming amount of evidence that the church's truth claims about history or science were blatantly false, but the fact that there are many where the church actively worked to conceal inconvenient facts from its own members. Including excommunicating members who had been researching honestly and without intending to attack the church.
The "ah shucks there's hard, publicly available evidence, so we'll pivot to 'it's complicated'" approach is great PR, but epistemically and ethically very suspect.
A fun recent example of this is the church recently quietly admitting they'd had the 1886 Revelation in the archives for nearly a century. (I'm one generation removed from the practice of polygamy on my dad's side.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1886_Revelation
The 1886 Revelation is a nothing burger.
but it is interesting to me that you found the church's efforts to slow walk research a negative, when that reads as a positive of a conservative institution that seeks to maintain a cohesive belief structure that doesn't jump to conclusions, which is what I'd want the institution I'm offloading many life viewpoints onto, to do!
That’s a remarkable way to characterize “the church lied about a document pertaining to one of its most important doctrines because it conflicted with the party line.”
The fundamentalists would argue that the belief structure isn’t all that cohesive without polygamy.
Seems they have a point.
But I’m sure that general attitude of “well anything the church was trying to suppress was for the good of the cohesive belief structure” helps keep your testimony strong and less focused on the accuracy of said beliefs.
One thing that I think is odd is Brigham Young.
When Joseph Smith died, there was no clear successor. At least, not one that was currently alive. So the followers of Joseph Smith fractured. The LDS church followed Brigham Young. Despite ostensibly being a prophet of God, he endorsed slavery. And he justified it by the Curse of Ham, even though the second Article of Faith is pretty clear about sins not being inherited.
So based on that, I have two questions:
1. If prophets can be that wrong about something that important, and can stay wrong as long as they did, how can you trust them about anything?
2. Are you sure the LDS church didn't pick the wrong prophet?
That's not even the worst thing Brigham Young did! You gave me a softball.
Sadly the purpose of prophets (this is just my opinion) is a lot less exciting than it sounds. It's to bring things to your attention, not to innovate. Even Joseph just restored lost things. It's very easy to check their work because the things they say that are true are repeated again and again ad nausem by other prophets and apostles and scriptures. They say very little that is surprising. And when they do? Well the prophets of God are just dudes. I think the ones in the Bible are just dudes too, they just mostly got the good parts written down about them that filtered to us and they might've made some serious errors as well (maybe Elisha shouldn't have called the she-bear on those hooligans after all...)
Brigham Young was also the governor of a territory that became a state. His religious maneuvers and his political maneuvers were all twisted up together. Perhaps he believed that endorsing slavery was politically expedient. Perhaps he believed it incorrectly and he was not corrected because it was ultimately inconsequential since slavery largely (besides a few isolated cases) never reached the Utah territory.
I emphatically don't believe he was the wrong prophet. There are very few people who could have kept the church together, led them across the plains, established the Utah territory, and held it together through war and famine etc besides him. He was one of a kind for better and worse.
I agree that the view "the leaders of this church often err, but that doesn't mean they aren't worthy of leadership" is a reasonable one. However, I don't think that the LDS church leadership would agree with that characterization of them at all. They often project a much more dogmatic and authoritarian posture about their own revelatory abilities than would be consistent with your more humble position (cf. The Mantle Is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect, When our leaders speak, the thinking has been done, Fourteen Fundamentals in Following the Prophet, The Prophet will never lead the church astray, etc.).
If the Quorum or First Presidency regularly admitted that they might teach incorrect doctrine, or that it's possible for them to teach something as divine revelation to the Q12 that later turns out to have been wrong, that would be one thing. But they seem to studiously cultivate the opposite impression among the faithful.
Do you agree that there is at least a little bit of tension between your own openness to heterodox interpretations, as you say, and the attitude of LDS church leadership?
There are very few if any examples that come to my mind of the entirety of the first presidency and quorum of the 12 all converging on the same mistake. Maybe upholding Brigham Young's teachings on race and the priesthood? But even then, that's ultimately Brigham's fault, and all we had to do was evolve past treating his every word as gospel (he said a lootttt of things, and seldom failed to claim them as revelation) Those originate from the early era when the prophet seemed to have a lot more unitary executive power if you will and now we have a counterbalancing quorum that keeps things much less spicy.
I don't think the church would be better off if everyone were more distrustful of the leadership. I think our deference for authority is one of our coordination-problem-solving superpowers and I hate to see people erode that by engaging with church like they do politics, trying to drum up support and agitate for change and what have you. (I do however approve of agitation in the periphery institutions like BYU, where the leadership have demonstrated again and again that they are both less cautious and more receptive to agitation)
It's yet another issue of populations vs individuals. The population of the church has to sustain the leadership pretty intensely for them to be effective and unifying, and in return we trade off some "accuracy". The individual needs to moderate their expectations of how spotless a track record the leadership is capable of or you're staking your faith on something easy to defeat (no man is perfect). The mantle is a coordination mechanism that allows a membership with a high spread of IQ to converge in outcomes. (Aside: many people's proposals for better ways to do public institutions or secular religions etc. that I get to hear about around here only work with an exclusively high IQ congregation and are thus DOA. The parts of religion that seem nonsensical and dumb to you aren't for you, they're for everyone).
I don't think any presidency+quorum in recent memory has "taught incorrect doctrine". They've emphasized and deemphasized certain aspects, and the more hotheaded and maverick among them have said one-offs that people latch on to (looking at you McConkie) but overall I feel they have proven to be inspired.
When you say you are "open to the heterodox interpretation being true" about controversial issues like the Book of Abraham, doesn't that mean you are open to the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve being mistaken?
Your other comments strike me as Straussian. It seems like you're suggesting that it's good for LDS leadership to cultivate a greater confidence in their authority than is justified by the facts because it's good for the organization. But deceiving people is morally wrong, not to mention a contradiction of the teachings of the LDS church, whether or not it's good policy.
The priesthood ban was clearly an instance of the 12+3 teaching incorrect doctrine -- I don't see a way around that. You can't blame Brigham Young when the First Presidency affirmed its status as a doctrine in the 1949 letter, and the church maintained this stance for more than 100 years.
Think we’re slightly talking past each other:
1. My point with blaming the priesthood ban on Brigham is that I think that the leadership in the ensuing decades, rather than all independently coming to the conclusion that it was right, were laboring under the assumption that previous prophets could not be wrong speaking ex cathedra, which is maybe a more forgivable mistake.
2. The heterodox interpretations I tend to be open to are usually not places where the prophets have come down hard on the other side. There’s a lot of “we don’t knows” with regard to Abraham for instance, I think the church carefully defines their stances in these cases that leaves open an interpretation that there was a mistake involved but doesn’t outright state it.
3. “You will be blessed for following the prophet” and “the prophet is never wrong” are not the same claim, but it is very hard to insist on the first one without implying the second. You have to walk a thin line of not being actively dishonest while not leaving the door open for the proud and self-assured among us (I certainly belong to this group) to start nitpicking and reinterpreting. That’s a recipe for coordination failure and schism. I think my Bishop is wrong about things all the time, but I sustain him and take his sacred leadership seriously, even if I might exercise some D&C 121 style diplomacy as well.
4. I wouldn’t say this the first time there has been some misleading going on via sacred revelation. God had the whole world thinking that an eternal burning lake of fire awaited sinners for a long time until we learned that “my punishment is eternal because I am eternal” and the whole idea of hell changed to something more reasonable. There are many many cases of lies by omission you have to accept if you want to accept our gentler God.
What makes you believe this religion over others? When you see others believing religions with the same intensity you believe yours, what do you think?
I'm a pretty big religion fan in general, I think most major religions are good for their adherents in principle (if not always in practice) and most of the problems people identify with *religion* are problems with *humanity* and repeat themselves in any institution or human endeavor, sacred or secular. I try to draw truth from Islam, Daoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shinto, Sikhism, where I can see it. I love studying them and participating in their ceremonies when I get the chance. I see the greatest truth, the most authority, in my participation and studies of this one.
When I see intense believers I feel happy, I believe God works in their lives and speaks to them in their own ways. Except when they turn that intensity to violent or unjust ends. I try to withhold judgement as much as I can, as religion and culture and politics are all twisted up. You'll see people monocausally blame Islam for a warlike and unequal Middle East, but Islam is much bigger than that (Indonesia! Bangladesh! Bangsamoro!) and these aspects of the Arab world seem to predate the arrival of Islam.
With regard to "most major religions are good for their adherents in principle (if not always in practice)", I'm not sure I agree unless you're really loose with meaning; for example, if Catholics lived strictly by their church's doctrine, then certain things which I believe can be good (premarital sex, use of contraception, homosexuality) would be banned. This seems bad to me -- honing in on homosexuality for a moment, I think most liberal people would agree homosexuality is fine, and yet the Bible seems pretty staunchly in the "homosexuality is a sin" camp. There are groups like Episcopalians who have somewhat awkward work arounds for this, but I find it hard to believe that this means the religion is good in principle unless you really warp the meaning of in principle. It seems like the awkward work arounds to inconvenient religious rules from scripture are practical ways to make religions better by deviating from their principles!
And with regard to "most of the problems with religion are problems with humanity," I find it hard to find the content in that statement. I do not believe in divinity, so I don't attribute any problems with any particular church to God or whatever. Religions are a particular kind of societal institution; when someone critiques grocery stores, I don't think it's any kind of defense to say "this is a problem with humanity, not a problem of grocery stores!" I agree humanity has many problems, it's just that some types of behaviors or organizations tend to lead to certain types of problems.
It’s true there’s a level of tiptoeing that goes on to coexist with society. Religions that are insufficiently conformist to the society they exist in get chased out (see: Falun Gong). I think people who choose to live by the principles of their religion live pretty meaningful personal lives for their sacrifice in a way that’s hard to reason about at population levels. I don’t think premarital sex has been a productive and winning experiment for western society, and people who choose to forego it are winninger.
As for the humanity thing, there are of course specific critiques you can make of a specific sect if you like as well as trends across sects. I think nations should be secular for instance, that seems to have worked out better than the bloody 1500s. I’m just shadowboxing with the critique I hear that religion caused this or that when it’s not very obvious that this or that wouldn’t still have occurred in a counterfactual world where religion doesn’t exist
Okay, I have a question. Suppose God wants to communicate something to humanity. Why doesn't he simply make a book appear on everyone's kitchen table, or why doesn't he appear to everyone in a dream and tell them what he has to tell? Why would he reveal himself to only a single person in a complicated way?
how you go about answering this question depends on what you think our purpose here on earth is, as well as how comfortable you are opining on God’s mind. It’s also a place where our distinctions with mainstream Christian doctrine surface quite prominently. It’s also really long (sorry)
first: I do not think God only speaks to the prophet. He speaks to all people in all times and places, to greater and lesser degrees. What distinguishes a prophet is what he speaks about. A prophet has stewardship over the whole world and so may receive revelation on their behalf. Anybody can receive revelation, but only for their zone of stewardship, like a parent for their family. It is precisely through the process of personal revelation that we believe one ought to acquire a belief in God in the first place, not just trusting some other dude. This is a sharp way this topic differs from regular epistemic topics that get discussed around here, which can be made clearer through learning facts about them and weighing them against each other. There are no number of facts about high levels of so called Mormon welfare that will convince you God exists or that we wield his authority, only God manifesting the truth to you will.
So why this way? Why not just prove God’s existence through some global supernatural miracle and speak clearly in an unmistakable booming voice from heaven about God’s will? Why all these lossy, human-tainted transmissions that are difficult to untangle from your own thoughts?
Our cosmology believes that before this life we were all spirits, co-eternal intelligences with God that had been authored into distinct persons, disembodied and perfectly naive. Being a disembodied perfectly naive spirit in God’s presence isn’t half bad, no evil or pain to speak of. But you don’t know anything and you can’t do anything, you can’t influence the matter around you or fall in love or make a choice. As we learn in the text of the Book of Abraham that this review failed to review, God’s plan for us that we consented to was thus: we’d receive bodies, endure a mortality of struggle, deprivation, confusion, ignorance, and pain, to test us yes but more importantly to *teach* us how to be more Godly. With an aim to returning to God’s presence and inheriting God’s power and glory for ourselves, not because it’s externally bestowed as a reward but because we’ve grown into seeing and acting on the universe as God does, with perfect judgement. This is the meaning of the “degrees” of heaven our faith believes in: the person that you’ve grown into will determine your course in the hereafter, with very generous chances (like test retakes and test corrections from college) to fix your messups and learn the lessons the right way around courtesy of Christ’s Atonement bridging the gap between sinful humans and a perfect God.
The parameters of these tests and lessons require God to be pretty distant during the process, like an RCT. Yes he intervenes some ways and times (I believe he intervenes far more in the scriptural era because the religion he was building was somewhat maladaptive and tiny vs the pagan contenders and needed the thumb on the scale for it to continue existing as long as it did) but mostly this life is seeing what you do on the other side of Rawlsian veil of ignorance. We quite literally believe in something near to Rawls’ thought experiment as a point of doctrine.
Imagine learning a subject like math but the answers to all the problems are already filled in. *Some* people could probably will themself to do the exercise to learn how to arrive at the answer, but even they would be tainted by the number being there already, influencing and constraining your calculations.
Because in the course of this experiment the free will of the participants is never and will never be abridged, everything sacred we have is very human shaped. Books and buildings and stuff.
I think by-and-large the secular humanists we have around here are doing pretty well in the experiment (a lot better than some religious people!). They reject God’s existence but they get some other pretty important things right, about the nature of morality and their duty to other people. The intellectual underclass is a little less likely to arrive at these conclusions independently so you can see how religion is useful for them. Due to the aforementioned test corrections the moral atheists are going to be just fine at the judgement bar. But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t improve their life right now by aligning their will more with God’s.
The joke used to be that everyone in Utah is Mormon: Mormon, non-Mormon, jack Mormon, ex-Mormon, but regardless, something-Mormon. Now, oddly, everyone in Utah is Mormon except for obedient members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
This is not my personal apologetic belief set, but it is always funny to me how little people being up any simulation theory arguments in these conversations. Esp with more people increasing their credence in such beliefs with the rise of LLMs AI AGI ASI. Papers missing? Partially found? Filled in fraudulently? New details every few decades? Well yeah God has an free will o meter and has to edit the sim so we can still be agents unto ourselves with enough uncertainty to require faith, etc
I have a couple questions, though I might be late responding to a two weeks old comment (disclaimer: I'm very much an atheist)
1. Is your theory of god unfalsifiable, and if not, what evidence would shift your opinion more towards 'Joseph Smith not being divinely inspired' vs 'Joseph Smith being divinely inspired'?
2. If there are two religions, both of which are popular and both claiming to be divinely inspired, but that have contradicting claim, would that imply that one of them is not actually divinely inspired, and if so, how do you figure out which, if either, is actually correct?
3. My atheist position comes mostly from not seeing anything that is better explained by god than by other theories. What would be an area where existence of god would have more predictive power or explain phenomena better than all the other theories?
1. I think the existence of God is not unfalsifiable in principle, but maybe in practice. But this is true for many of the softer sciences. Historical narratives are constructed because we gather and analyze documentary and archeological evidence and convince ourself that such-and-such happened. We could find evidence that weakens or strengthens our conviction in this narrative, but it would be hard to find a kill shot that we couldn't explain our way around (unless the claim was something very specific like event A predates event B and then we found and dated a potsherd that definitively proved that event B in fact occurred first). Same goes for psychological and sociological phenomena, all we can really do is observe and update.
What this means for religion is we can accumulate evidence for and against it and bayesian update ourselves around. Bayesian evidence for God essentially boils down to the trifecta of the spiritual power of scripture, one’s specific transcendent spiritual experiences, and the prosaic fruits of living the Gospel. If you did a population level investigation of people who identify as "Mormons" then you'd see we're not *that* special, but if you were able to invasively track who is actually not just professing membership in a church but correctly engaging with and applying the doctrine, your key indicators of wellbeing would all shoot up quite dramatically. I think this would be true of most religions to the extent that their doctrines are not actively deleterious (there are no shortage of those as well). If you could do the same study and found that wellbeing indicators were level or even down, that would be pretty strong evidence against its truth. You can say this is just because our doctrines map suspiciously well to known good things that are not necessarily an indicator of anything divine or supernatural, and I agree! Christ’s exemplar life is sort of hard to argue with because the rightness and trueness seems to exist separate from the question of his divinity. Like duh it’s commendable to be nice to the downtrodden and sacrifice on their behalf. For a work of fiction that illustrates the self-evident goodness of the still-imperfect believer, read the Brothers Karamazov.
We have a path we always invite people to try to prove to themselves: read the Book of Mormon, think about it, pray with faith that you can receive an answer if it is true, and then you are promised an answer. If the answer is no, or there is no answer at all, I think you are entirely justified in following a path away. Most people don’t make it that far, so I’m not sure what the success rate is on people actually testing the test.
2. In questions of contradictions, you pray about it and solicit an answer from heaven, along with intensive study yourself. I tend to focus on where religions overlap rather than where they diverge, and sometimes the divergences don’t seem so intense that one ought to not test the waters of both? As in, listen to their own argument for their truth and their prescriptions and apply them. Unless one religion has some precept that’s like “you go to hell forever if you don’t choose us first and immediately” which I am not aware of being the case in any major religion. It is possible that they could string you along from the less disruptive prescriptions to the more disruptive ones (oh you’re doing shahadah and salah and sawm and you still don’t feel anything? that’s just cuz you need to do hajj and zakat too) but you are welcome to terminate your investigation at any point.
3. The best explanatory power God offers is for the classic triptych “where do we come from? where are we going? why are we here?” Answering those lends meaning, direction, and accountability to your life. They give you buy-in into a morality better than any purely philosophical or empirical theory can. And it of course provides explanatory power for spiritual experiences beyond your neurons firing in ways that mislead you.
I also think something secular philosophy has a big blindspot with is sin. Consequentialism tells you what you ought to do, but not necessarily what you ought to do when you don’t do what you ought to do. I spend a lot of time in irreligious spaces hanging out with brainy atheists (whom i deeply love and do not look down upon, they are all smarter than me) and I’ve always found them ill equipped to discuss akrasia and fallibility wrt to <maximizing utils|fulfilling your deon|cultivating virtue>
Eliezer talks about how one can choose to explain, worship, or ignore any phenomenon https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yxvi9RitzZDpqn6Yh/explain-worship-ignore. He says you can always ask “why?” to the next explanation and it without fail recurses down to the standard model of particle physics and the big bang, at which point you can’t answer why any more and you choose to worship instead. I do not find the prospect of worshipping a set of fields and forces very appealing. I don’t see how a pure materialist explanation for reality permits free will, and I don’t see how a physics-driven world of brains without will completely driven by the interactions between elementary particles permits for any real theory of morality beyond an observational one. Anybody who subscribes to a materialist explanation for consciousness is engaging in the same sort of self-deception they use to explain away my spiritual experiences when they reason about all of the various philosophical topics that rest upon free will as an axiom. Yes I am familiar with compatibilism and moral anti-realism, I find those arguments incredibly unconvincing placed against the transcendental experiences I and many others have had grasping onto some deeper non-material tissue.
1. Why would it be hard to falsify existence of god? For example, if you believe that god can hear your prayers and influence the physical world, you could, for example, look at outcomes of patients who are devout and pray to god (maybe ask people how much time they volunteer and only choose the top 10% to make sure you don't get 'free riders') vs atheists. In a godless world (or a world without a god who can hear prayers and influence the world, to be precise), we would expect no difference. In a world with a god, we would maybe expect the outcomes to be better for those who pray. Of course, you can modify/specify the theory of god such that maybe he cares for both those who pray and those who don't, so that's why you don't see the difference, or maybe there are some other mysterious reasons for there to be no difference. But generally, in a world with god, P(patients who pray have better outcomes|god) is higher than P(patients who pray have better outcomes|no god), so if the result of such a study is positive, you should update towards god, and if it is negative, you should update towards no god (or at least a god who influences the things happening on Earth).
You can also ask one person to pick a number, and then another person to pray to god to reveal them the picked number, and see if it is higher than what you get in the same scenario without praying. But perhaps god doesn't care about such minute studies and so doesn't bother to asnwer? Ok, but surely there is some possible study idea such that we would expect different outcomes for devout religious people and for atheists, otherwise it just looks like an invisible dragon (https://www.lesswrong.com/s/7gRSERQZbqTuLX5re/p/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY).
My understanding is the differences that you can observe come down to religious people having more buy-in in their beliefs, and thus being more virtuous (with respect to the moral systems already existing at the time). For example, the post had a link to a study about Mormons spending much more time volunteering and donating than other Americans. The things that you point to as evidence for god ("the spiritual power of scripture, one’s specific transcendent spiritual experiences, and the prosaic fruits of living the Gospel") are also explained by people just being really convinced that their religion is true and thus making sure they live virtuous.
> You can say this is just because our doctrines map suspiciously well to known good things that are not necessarily an indicator of anything divine or supernatural, and I agree!
Wouldn't we expect that in a godless world as well? If the religion practices are good (for example solve Prisoners' dilemma), then the groups of people believing in that religion would be more successfull than other religious groups, which would attract more people, so that just by evolutionary mechanism we would expect the more popular religions to have traits that are beneficial for the group. I don't see anything suspicious there.
My main question here is: Are there effects of religion that are not explained by people really believeing and being more motivated to live virtuosly? If not, wouldn't that be suspicious?
(It seems to me that the people who lived closer to the founding of their religion would be more likely to say that there are indeed supernatural effects explained by religion, and were willing stake their belief on falsifiable tests (for example the contest between Elijah and priests of Baal had direct falsifiable claims and tested them), but with time it retreated to only making moral and spiritual claims. But even in the moral realm, it seems like believing in god doesn't give you new information about morality, but only increases your belief in the existing moral systems. For example, there's no reason for god to not at least mention that slavery is bad to the people he inspired to write the bible, even if they couldn't abolish it at the time. Or even in current times, I'm not aware of a strong correlation between people being highly religious vs people being vegan. It seems like the work of moral progress is not done by prophets, who we would expect to have much higher understanding of morality if they were divinely inspired. Instead, the prophets amplify the better memes of a current moral system, which, while useful and good, again is more easily explained by a godless world.
2. I guess here I'm not sure how does one determine if a text was divinely inspired. If a person wrote a text and claims it was divinely inspired, is there a difference between determining if the text was actually divinely inspired vs determining if you think the text has good moral points?
3. Similar to 1, some reasons here ("Answering those lends meaning, direction, and accountability to your life. They give you buy-in into a morality better than any purely philosophical or empirical theory can.") come down to instrumental usefulness, which does not require a god, and I agree that some religions might indeed have instrumental usefulness.
While religion also does provide some explanation for existential questions, when I say 'have explanatory power' I usually imply not only providing an explanation, but also that explanation being better than others, like being supported by other evidence or being better epistemically. But I don't think starting a discussion of free will and materialism will be very productive here.
(Also, when you say "I do not find the prospect of worshipping a set of fields and forces very appealing.", what do you mean? If the options are worship, explain and ignore, I assume you're not choosing 'explain', since that would require having an explanation for why god made quantum field theory the way that he did? I guess one can invoke 'mysterious ways', but that wouldn't be much of an explanation)
1. I don't think religion can be approached in the way that most other epistemic topics are. Catching a belief in God has to be a personal journey. I don't think your prayer studies would yield results because you are specifying the criteria of success (knowing the hidden number or recovering from illness) when those aren't necessarily in alignment with the grantor. Imagine there is a superintelligent AI simulating all of us with some objective function, and you use these tests to disprove its existence. Why do you suppose that the superintelligent AI who can see all causes and effects and is over all people has an objective that implies more people who pray to them to recover and will give praying people mind-reading powers? It's a highly simplistic view of what role God plays (though to be fair there are definitely Christians who think this is exactly how God works!)
Your point about moral evolution occurring societally outside of religion is well taken, and I agree that's the case. My best explanation for that is that a pragmatic religion that won't die out in a generation (and/or completely isolate itself from society writ large such that it ceases to grow or exert much influence on the world like the hermetic orders) can only ask so much of its adherents, and so the pareto optimum exists in demanding only they exemplify the "better memes of a current moral system”. Jesus drank wine, but I do not.
It is curious that these extreme miraculous proofs always seem to exist in these long dead scripture stories, isn’t it? But one great thing about my church in particular is there’s miraculous stuff happening in contemporary accounts! You’ve got multiple contemporary documents attesting to the same events, like Joseph healing people during a malarial outbreak, or the testimony of the 3 witnesses. And of course you have the Book of Mormon itself which I must reiterate is our main proof, a book of scripture with so much profound insight and spiritual heft that it is difficult to wave away as the invention of an isolated farm boy turned con man. I frequently say that my personal theory for why miracles seem to be so prevalent and public in scripture and so absent in day-to-day life is a combination of survivorship bias (holy scripture is of course going to focus on miraculous events, and since the books cover hundreds or even thousands of years you don’t need that high of a frequency to populate them) and precarity (the God of Abraham had to intervene constantly to not be wiped out by the more memetically attractive pagan deities on all sides, Jesus had to display his divinity constantly to build such an enduring legacy that wouldn’t be wiped out by the Romans/Pharisees/etc, the early restored church had to give the saints very good reasons to suffer all the privations and persecution that they did).
2. I think there’s a big difference between determining if a text is diviniely inspired vs morally good, which is the aforementioned prayer and receiving a witness from heaven that it is divinely inspired. This is what all your demands for proof are going to continue to boil down to. Spiritual proof is individualized and non-fungible. You gotta get it for yourself, I can’t share mine with you even if I really wish I could.
3. To some degree I think a religion’s instrumental rationality is proof of their epistemic rationality (by their fruits ye shall know them). I think bare utilitarianism is a fairly effete moral philosophy that is metaethically flawed. It can’t be full-throatedly recommended to any individual because they lack the ability to apply it rigorously. It’s maladaptive. If I wear the shoes of the supreme being and I am constrained by
- some set of physical laws (yes we actually believe this, we don’t believe in ex nihilo creation)
- some set of moral laws (we believe this too, Alma 42:13 “…the work of justice could not be destroyed; if so, God would cease to be God”)
- human agency (Alma 42:27 “…whosoever will not come the same is not compelled to come”)
I think what I would come up with to influence my little wards over a vareity of personalities, circumstances, and talents would basically look like the religion that I know and love.
At the end of the day the true explanatory test you can apply is when you study and pray and then receive an answer and you have to explain that. It's one on one and the result will not be publishable in an academic journal.
When I say I do not find the prospect of worshipping the standard model appealing, I mean that I find the idea that quarks are where the explanatory power of physics stops and there is no further explanation and I must worship it to be lame. A loving spiritual father who organized reality for me and I must worship him (I think you misapprehended the essay if you think I must explain why God created quantum fields. I don’t, I just worship. I worship God instead of the quantum fields) is a superior place to terminate my explanation.
> It's a highly simplistic view of what role God plays (though to be fair there are definitely Christians who think this is exactly how God works!)
Would you say that people who believe that praying can help increase health outcome are wrong / have a highly simplistic view? If so, I agree. I brought up this example because many people might believe such things, and they are indeed falsifiable.
> Imagine there is a superintelligent AI simulating all of us with some objective function, and you use these tests to disprove its existence. Why do you suppose that the superintelligent AI who can see all causes and effects and is over all people has an objective that implies more people who pray to them to recover and will give praying people mind-reading powers?
If that AI claims that he cares about people, and claims that he can heal people, and wants to encourage people to believe in them, then I would indeed expect that the AI would heal people (unless the AI is lying).
> You’ve got multiple contemporary documents attesting to the same events, like Joseph healing people during a malarial outbreak, ...
I do not know much about that event. Could you tell me how many people he had blessed, how many of them survived, and what was the general survival rate for malaria in similar condition (but without the blessings)? I found this paper online (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10077013/pdf/ajtmh.22-0672.pdf) about malaria among US soldiers during the Civil war, which says that "Overall, malaria-related mortality rates were more than three times higher among Black (16.3 malaria deaths/1,000 person/years) than White (5.0 deaths/1,000 person/years) soldiers, and the case fatality rate was approximately twice as high among Black (estimate 2%) than White (estimate 1%) soldiers.", so if the fatality rate in adults is only around 1-2%, then people recovering wouldn't really be a miracle. But I've also seen a number here (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11477079/pdf/jcm-13-05680.pdf) that 26% of French troops sent to Madagascar died of malaria, so I guess the number is somewhere in the range from 1 to 30% (maybe in Madagascar they had a more fatal strain than in US?) (I literally don't know anything about mortality rates of malaria in 19th century America, so please correct me if that information is wrong). Apparently, Joseph's brother and his son died of malaria, so perhaps the number should be higher than 1%. But if you claim that this was a miracle and not just natural recovery, I presume you know the actual numbers here? Also, if god gave Joseph healing powers, why wouldn't he also heal his brother and son? Do these powers sometimes work and sometimes don't?
> or the testimony of the 3 witnesses.
(Again, I don't know much about the event and haven't done any meaningful deep dive). Yeah, that's surprising. But it's only three people, and it's not that surprising if people who want to have a vision end up believing that they had a vision (even though it's still surprising). Also, it's not that hard to get people to lie for you: we know Joseph was convincing enough to get away with polygamy for quite long, and that he was not an honest man (ie lying about polygamy). It would be surprising if, without communicating beforehand between each other, they would then independently describe what they saw, and you could compare their descriptions and see that they said the same thing. For some reason, nobody from the religious propets ever does this, even though it would greatly improve their evidence. But fine, you get an update towards god existing.
And for all the miracles, they never seem to get new information that would be inexplainable but for a miracle. For example, imagine if people could look at the plates, see that it was indeed ancient egyptian and do the tests to date it back to ancient Egypt. For some reason, this never happens: the sheet with characters from the golden plates is not actually any ancient Egypt language, Joseph can't actually discern between an ancient language and random marks, the scroll used for generating the book of Abraham turns to be just a standard egyptian scroll.
Also, I would update much more based on such miracles/visions if all/most of those would support the same religion / make the same claims, ie if the knowledge revealed in visions or via divine inspiration wouldn't conflict with each other (ie different religions having conflicting beliefs yet both being based on word of god or divine inspiration) and with knowledge that we get from other ways (ie Bible and Book of Mormon claiming things we know aren't true). This uncorrelatedness updates me more towards "people just aren't that reliable at eyewitness accounts and if they want to see something, they might" than towards divine vision, but overall visions still update toward god, though not by that much.
> And of course you have the Book of Mormon itself which I must reiterate is our main proof, a book of scripture with so much profound insight and spiritual heft that it is difficult to wave away as the invention of an isolated farm boy turned con man.
Survivorship bias can explain that (ie you just forget about all the people who start cults that fail). I don't contest that believing in the Book of Mormon leads you to leading a more moral life than average, I just don't think you need god to write it.
>the God of Abraham had to intervene constantly to not be wiped out by the more memetically attractive pagan deities on all sides, Jesus had to display his divinity constantly to build such an enduring legacy that wouldn’t be wiped out by the Romans/Pharisees/etc, the early restored church had to give the saints very good reasons to suffer all the privations and persecution that they did.
If the god is not afraid of hiding and he wants people to believe in him and not in pagan religions and he is ready to do miracles for that, why can't he just say to all people at once "Listen to Jesus", or write across the sky, or do any such miracle? I really don't understand how this would not be the obvious solution, and how you're not surprised that he doesn't do that.
> I think there’s a big difference between determining if a text is diviniely inspired vs morally good, which is the aforementioned prayer and receiving a witness from heaven that it is divinely inspired.
Ok, makes sense.
> I think bare utilitarianism is a fairly effete moral philosophy that is metaethically flawed. It can’t be full-throatedly recommended to any individual because they lack the ability to apply it rigorously.
I think there are many atheists who are moral people without believing in god, so just empirically there must be some moral philosophy that can be applied by individuals without faith.
> At the end of the day the true explanatory test you can apply is when you study and pray and then receive an answer and you have to explain that. It's one on one and the result will not be publishable in an academic journal.
I understand why a process of converting to a religion would be personal and not easily quantifiable, that's fair. I don't understand why god has to hide all of the effects of believing in god (or to be more exact, he shows the benefits that are explained by people being more confident in their moral system, like giving more to charity, but he hides the other ones).
> A loving spiritual father who organized reality for me and I must worship him (I think you misapprehended the essay if you think I must explain why God created quantum fields. I don’t, I just worship. I worship God instead of the quantum fields) is a superior place to terminate my explanation.
I don't think I misunderstood the essay. The choice between 'ignore', 'explain', and 'worship' arises for any claim. If you have a graph of claims connected by explanations, then when you choose 'explain', you go down that graph to another claim. If you choose 'ignore' or 'worship', you stop at the original claim. There is no implication that you only worship one thing, or that if you worship god, then suddenly the three options do not appear for any other claim. You still have to choose how do you explain why equations of QFT are the way they are, and it appears that you're choosing 'ignore'.
(“Mormon” here) Not all too bad. For a review of “the _Book_ of Abraham” I would have liked to see more commentary on the actual text, but maybe that’s just my preference.
There’s little question that Joseph Smith was not a flawless seer. There are a number of revelations which didn’t happen (one is mentioned here, I can think of another one or two offhand). There are some concrete predictions that turn out surprisingly true, like the prophecy on Stephen A. Douglas, but he’s not shooting 100%. Figuring out what’s God and what’s the voice in your head is, I think, an extremely subtle business at best. Maybe if an angel shows up it’s easy, but when it’s (paraphrasing Smith) “pure intelligence revealed directly to the spirit as if you had no body at all” it’s got to be tricky, very tricky. Joseph Smith’s marriage practices are certainly “not good.” The root idea for his polygamy being that “we’re restoring all the old practices of men of God like Abraham and Isaac and Jacob” is palatable enough, but I can’t offer any defense for how Smith went about it.
The Book of Abraham is just the “House of the Dragon” spinoff of the original content, though. The Book of Mormon is of course the real interesting work.
It’s interesting I find many of the appealing parts of church doctrine outside of the Book of Mormon (e.g. No hell/ECT; emphasis on agency; parts of existence that were not created by God). These things help me to form my own theodicy.
I think a lot of the cosmology is indeed more appealing than the BoM. I just find the BoM the most interesting as a text. (Not like I’ve written 400000+ words in an unpublished commentary on it or anything.)
Since the folks 'round here are so interested in the possibilities of AI, and since Ancient History is the topic for today - why haven't efforts to use AI to decipher Linear A been successful so far?
If there is one thing AI ought to be good at, it is pattern recognition, and what is deciphering a language, but learning patterns?
*For those not keeping score at home, Linear A is an ancient Cretan writing script that uses the same characters as Linear B (deciphered by Michael Ventris and determined to be an archaic form of Greek) but which nobody so far can read.
It's a small corpus and probably not related to any surviving language.
Or at least that's the reason humans haven't managed it, so putting AI to the task won't necessarily solve it either.
One of the major criticisms of contemporary AI systems is that even when they equal or surpass human performance on certain tasks, they take a *lot* more training data than people do to get there.
The initial breakthrough in Linear B was due to Michael Ventris, but Ventris and John Chadwick are jointly credited with the decipherment. The language turned out to be an early Cypriot version of Mycenaean Greek - but Linear A is probably Minoan, for which we have as yet nothing along the lines of a Rosetta stone. If is ever deciphered, surviving texts, far from proving to be undiscovered literary and philosophical masterpieces, will almost certainly turn out to be shorthand lists of taxable goods - so not very much there for pattern recognition!
Fair enough.
Actually, all the response are sensible, just don't want to clog the stack with "thanks, sounds legit".
Last month, someone claimed to have made some progress on Linear A using AI. It made the front page of Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48600107
(Very light on technical details, though. The guy wrote a draft manuscript of his work and sent it to some academics for review, but he didn't want to post it publicly until he got feedback. We'll find out eventually, I guess.)
Great read. As a less-than-true-believer member, who still considers himself a Mormon, that South Park quote actually fits my personal worldview fairly well. I had never heard it before. I still am holding onto some hope (likely irrationally) that there is some divinity in the things Joseph Smith taught, despite all of the deep flaws. This religious bet hedging comes at a cost though, I am not nearly as "good" as I was when I had stronger beliefs in the church, reflecting the tension the author identifies. My current conception "Joseph Smith revealed some divine truths, despite the false provenance of his scriptures and his abuse of power" is helpful in resolving some cognitive dissonance, but it puts me in a place where religion places much fuzzier obligations on me. I am still in the process of working out how solve all of this. I just want to believe anything, that is not patently false, that leads me to help others.
For what it's worth, I've been out of the LDS church for many years now, and I still take opportunities to help others. If that's something you genuinely want to do, I think you will find ways to help regardless of your cosmological beliefs.
If you think the cosmological beliefs and/or the organization are genuinely useful towards the goal of helping others, sticking with them is probably a good idea. I have the kind of autistic brain where I care a lot about what's actually true; sitting in a meeting where people testify they are certain that specific things are true, when I believe those things are likely false, and not being socially permitted to testify of the opposite, is deeply uncomfortable for me. If you don't have a problem with that, power to you - I hope you continue finding ways to help others regardless of where you or your beliefs end up.
I've left, but I can totally respect this. For me the cognitive dissonance became unbearable. But I really do miss the community and the built-in mechanisms to help people. I was a weirdo who actually liked the comradery of helping in moves. I'm also a little once bitten, twice shy and struggling to find structured ways of helping. But that's probably a "me" problem and if I could commit I know there's need out there.
In my case I found a community organization to volunteer with on a consistent schedule. That gives me opportunities to help people often, even if it isn't exactly the same as getting called up to help someone move in.
As an active member (activity level,: said yes to teach early morning seminary 😂) , I'm curious if you find selection effects a problem for said community organizations?
I often dwell on what drives successful members of society to engage in inefficient uses of their time/human capital (eg yud's gathering fuzzies vs utils. Crassly, me cleaning the church vs working and paying more tithing, a classic bugbear hah) and find that outside of
Something to do with child rearing/family event
And
Religious conviction
Most community volunteering splits into
Outlet for specialized hobby which you must be specialize in
Political feeding trough
Outlet for Dysfunctional adults
But perhaps my experience is purely non representative?
I volunteer for a nonprofit in my community which helps families in poverty. The nonprofit has employees as well, not just volunteers.
I'm not completely sure I understand your question; can you clarify? One interpretation of your question is "would that community organization disappear if a few people self-selected out of volunteering?" If that's what you meant, then no, it wouldn't - they would just have to hire a few more people in that case. Another interpretation would be "how do you get the very best people to join your organization so you can benefit from their superior skills?" If that's what you meant then they don't, not really. The people who volunteer or work there are ordinary community members, not exceptional ones - not more successful than the average member of society, but not especially dysfunctional either. Another interpretation would be "how do we get 100% of people to join community organizations instead of a self-selected subset?" That seems obviously impossible to me and also not necessary.
"Selection effects" could mean a lot of different things, so I'm still not sure I answered the question you were trying to ask. I don't have much insight into the reasons why people choose to work with a community organization instead of somewhere else; I also don't have much insight into why people other than myself choose to volunteer instead of doing other things with their time.
I'm very curious about your thought process as a Protestant. Is your faith in the Bible as shaky as your faith in the BoM? Are you "holding onto some hope" that there is divinity in the things Jesus taught, or is that as shaky as your faith in the things Joseph Smith taught?
If you got to the point where you didn't believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet at all, where would that leave you? Would you be a deist with LDS characteristics, a normal Protestant, an agnostic?
It's a good question. My faith in the bible is not necessarily as shaky my faith in the BoM but there is an analogue in my views on both. Both are potentially the word of God, but "through a glass darkly" mediated by the imperfect humans that wrote them.
A separate way of answering this question, however, is that my faith in Christ is significantly stronger than my confidence in Joseph Smith. If I were to find that Smith was a complete and utter fraud, it would not (greatly) affect my faith in Christ. I believe in Christ, in large part because I find the parable of the prodigal son to be the single clearest illustration of how a divine perspective would differ from that of a normal human. I'm not saying that it couldn't have possibly been the work of a human, but I prefer to have faith that it is divine. I use the parable of the prodigal son as my personal measuring stick for whether something is Godly. I ask "is this consonant with the principles of that parable? (e.g. sin leads to misery; sinners are to be pitied not scorned; God's love for us is not contingent on our actions; God is constantly hoping that we will return to him; the only permanent barrier between us and God is our own pride)
I feel that even without the scaffolding of Mormonism I would be something adjacent to a C.S Lewis "Mere Christian". Maybe there would be another protestant church that would be a superior scaffold for my religion but given that I've started to believe that there is no "one true church" I might as well stick with the good one that I have. The thing I believe God wants us to do, the point of life, is to give up our obsession with our own selves and become like Christ; loving God and our neighbor. I feel there are likely many religious contexts in which that can happen. If life was about finding and believing in the one true church, I imagine God would give everyone a chance to at least be exposed to it.
"I just want to believe anything, that is not patently false, that leads me to help others." Then why not believe that most humans agree that suffering sucks, identify sources of suffering there is widespread consensus do indeed suck (starving, dying of preventable diseases, etc.) and just do things that reduce the occurrence of those kinds of suffering in the world?
For that matter, why isn't "I want to help others" as a statement of truth a sufficient motivator?
"I want to watch movies" is a statement of truth sufficient to get people to watch movies. "I want to make money" is a statement of truth sufficient to get people to get a job. Why not "I want to help people?"
(I'm not in the LDS but I grew up in the Churches of Christ for the record which is another quasi Protestant Restorationist American 19th century religious project that gets weird stinkeye from most mainline Christians and has maintained remarkable cohesion and growth given what it was. I'm now almost fully Nietzschean in outlook I would say though it took me about 20 years to get here. Maybe that's too far a path to go down for you, but I think the question of why your own will directed to what you supposedly want is insufficient to motivate you is an interesting question to ask yourself. If it *isn't* insufficient, then why not just do it?)
Its funny that you say that because I have tried exactly that. For many years, starting in my teens, I was an atheist, and I had resolved to live the best life I could by doing exactly that (1) meditating on the fact that suffering is wrong and (2) giving my money to effective charities. But it didn’t work, at least not for me. The problem is not one of rationality. I can believe, and do believe, without any doubt whatsoever, that I ought to do everything in my power to reduce the suffering of others. At the same time I know what I want to do is very different from what I ought to do. And in that period, though I gave some money to charity and never wavered in my belief about what I ought to do, overwhelmingly my self-centered hedonistic side won out. And I saw that the people who still held the beliefs that I had rejected did a much better job of winning this battle between want and ought. And seeing other people leave the church, I never saw them become more selfless.
This has led me to the conclusion that religion has the power to change hearts while philosophy only has the power to change minds. Philosophy and rationality can provide a prescription but not the medicine itself. It can provide a map but not fuel. The willpower and disposition to do what you ought seems to come mostly strongly from religious practice. What explains this change of heart? Maybe it is something in the mundane rituals that gradually change the way you interact with the world. But maybe there is something genuinely supernatural and divine. Maybe it is only through religious practice that we come into contact with this divinity that reshapes us.
I would imagine that the answer is probably more social in nature than you think, and that the difference in how it feels subjectively to you is not truly a matter of how you think yourself (or faith yourself) into something by working through it alone on the inside, but much more about how subjectively different it feels when you know you are in a group whether others truly believe and have the same values that you do. Wanting to help others when you feel that most everyone in your community wants the same thing, or at least believes they do, is very very different, subjectively, from wanting to help others and feeling that you're surrounded by people with no such want at all, who couldn't care less.
Perhaps an easier illustration: many people make a sacrifice by choosing to be monogamous. A choice they voluntarily make, and which they believe will have benefits, yet which they may sometimes struggle with to a stronger or lesser degree, and sometimes might feel in moments of temptation that it's an almost unbearable sacrifice. Yet most do not have terribly much difficulty with it on most days, and on most days may not even perceive that they are giving up or missing anything significant at all. However, this would all feel very different if you are in a community or social world where no one else values monogamy, and it's not a norm and in fact it's looked upon with derision or at least pity that anyone would punish themselves in such a manner and deny themselves the pleasures of being with more than one person. In that type of context, remaining faithful to one's spouse is likely to start feeling like a terrible burden or at least one that brings no joy or sense of "doing the right thing" and becomes increasingly difficult to abide by when everyone else around you thinks you're a sucker and is indulging themselves and seeming to enjoy it. I would imagine in that world, the motivation to stay faithful gets ground down to a bare nub and becomes very hard to follow through on. Whereas if you live in a world where everyone values and upholds and mostly succeeds at living up to their ideals of remaining faithful to their spouse, it becomes both more easy and more pleasant to do so oneself. We are all much more socially influenced than we think and don't stand as islands alone with our internally- generated and maintained principles.
Also, curious to know what your Nietzschean outlook looks like. I’ve never read his work but I’ve always had some prejudice against him grounded in this Tolstoy quote:
“The whole world knows that virtue consists in the subjugation of one's passions, or in self-renunciation. It is not just the Christian world, against whom Nietzsche howls, that knows this, but it is an eternal supreme law towards which all humanity has developed, including Brahmanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and the ancient Persian religion. And suddenly a man appears who declares that he is convinced that self-renunciation, meekness, submissiveness and love are all vices that destroy humanity (he has in mind Christianity, ignoring all the other religions)”
While I don't agree with your generalizations about Joseph smiths abuse of power, I find your faith in the face of uncertainty admirable and want to let you know that while I don't think "world weary post apologetic faith" is more deserving of praise than "child-like faith", it is still deserving of it. Happy for you and praying for you.
I would remind you that whatever level of engagement your current motivation set lands you at now, the key is to evaluate where it will land your grandchildren! And if you are happy with how the forging of those links is going, that is most of the balk game
Thank you, I really appreciate that.
I'm interested in your viewpoint on plural marriage. For me I can't come to any conclusion other than abuse of power. I simply cannot accept D&C 132 as the word of God (particularly verses 52 to 54). Maybe I am wrong, but I just cannot believe that God would threaten to destroy someone because they were unhappy that their husband married other women. It's simply not consonant with anything I believe about God's character. I cannot accept that God has some secret reason why Joseph needed to have multiple wives, at first in secret, and against Emma's wishes. I wouldn't worship a God that would justify such things without explanation.
And this raises another tension: I would like to raise my future children in the church and with the same values, but how I do deal with the epistemological messiness? My wish-washy viewpoint of "some of it is true some of it isn't" isn't exactly a helpful religious message. But I think a synthesis is possible, I would teach that our religion is Christianity and our church is LDS. The church is where we go to learn about Christ and to worship and serve alongside others.
A tangent, but
"But what is the mechanism, what are you actually doing in your mind when you try to have faith?"
I suspect a lot of people aren't *trying* to have faith, exactly. I think most people of faith fall into two categories
A lot of people were raised as believers and carry that forward throughout their life because it's so deeply ingrained. They don't really question it.
Of the people who do question their faith, or who were raised without it (or raised with a different faith), I think affirmation or conversion often come because of a profound experience (or several experiences) that are so strong and out of the ordinary that they attribute it to supernatural causes.
Surely there's a lot of people who are just Pascal's Wagering it as well though. They know it sounds implausible but they fear the possible consequences of disbelief so they work hard to keep believing.
One thing that bothered me was the unnecessarily narrow reading of "by his own hand, upon papyrus." While it may be that Joseph Smith (and perhaps most Latter-day Saints) believed that the Book of Abraham papyri were literally written by Abraham himself on the papyri that eventually ended up in Joseph Smith's possession, I think that this is not the best interpretation of the text. It's reasonable to think that what "written by his own hand" means is "this text contains Abraham's first-person account of what happened," not "this specific document in your hand was written by Abraham." A text could still be "by the hand of Abraham," even if it's a later copy. In fact, this is how some of the books in the Book of Mormon present themselves --- as first-person autobiographical accounts that were later compiled and abridged by the prophet-historian Mormon. This leaves more "wiggle room" for inconsistencies in the text, as original first-person accounts may have been re-interpreted and modified as they were copied.
It's also a frequent way the letters of Paul end: with a signature by his own hand. People copying the letters of Paul would also copy that phrase.
Agree, I thought that was a flaw in the piece. The text saying "I wrote this myself" obviously doesn't mean that he wrote the copy we now have, any more than I wrote your original comment if I quote it in mine.
The "by his own hand upon papyrus" part is from the preface/foreword. Said preface was written by Smith from his own perspective to contextualize the scripture that follows.
Be really careful when using self-published Mormon church membership numbers. The number they report is NOT "how many Mormons are there?". It is "How many people have we baptized, who we don't have proof have died or have not reached the age of 110." And in many cultures it's really easy to convince someone to get baptized into random churches. Most people they baptize do not consider themselves Mormon and often don't associate with anything Mormon. It's not uncommon to take the list of local Mormons the church has, pick a name at random and go find them, and at first they're completely confused why you think they're Mormon but if you keep prodding and they're talkative you might get an "Oh yah, when I was a kid some Americans organized local baseball games and we did have to go down to the church and get baptized to participate but I've never been Mormon" or some similiar story. [To be fair, 90% of actual Mormons are mostly just annoyed at the small percentage of Mormon missionaries that do/did this as it creates years and years of paperwork for them as there's no practical way to get them off the list as it's maintained in SLC]
Actual analyses (e.g., reputable surveys that ask people "what religion are you") find about 5M Mormons. This is also consistent with other number the LDS church publishes, such as how many babies were born and blessed in the church. (You take 5M x Fertility Rate = about number of annual baby blessings.).
And roughly, Mormonism hasn't been growing since the early 90s. It's beaten many of it's peer religions that have lost membership, so it's got that going for it. But historically it's better to think of the growth as two big surges, mid 1800s it really benefited from 'come to America as an immigrant' and like 1950-1980 it really rode the Americana wave internationally 'bring America to you'). But it's not an unstoppable growing movement, it's barely holding steady over the last several decades.
TL:DR: humans are masters of cognitive dissonance.
1. "A factor fueling the fascination with ancient Egypt was that a bunch of Egyptian papyri were floating around, but nobody in the US knew how to translate them. A mystery! The Rosetta Stone had just recently been deciphered in Europe, but the knowledge had not yet propagated to the Americas. So when traveling antiques exhibitor Michael Chandler was touring around his collection of mummies and papyri scrolls, he frequently asked around for people who could translate what was written on them."
To be fair, it wasn't just the Mormons who thought that they could read hieroglyphics (and couldn't). Before the Rosetta Stone, there was a whole european tradition going back centuries of claiming to be able read hieroglyphics, and as often as not the phoney readings are more interesting than the actual texts themselves. ("Butter, eggs, milk for the cat, emmer, a card for Aunt Hatshepsut's birthday....)
Dame Frances Yates' phallogocentric and heteronormative magnum opus "Girolamo Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition" lays this out in detail. This book also is funny AF.
2. While the Book of Abraham should be enough to slay anyone not a full-on cult member, there also is the story of Mark David Hoffman, The Mormon Forger, which would be a tale of 169% pure 24K solid comedy gold, if it had not involved the deaths of innocent humans.
Long story short, he had an uncanny talent for finding old Mormon documents that contained information that the LDS church would just as soon not be made public., then selling these documents to the LDS church, then leaking information about those documents, which the church would sheepishly have to admit did in fact exist and were believed genuine.
Of course, the documents were forged by Hoffman.
The really funny thing is that the LDS leadership, who are purported to have a direct line of communication with Heavenly Father, authorized Hoffman large sums of money for these fakes and apparently believed them to be genuine.
The Tanners, who are Mormon apostates and Mormon folk devils, were among the first to call bullshit on these documents, even though their content was, on balance, embarrassing as hell to the LDS church and would have given evidence to a lot of things in LDS history that the LDS church would just as soon not talk about.
I had the opportunity to meet Sandra Tanner and thank her personally for the brave work she and her husband did for decades in near isolation. Their website I stumbled upon was foundational in my personal journey out of the faith.
Much of their work was simply surfacing documents the church didn't want surfaced.
The single biggest factor in my loss of faith was recognizing that the LDS church had a longstanding pattern of suppressing history and punishing researchers. They were not and are not good faith (pun intended) actors.
As a former Mormon I loved this review. I especially appreciate how the reviewer grappled with topics I've been debating: is there something about believing difficult to believe things and reinforcing that belief publicly that is almost a pre-requisite for strong communities? Is it the very act of performing that signalling that's required for strong communities? It's an alarming thought for me, and I don't know the answer, but I certainly haven't found as strong and dedicated of a community after leaving the church.
I think Scott had an article about this phenomenon, something about believing in certain falsehoods leading to better outcomes.
A pal of mine met a couple of Mormon missionaries a few years ago. They asked him for directions to a particular pub. Hopefully they also got to sample the forbidden delights of coffee and premarital sex
I'll be honest, I'm not impressed that this is something like three or four pieces on mormonism in a trenchcoat. Full disclosure I am a believer, but the author really wanted to deviate fully from discussing Abraham at some points. That is, we came for Abraham not for unrelated history regarding Joseph Smith's character.
Many of the criticisms are fair and the scholarship is well represented. It is very difficult to get stuff right as other replies point out.
Since this is often a rationalist venue, I will point out that generally speaking the negative approach is if you can find one seemingly proven negative claim Joseph Smith & co collapses, but the reverse positive position is also available! - that in many cases he appears to be a damn lucky guesser as a prophet would be.
The Book of Mormon says in several places it probably has mistakes of men in it. So the author has not read it, I am afraid.
Dr. Michael Heiser's (not LDS) work on an ancient belief in jewish and divine councils does seem to vindicate some of Smith's claims.
Finally, within the text of the Book of Abraham are parts where Jesus Christ is speaking as Jehovah. The org is caller the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Don't forget and bury that.
Truly the "guessed right again" award is underdiscussed
It's always "I found one issue it's all fake" and never "I found one supernatural truth something is right here"
"I’m not exactly sure how to describe every component of the faith concept, but it’s got something to do with changing your credence in a proposition without good epistemic reasons. That doesn’t mean there couldn’t be good non-epistemic reasons. Info-hazards are a thing and our emotional system is deeply connected to our belief system. Having certain true beliefs can be the source of constant anxiety and self-doubt.
The coolest one is that you can use faith to solve the coordination problem."
This is exactly backwards. It's because religious communities manage to solve coordination problems that their sacred nonsense inspires faith - a perfectly cromulent epistemic reason!
That’s not an epistemic reason! It’s a practical reason. An epistemic reason would be something that is more likely if the content of the belief were true than if it were false.
Given that your community is clearly above average on many metrics, it's very likely that the special beliefs that guide it are true (or, even better, True, in a mystical sense that only the chosen few can fully grasp).
This is all in William Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief” (https://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/Clifford_ethics.pdf). The fact that acting according to some views leads to effective cooperation may be evidence that the ethical content of those views is true, but it doesn’t give any evidence at all that the empirical content about who said what to whom three thousand years ago is.
The fact that a part of a belief system is credible lends credibility to the whole entangled enterprise - this seems so obvious to me that it's almost tautological.
When many other belief systems that differ on all the physical and metaphysical claims do nearly equally well on the social and ethical things, that’s already been accounted for. Especially since the physics and metaphysics just isn’t very closely tied to the social and ethical stuff.
Sure, this would be a good counter-argument, one that I (for example) happen to find convincing. But it doesn't make the initial proposition have literally zero evidentiary value - it still has some, even these days, although trending downwards, which is related to why traditional religion in general is declining in the west.
If only there was another prosocial, love focused religion that was arguably as epistemically rigorous as you could get focused around this Jesus guy...
>that was arguably as epistemically rigorous as you could get
all christian faiths have very serious epistemological challenges.
I agree every Christian tradition inherits a common set of epistemic burdens.
But I don't think Christianity is uniquely or disqualifyingly burdened compared to alternatives
your comment was vague, but i assumed you had some specific "jesus focused" alternative in mind that you felt was epistemically rigorous, or at least, more so than mormonism.
No, your common sense read is correct. I do think most mainline Christian traditions are more epistemically rigorous than Mormonism, especially after reading this article. But that's not necessarily a high bar. I would just claim that I don't think Christianity is uniquely or disqualifyingly burdened compared to live alternatives. Burdened in different ways, but still a live possibility. Whereas Mormonism is exceptionally falsifiable and has it seems to me reasonably been thus falsified.
>Whereas Mormonism is exceptionally falsifiable and has it seems to me reasonably been thus falsified.
fwiw, i strongly dispute this claim. you may not have the time or interest to engage with brandolini's law and mormonism, but i assure you the faith is not "exceptionally falsifiable".
Fair, that was in some sense a compression in of itself. I would say although there is a large apologetic literature here, Mormonism makes unusually recent, concrete, checkable claims. I guess I'm mostly in agreement with the post author that with named nineteenth-century actors, surviving manuscripts, extant papyri, facsimiles, translation claims, court records, institutional records, etc. conflicting with surviving evidence in such a way, it certainly seems to carry a heavier epistemic burden. It's not logically impossible to rescue, but the Book of Abraham seems like a hard case to explain away.
I think the lack of material historical evidence is pretty difficult to overcome. Of course it isn't falsifiable, as an absence of evidence isn't technically evidence of absence, but in the case of a claim where we would expect there to be ample evidence, the lack of it is a pretty bad sign.
Every other ancient text describing events, typically comes with some material evidence that they happened, especially in literate societies. There isn't really any evidence that Atlantis existed, despite us having a written account of it's existence, and that's pretty good evidence it's the written account that's wrong, rather than the archaeological evidence which is wrong.
I think the proposal is that instead of a Jesus guy you might use algorithmic analysis of AI and decision theory.
Perhaps. I'm not sold "algorithmic analysis of AI and decision theory" can do the the things religions do: bind families, sanctify sacrifice, discipline desire, comfort suffering, teach forgiveness, transmit values to children, and make ordinary people love their neighbors when defection would be easier. At least, there are many maladaptive shamanistic ways it might invoke the transcendent. But why tear down Chestertons fence without peeking over it first :)
And indeed that is just on the idea that religion coordinates people. Without invoking the stronger claim that love, forgiveness, sacrifice, incarnation, and redemption are closer to the structure of reality than cynicism or pure utility-maximization.
Didn't Immanuel Kant and other Enlightenment era philosophers/ethicists do pretty much that already? Derive love, forgiveness etc. from first principles without relying on religion? Not to mention you can get 90% of your "things religions do" list from just tribalism alone.
Enlightenment ethics did not arise in a vacuum. It emerged inside a deeply Christian moral world, and much of its account of universal human dignity looks a lot like Christian moral inheritance translated into philosophical language.
Also, the move from “humans are rational agents” to “every human has inviolable worth” is not trivial. Kant gives one of the best secular attempts at that argument, but I’m not sure he fully bridges the gap without smuggling in moral intuitions and frame his culture had already received.
re tribalism, it can get you family loyalty, in-group sacrifice, and norm enforcement. It does not obviously get you internalised forgiveness of the guilty, care for the weak stranger, love of enemies or the equal dignity of all persons. In fact, tribalism often points the other way. I think many Westerners imagine that if society became more tribal, the norms enforced would still look like the generally high-trust liberal-Christian inheritance they grew up inside. Looking at actual tribal societies around the world, that seems like a dangerous assumption.
So my worry is not that secular ethics cannot describe Christianish virtues. It probably can. My worry is if we actually reproduce those virtues at scale once we sever the metaphysical and ritual roots that once formed people and families around them. I’m not saying “therefore Christianity is proven.” But the Enlightenment may have inherited more moral and cultural capital from Christianity than it could independently regenerate.
But we're not talking about "independent regeneration". We are talking about Christianish AIs built by Christianish engineers trained on Christianish datasets and tasked with developing explicitly Christianish ethics system. Severing the metaphysical roots does not necessarily mean severing family ties, especially when family ties is explicitly one of the things you're replacing the metaphysical roots with.
All of the Abrahamic religions are basically the same, but people aren’t ready for that truthbomb yet.
As an ex-mormon, now hard athiest, I mostly enjoy these kinds of writings. I too find it curious how people keep their faith with "proof", acknowledged by the church itself, of many of these issues. I mostly agree with the South Park quote though. If it makes people happy good for them. I had a great time when I was a believer.
That said, the thing I find most frustrating in all of them is the idea that Mormon's are different than any other religion in terms of being false or full of contraditions etc...
I don't know every other religion but:
1. Mormon leaders are volunteers except for a few at the top. Those few at the top are not living ostentatious lives of luxury, fancy cars, yatchs, mansions, etc..., unlike many other religious leaders. Local leaders get paid nothing. Only support staff gets paid (cleaners, janitors, etc...)
2. Mormon's believe you are literal children of God and that if you're faithful you'll be like God in the afterlife. This always made more sense to me than most other religions in that it gave a point to striving to be better beause you can't be trusted with that kind of power unless you prove you can handle it. If you don't make it your are not sent to hell.
This seemed far more logical than the norm which George Carlin put so well: “Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time! But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money!”
The Mormon church expects 10% gross of your income (Tithing). Tithing is in the bible. The fact that (AFAIK) most other Christians don't do it always seemed odd. And, see #1, that money is not going to the leaders personal pockets.
And, to add to that, you're supposed to fast (go without food) for 24 hours the first Sunday of each month and further, your supposed to donate the food/money you would have used for that 24hrs for the church welfare program. Mormons have a welfare program, look it up, it's amazing.
3. Mormon's don't believe in "fire and brimstone" type hell. If you don't follow the rules you don't become a god. You still go to heaven. In the Mormon religion, hell is called "outer darkness". It is the absense of everything, utterly alone with no sensation. Very few people go there. That always seemed more logical to me then the contradtion George Carlin pointed out above.
4. Mormon marriage, "Sealing", always made more sense to me. In the mormon church you get "sealed", "for time and all eternity". You go to heaven and you're with your spouse. Vs "Until death do us part". The norm to me always seemed to consede non-belief in the after life. Why would you want to give up your spouse at death if you're both supposed to be in heaven after?
5. Mormons (from the book of Abraham) believe heaven is a place in this universe. That's the whole, the planet closest to where God lives is the planet Kolab, part. That, to me, always seemed more logical than heaven is in some alternate reality which is what most religions believe. Why add more magic?
Finally,, if you actually read the Book of Mormon and/or the Book of Abraham, they feel fine as scripture, at least to me. I'm not saying they are true or false, rather, I'm only saying, they don't say anything too far from what most religions teach. They tell a history of certain people (real or fictional) and they say the standard stuff like "be excellent to each other and party on!"
Anyway, like every religion, the Mormon religion has it's flaws, issues, bad parts, and contradictions and I believe it's false but it's no more false or flawed than any other religion. And, if you go by "you will know them by their fruits" they seem rather exceptional compared to many.
As a fellow ex-Mormon I agree with all this. With the possible exception that I loved a lot of the church while I was in it but it also made me deeply uncomfortable (I struggled with something like scrupulosity).
Sorry you got hit by the scrupulosity bus! I'm curious if you think the church should institute something like rumspringah, in addition to the anti-rumspringah super orthodox mission life (a place where some young people exhibit temporary forms of thought similar to scrupulosity) ? Or if its just a question of balancing the religious equivalent of type 1 vs type 2 errors?
I do think an LDS version of Nate Soares' EA medicine https://replacingguilt.com/ in the voice of <insert current popular speaker> would be quite the banger at Deseret Book for the teen/mission prep section!
Sorry for the delay. I've been thinking what to say and I'm not really sure the path forward here. I think things are already getting quite a bit better. There are certain behaviors that were majorly vilified previously that are now talked about in more humane ways. I think there is more sensitivity to shame and judgmental attitudes.
The rumspringah is an intriguing idea. When I was all-in I couldn't have cared less about the stuff I was "missing out on." It just didn't matter. It wasn't until leaving and seeing things differently that I've got some regrets and wish I had more life experiences. But that's also my huge criticism of ex-Mormons trying to relive an age that is gone and destroying their families in the process over.
Wow, I've been meaning to read Replacing Guilt for a while now and didn't realize it was Nate Soares as the author! I'll have to take a look.
> In the Mormon religion, hell is called "outer darkness". It is the absense of everything, utterly alone with no sensation. Very few people go there.
Wait a minute, so where do the atheists go ?
> Mormons (from the book of Abraham) believe heaven is a place in this universe.
Is it still possible for a few chosen faithful to transcend this Universe and be placed in charge of creating their own world(s) ? Or do they "merely" get to terraform planets in our current Universe ? Or was the whole thing made up by mormon-haters ?
In LDS theology, atheists who never accept Jesus or the restored gospel but live honorable lives go to the middle level of the three levels within heaven, called the "terrestrial kingdom". People who do not live good lives and do not repent go to the lowest of the three levels within heaven, called the "telestial kingdom". People who accept and live the restored gospel of Jesus Christ go to the highest level, called the "celestial kingdom". All those classifications include people's decisions after death, not just in this life.
Those who remain faithful can become perfect over time, eventually becoming like God. That's usually interpreted to mean that they are like God in all ways, including being able to create their own worlds. Whether those worlds are in our current universe or a brand-new one isn't really addressed in the doctrine.
Very informative, thank you ! FWIW, I think I must have heard the terms "telestial/terrestial/celestial" at some point, but got confused because they sound so similar.
The fact that Mormons believe that heaven is in this physical universe always seemed to me to indicate it was a religion developed by people who didn’t understand abstractions. So in my opinion not an advantage. (I am an atheist)
The Book of Mormon is about a fictional people and isn’t an authentic ancient text. At least the Bible is an authentic ancient text written in actual ancient languages (even if not always as old as it seems to claim).
Fascinating!
"Moroni ... carr[ies] heavy golden plates from Central America to New York, where he buries them in the ground because he’s been told by God that this is where Joseph Smith will find them a thousand years later and translate them into English."
There are two theories in Mormon historiography as to where the civilizations described in the Book of Mormon were located. One is the Hemispheric Theory, which holds that the settlers spread over the entire Americas. By that theory, the final battle where Moroni resided and finished up the plates was at the site of Joseph Smith's farm in New York. The other theory says that the settlers couldn't have spread that widely and were localized somewhere, of which the isthmus of Mexico is the most favored location, because it pretty well fits such geographic clues as the Book of Mormon provides.
The above quote is the only explanation I've ever seen for why, in that case, Moroni traveled thousands of miles to unknown (to him) territory to bury his plates. But is there a record of this revelation?
I like how on-the-nose this is as a description of the belief in Functional Decision Theory!
This is not a book review of the Book of Abraham. It's a blog post about why Joseph Smith is a fraud. At ~14000 words, it's also substantially longer than the Book of Abraham itself (~3500 words), which kind of defeats the point of a book review.
It says some straightforwardly false things. The most egregious of these is claiming that Mormonism believes that the Book of Mormon is infallible, when the title page of the book itself says "if there are faults, there are the mistakes of men" [1]. Another clear mistake is mixing up the 1826 court bills (which only show that a trial happened, not the details of the case or the outcome) with Justice Neely's docket (published in 1873 by Methodist missionaries to Utah - the original has been lost, so its reliability is debated) [2].
There are a lot of instances where there's not scholarly consensus, and the book review takes one position and confidently presents it. I believe that the author has had many hours of discussions with missionaries and has read online about the church substantially, but they're clearly not an expert on Joseph Smith or Mormonism.
[1] https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/bofm-title?lang=eng
[2] https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/introduction-to-state-of-new-york-v-js-a/1
Agreed, there’s a handful of small but significant falsehoods that only people extremely well versed in Mormonism would notice, and they’re a lot of work to find the right sources to refute. (And no one here would care if you refute those points because it would look like nitpicking around the edges while doing nothing about the reducto ad absurdum which is the essay’s core goal)
The claim about the infallibility of the Book of Mormon seems like a clear mistake but I'm not sure about the trial thing. You're saying the reviewer mixed up some court documents but do those details matter? Is it true that people paid Smith to use seer stones to try and locate valuables? If so, then whether he was actually found guilty of "disorderly conduct" doesn't matter much - even if he was acquitted, that wouldn't save his credibility.
My immediate response to your closing argument is "those who can make you believe absurdities can also make you commit atrocities." Yeah, if God tells you that you were put on this Earth to do good works and raise this fallen world, you'll be motivated to do good. But if God tells you that you should join the Nauvoo militia to defend the faithful by violence, if God tells you that you need to burn down a newspaper office to protect the reputation of your prophet, if God tells you that Joseph Smith is allowed to sleep with your wife... you get the picture.
And I don't think it's correct to generalize from "this community is doing well for itself" to "therefore everyone should be in this community" because of the obvious selection bias - if you're a victim of the community, or even just someone who gave it a good try and couldn't muster up the necessary zeal to make it work for you, you are no longer part of the community, so your suffering doesn't get counted.
You could probably draw a similar graph for ancient Christianity, which started with a handful of heterodox Jews, had its leader publicly executed (something that you'd normally expect to be a major setback for a cult!), and somehow went on to become the official state religion of the Roman empire and ride its success to world domination. It wouldn't make the Roman conquests any less terrible for its victims.
there is nothing wrong with defending yourself against extra-judicial mobs, and a city council voting to remove what they have deemed a public nuisance (even if it is a printing press) is hardly an atrocity, and although the concept of "spiritual" polyandry was briefly practiced, no serious historian believes joseph actually slept with other mens wives.
also, the author made no claim that "therefore everyone should be in this community".
the description is a literal and factual description.
however, if you are emotionally invested in characterizing joseph smith as a cartoon villain, you are welcome to color it however you'd like.
"mob" your bias is showing
As an atheist reasonably tolerant of and interested in other people's foibles, I found this a useful if somewhat amateurish and poorly edited read. Basic takeaway for me, Joseph Smith's golden plaques are if anything less cockeyed than Christianity's triune god (for which I blame the effect of ill-digested neoplatonism upon simple-minded Judeans, but that's another story), if just as batty. But I appreciate a church whose leaders are modest, unpaid and seemingly significantly less corrupted than most, as well as what comes across a generally tolerant and unvindictive view of sin, sinners and the afterlife.
I also blame ill-digested neoplatonism for the concept of the triune god. I'm going to use that phrase from now on.
Thanks; but good luck slipping it into the average conversation...
Others have already said this, but this is not a book review of The Book of Abraham, which is a real pity, because a review from a non-believing outsider (I myself am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) on the book of Abraham would have been fascinating to me. Comparing it to other Abraham narratives, examining the similarities/differences, etc. It was a real missed opportunity. You could even put aside Abraham the person and compare this text to similar texts in the Bible. For example:
Abraham 4:3-4
And they (the Gods) said: Let there be light; and there was light. And they (the Gods) comprehended the light, for it was bright; and they divided the light, or caused it to be divided, from the darkness.
Genesis 1:3-4
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
So similar, yet different enough to mean something. Singular God vs plural Gods. Seeing the light vs comprehending the light. Commentary that the light was bright. What does it mean? I don't know, talk to me about it, speculate, give me something to think about.
Instead the book of Abraham is just used as an excuse to explain in great detail why Joseph Smith was a fake and why believing his truth claims is silly. I've read so many of those arguments by now that the genre is just boring.
Well, near the end there was a bit of (positive!) commentary on the actual content, starting with "The Book of Abraham is short, five chapters, an afternoon’s read".
Deeply disappointed in this one. There's no attempt to steelman serious apologetic positions, leading to a one-sided, self-congratulatory beatdown of the outgroup.
On the one hand, I'd agree that it doesn't engage with the most up-to-date apologetics from the church, and frankly, I'd agree with a description of the review as one-sided and self-congratulatory. As much as I'm interested in the subject material, I can't see myself voting for this as one of my favored reviews.
On the other hand, the justifications that the review offers for challenging the material evidence, and then the repeated disconfirmations as the material evidence catches up with them, *do* reflect apologetics from the church in previous decades. And if an institution has a track record of generating apologetics which are a continual retreat from the evidence, which keep being proven wrong as the evidence advances, I don't think it's unfair to treat that group's track record as an illustrative example of motivated reasoning.
I appreciate the research and story-telling in this review, but I think the author's speculation about epistemology and the Mormon psyche has things somewhat backwards. The line of causation for their success doesn't begin with "faith". Look at all the items in the paragraph beginning "The Mormons do this really well ..." - it's all about their shared experiences, more than a shared belief system. In contrast with the Protestant Christian denominations, which do find unity in common beliefs (doctrine), Mormon unity is built on shared rules and traditions (practice). This makes sense considering their respective views on the role of "faith and works" in salvation. Also, seems consistent with comments from current LDS members above, who are very comfortable expressing doubts or disbelief while still considering themselves part of their religious community.
Shared experiences is a big thing for us, you're absolutely right. It isn't enough for us to believe the Book of Mormon just because we're told to. We believe and teach/emphasize that anyone can receive a spiritual witness about it. How this can play out is: "I used to believe because my parents told me to, but now I believe because I had the same kind of experience they had and now we share that together." Our faith is rooted much more in events, trusting witnesses to those events, and being witness to our own personal spiritual event, rather than subscribing to a set of beliefs.
"It isn't enough for us to believe the Book of Mormon just because we're told to."
"Our faith is rooted much more in events, trusting witnesses to those events, and being witness to our own personal spiritual event, rather than subscribing to a set of beliefs."
In practice, this distills to "we are told to believe the BoM and subscribe to a set of beliefs by rooting our faith in events, trusting witnesses to those events, and being witness to our own personal spiritual event."
Which is to say, it's turtles all the way down. The implicit and explicit family/community pressure to believe and conform is immense. That's a feature, not a bug.
Former Mormon here, and I want to push back on this a little. (Only a little, though.)
I agree that Mormon unity is based on shared rules and traditions. However, several of those rules and traditions themselves connect to affirmations of belief - or at least, lack of affirmations of disbelief. Many rituals that bind the LDS community together are centered around the temple (baptisms for the dead as youth, marriage ceremony through temple sealing, etc.), and the temple recommend interview requires you to positively affirm a testimony of several of the core principles of LDS teaching, including that the current church president is a prophet of God and that the gospel of Jesus Christ was restored. If you don't believe those things, you either claim you do, or you can't participate in those rules and traditions. Another repeated ritual is the monthly testimony meeting where members testify of their shared beliefs. If an individual has beliefs that don't match the officially approved ones, they can abstain or only share the ones that do match, but they can't share "I have a testimony that [official LDS belief] is false" even if that's a true statement about their personal testimony.
Expressing doubts is fine. But when your bishop asks "do you have a testimony of [core teaching], you either say yes or get shut out of the most important traditions. "I believe with caveats" is okay, "I don't believe" is not.
Thanks for adding that context. I was generalizing very broadly, and from an outsider's perspective (evangelical christian).
> Wouldn’t it be nice if all humans on earth could enter into a collective brainwashing ritual where we all ended up thinking playing cooperate in the Prisoner’s dilemma is the correct thing to do?
Well, maybe. But there are at least two problems with this plan.
The first one is that some people's brains -- like mine -- are just broken. They cannot make themselves believe things that are obviously false, no matter how many times they chant "Jesus is real". Several theists told me (on separate occasions) that if their eternal salvation depended on believing that the sky is green with purple polka dots, then when they looked up at the sky, this is what they would see. If they saw anything else, they'd make an appointment with the optometrist. But I cannot do that; no matter how much I want to believe that the sky is green, when I see a blue sky, I cannot help but believe that it is blue. And I've met other people like me, so I'm pretty sure I'm not just some one-off genetic freak.
But freaks (even numerous ones) can be easily dealt with (and have been throughout history). The other problem is the price; and the price is as high as it is insidious.
In order for your goat-sacrificing ritual to work as intended, you must on some level believe that it actually does *work*. Not merely as some instrumental social engineering hack, not as a fungible prosocial exercise, but as an actual mystical act of communion with your very real god(s). Ok, maybe your religion can handle a few skeptics, but by and large the average person must believe in goat sacrifice. But beliefs form networks. In order to believe in the Mormon god, you must also believe that, against all evidence, Jews came to America by way of Egypt; that it's possible to find Spanish silver by looking into a hat; that you must entrust your money to a proto-crypto-bro; and before long you'll find yourself believing that the Earth is young and possibly flat, that gay people should be stoned to death, and that the stars are just little lamps in the sky and life is a magical ineffable gift from God and many other such things.
And this is actually fine most of the time. The average person will never encounter the stars or the curvature of the Earth or indeed gay people, and thus all the things he believes about all that stuff have no impact on his life. But if you want to move humanity forward, toward greater and greater feats undreamt of by even the ancient prophets, then you need to have a healthy contingent of people who will believe that the sky is blue even when everything they've ever been taught tells them that it's green with purple polka dots. And you need to allow these people to ask questions, even when your holy book already has all the answers.
It's a tough choice. To paraphrase another visionary, you must either allow your mind to correlate all its contents thus enabling you to perceive terrifying vistas of reality that will make you go mad from the revelation; or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. There is no middle ground, not really; eventually, you will choose one or the other -- and some of us don't even get to choose.
>In order for your goat-sacrificing ritual to work as intended, you must on some level believe that it actually does *work*. Not merely as some instrumental social engineering hack, not as a fungible prosocial exercise, but as an actual mystical act of communion with your very real god(s).
Yep, that's why Nietzche said that God was dead, almost 150 years ago now. It's kinda amusing, and sad, that the atheism discourse, in the main, is still at a lower level of sophistication than that.
I'm not very sophisticated, admittedly, but I'm not sure how anything I've said runs counter to the mainline atheism discourse...
My insult wasn't directed at you, but at people with with galaxy-brained faith-inducing brainwashing schemes.
I'm an atheist myself, and even the same kind as Bugmaster (can't make myself believe), but I see very little galaxy-brained about it.
The interesting part, to me, is that when I sit down with my more tolerant mainstream leftwing friends for a beer, and talk about some of the many, many discrepancies and flat-out lies by the establishment, they'll frequently not even contest it and merely claim that these lies were meant well and serve the higher purpose of keeping the system together. On one notable occasion, a colleague talked me out of investigating something (successfully, I might add) precisely because he thought it was true, and told me I'll just paint a target on my back if I do so. Beforehand, he publicly said the exact opposite.
Of course, mainline religious conservative christians, which raised me, aren't better in this way. Thus is it seems to me that this isn't something special too this or that particular minor sect; It seems to me like it's the primary organizing and cooperation mechanism that humans always use everywhere.
But if it is so, the current leftwing mainstream (I'm primarily talking about urban academics, although urban lower class is even worse as far as I can tell) nevertheless seems pretty terrible. The conservative environment I grew up in was significantly happier, more communal and more functional. Going by the numbers, I get the same impression; TFR, for example, in my ancestral home is still relatively healthy at ca 1.9, while urban leftwing academics have some insane sub-1 average by most estimates. Currently, it holds itself together purely parasitically by siphoning the young from populations with a more healthy age pyramid. That's not sustainable.
It doesn't seem like we disagree here. My point is exactly that the lies that "were meant well and serve the higher purpose of keeping the system together" are in fact harmful instead. It's terribly naive to expect that the next galaxy-brained attempt at brainwashing people with the fresh set of noble lies would finally usher in the long-awaited utopia.
I haven't seen the alternative yet, though. Every single society I'm aware of runs on, as you put it, a (frequently-not-even-fresh) set of noble lies. The few ultra-cynics like me I've found are overwhelmingly unabashed rational egoist hedonists, at most utilitarist hedonists, constitutionally incapable of forming any kind of large-scale society, not even on the level of the already badly working lefties. They're themselves entirely dependent on the substrate of a greater society.
From my vantage point, it's the one who tries to build a new society on hitherto never seen principles who is galaxy-brained. Not that I do not sympathise, I'd love for it to work and am trying in my own way. But the deck is stacked against us.
I think both sides run on hate and fear; the only difference are the proportions and the targets.
Leftists hate the conservatives and fear them a little, but they are absolutely terrified of each other. At any moment, any one of them can call in a hate mob on any other one just for being insufficiently ideologically pure. This is why they're always trying to one-up each other tolerance-wise.
Meanwhile, conservatives hate the leftists of course, and fear them a little; but they're absolutely terrified of minorities. At any moment, a million Mexican immigrants from Somalian Haiti can flood the country, take all the jobs, and eat your cats and dogs; meanwhile, the leftists will give them free forks and spoons, assuming they have any left over from transgendering your kids.
Both sides believe that their way of life is under constant assault, and that drastic measures must be taken to preserve it. I've had both a leftist friend and a conservative one tell me, in almost the exact same words (though on separate occasions), that in order to save the country what we need to do is put the other side into reeducation camps -- it's for the Greater Good, you see, and thus for their own good. Only when half the country is in camps can the healing begin.
Meanwhile, I'm standing over here going, "hey can we maybe skip the camps ?", but no one listens to me...
Just offensively long. There is being thorough, and then there is being self-indulgent. Can't believe people actually voted for this.
Being extremely long is a time-honored tradition for ACX book review contests. People vote for the ones they like, and enough readers here like the long reviews that a significant chunk of the finalists tend to be long.
Sure. And I have been a fan of long reviews in the past. But there comes a point when an author’s presumption to other people’s time is not commensurate with the insight or quality of what they are offering. This piece is horribly self-indulgent. The result is that it is offensive to dump this in people’s inboxes and ask them to read it. Or at least, a warning about length seems in order. If this was an old school magazine publication, I could tell just by looking. But on Substack and in my Gmail, I didn’t realise what I was being asked to read through. It was well over 20 minutes before realising I wasn’t even halfway through the damn thing. Which wasn’t even that good. Hence, offensive.
There are some authors whose posts leave me wanting more even when they go on for tens of thousands of words; others whose writing feels like a slog after just a few sentences. This review was more like the latter. It seems like the author read enough previous reviews to pick up that the successful ones tended to be long, and, like a B-movie director realizing they needed to hit the 90-minute mark in order to qualify as a feature, added filler.
Yes, completely agree.
It's almost like the perfect religion would be one in which God gave man a free choice to believe or not - perfectly rational to accept, nothing refuting it, a lot of evidence in its favor, but nothing proving it in such a way as you wouldn't be free to disbelieve it. Perhaps a religion in which God wanted us to freely choose him, and saw our condition and suffering and expressed solidarity with us in some form or another, perhaps at the point in history in which he could maximally offer the choice to follow some form of true morality and help us out to as many people as historically contingently possible. Perhaps also where this religion was also united to some form of philosophy as well that made it eminently reasonable and provided a full set of epistemic and metaphysical principles.
Do you think such a religion would be good at solving coordination problems, the way the original essay describes?
Would it be perfect/ideal only for its believers, or would it also be perfect/ideal for those who evaluate the evidence and come to the conclusion that it's probably not true? Some of those people will exist, if the evidence is as you describe.
(I assume you're talking about Christianity, but I'm interested in hearing where you think the religion you describe would fall on those measurements whether or not it's actually hypothetical.)
It probably would, but to a less good extent as Mormonism - it almost seems like the more cult-like and irrational the religion is the better it is at solving coordination problems. So while any belief system or even things like race or sports can help build group identity and therefore build trust, extremely weird beliefs or tight knit groups would be better than bigger and more diverse groups that are more universalist.
So the ideal religion I'm describing (yes Christianity) would probably have an advantage of universalism and spreading to a bunch of different groups, and could help with coordination, but this very advantage would also provide a weakness in terms of its ability to ward off all other belief systems.
As far as for solving coordination for people who don't think it's true, I don't know. To be clear though, I don't think this religion's perfection comes from its solving the coordination problem, but more towards providing the author (Scott) with a belief system that could give him light in his eyes, while also not being absurd since he says he couldn't do one with receipts disproving it.
I think it's also important that this religion I'm describing, in order for it to be truly perfect, the important considerations for choosing it or not shouldn't be really different people evaluating the evidence differently. That would actually be a seeming imperfection. The perfect religion would be one where your choosing it or not was a truly moral choice, where the philosopher and the midwife were both afforded a free choice to choose it or not.
(Side note, but this post wasn't written by Scott Alexander; it's an entry in the book review contest, written by someone who reads the blog.)
Personally, I have what I consider to be fundamental philosophical objections to this idea: I think it demands doxastic voluntarism (I was going to link to Scott's essay on this, but I just realized it's a paid article,) and I don't think doxastic voluntarism is a good description of human behavior in general. For the most part, I don't think people decide what to believe; we can engage in behaviors to willfully expose ourselves preferentially to evidence we think will support or oppose beliefs, based on how they flatter our biases, but for the most part we cannot think that our available evidence indicates that something is probably false, but decide to believe it anyway.
Some people, more than others, seem to be able to induce cognitive dissonance by deciding to behave as if they believe, until they start to emotionally accept a proposition as true. But most people, at least, cannot go from a position of "I'm pretty sure this is is wrong," and decide to change their mind about that.
I think that, given acceptance of a truth claim, people are free to make active choices about how to respond to it. So if everyone were convinced that a God existed as a matter of fact, they could still choose whether or not to worship it or follow its instructions. But I don't think that asking people to make a decision about whether or not to believe in God is something that an ideal religion could do, and I think that encoding the assumption that this is a reasonable thing for a god to ask into its doctrines is a flaw in any religion that believes such a thing.
"For the most part, I don't think people decide what to believe" - Why don't you think so? I mean, I agree you can't just "decide" to believe something that you think is false. But certain things you can believe on a sort of decision basis - for example, do you believe in human dignity? Are you against infanticide?
There's no "evidence" that scientifically "determines" a moral choice. That's why you're responsible for it.
"I don't think that asking people to make a decision about whether or not to believe in God is something that an ideal religion could do, and I think that encoding the assumption that this is a reasonable thing for a god to ask into its doctrines is a flaw in any religion that believes such a thing"
Well I would say that metaphysically God is rationally provable/obvious. We just don't have good metaphysics these days. So really it's just a reasoning error. But I think most people (obviously mostly referring to Westerners) when they think of God they're really making a decision for or against Christ. And they typically when deciding to reject have more (immoral) reasons to reject - which you can be condemned for. And sometimes you're morally responsible for your ignorance. Just as one small example - if your rejection of Christianity is sort of because you support (insert immoral sexual act) and you also think that the religion was made up by Constantine, just because you're incorrect/ignorant doesn't excuse your ignorance - your ignorance in fact is morally condemnatory and you can be held to account for it, because you could seek the truth but choose not to.
So, I already replied to your restack, but to address this here where the formatting is easier.
I draw a distinction between beliefs and attitudes or policy decisions. I think that the question of whether I "believe in human dignity" bundles in a bunch of different assumptions on its own, and needs to be decomposed to be properly addressed. I have values and preferences, and I think that something like "human dignity" can sometimes be useful to discuss as an abstraction. I'm personally opposed to infanticide, but I'd categorize that as an attitude, not a belief. I think that a question like "Infanticide is bad: true or false?" is incorrect framing.
I strongly disagree regarding God being rationally provable or obvious; this is a question I've devoted thousands of hours of my life to, and I certainly don't think we can expect to resolve it satisfactorily in the space of the comments here. Personally, I don't feel the arguments for this position hold up well under scrutiny. There are certainly intelligent people who do, I've discussed the issue with many of them at length. I think I can point to biases which lead them to privilege arguments which favor their religious belief, while they would probably argue that I have biases that predispose me to reject them (although personally, I think I would be more happy living in a world where I could be convinced that a belief in God was well-evidence and most likely true.)
But, I would contend, under a worldview which proposes the existence of an omnipotent God which takes an interest in the beliefs of humans, and morally judges them for their beliefs, we probably should not expect to see highly intelligent people, who care about being rationally rigorous, who have strong moral impulses and no particular acts they want to commit which are religiously condemned as sinful, examining the evidence and deciding that God probably doesn't exist. If there is a God which uses people's belief to judge their morality, it has made that distinctly non-obvious, in the sense that intelligent people do not consistently converge on it. People might contend that thier beliefs are "obvious," but they don't agree on what the obvious correct belief is.
But, in a world with no god, where people have cognitive biases that lead us to systematically deviate from correct judgment in predictable directions, it's unsurprising if large numbers of people draw conclusions like "a god exists" even if they're untrue.
"this is a question I've devoted thousands of hours of my life to, and I certainly don't think we can expect to resolve it satisfactorily in the space of the comments here."
- Perhaps you can't be convinced/have all your objections in your opinion satisfactorily dealt with, but I really think it is very simple - the uncaused cause argument is pretty unanswerable in my view, despite the recent attempts in the West by mediocre minds trained at less than mediocre "universities," the lesser sons of greater sires, to reject all of its metaphysical and philosophical tradition. Additionally, the fine-tuning argument is good enough for moral certainty, and it's pretty transparently ridiculous and silly the obvious attempt to posit a clown-universe "multi-verse" in order to escape God.
"who have strong moral impulses and no particular acts they want to commit which are religiously condemned as sinful,"
- The lack of a desire to worship God is itself sinful, as a lack of gratitude for existence.
"examining the evidence and deciding that God probably doesn't exist. If there is a God which uses people's belief to judge their morality, it has made that distinctly non-obvious, in the sense that intelligent people do not consistently converge on it"
Well, I would say "God" (not the deist God, who I maintain is rationally provable/obvious) as in Christ has made his existence both obvious and hidden - "I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children." His existence is obvious to those who seek Him, and He came to earth to save us from our sins (which we no longer recognize, because our culture is based on denying/rejecting God and Christianity/our tradition, but which the Greco-Roman world did). But hidden from those who demand he prove himself in ways which you have no right to demand e.g. an experiment.
"in a world with no god, where people have cognitive biases that lead us to systematically deviate from correct judgment in predictable directions, it's unsurprising if large numbers of people draw conclusions like "a god exists" even if they're untrue."
- This is really just the imaginary present world for you where you assume there is no God. But I don't think that's what a world without God would look like at all, because such a world is metaphysically impossible. We cannot at all be sure that a world without God would have predictability, in fact it would seem it would not, because if there is prediction there are laws and therefore God. Again, I don't actually think it's that complicated, you simply are committing metaphysical errors that go towards my point that being smart isn't actually the way to salvation, because smart people can make very basic errors. It really is so simple an 80 IQ person can get it, but a 130 IQ person could miss it.
So, I've explored arguments such as the prime mover and fine tuning arguments at length in my own time, I personally don't think they're actually convincing when examined in depth. Obviously you disagree, but the fact that different people will come to different conclusions is well accommodated for in my worldview.
But when you say "the lack of a desire to worship God is itself sinful, as a lack of gratitude for existence," I think it's worth recognizing that there are people who are very, very deeply devout, who live their lives around gratitude and worship for their creator, who examine the evidence further and ultimately come to the conclusion that their beliefs are probably not true after all. The idea that they're drawn away from their religion by a desire to sin is, in my experience, not usually borne out in reality.
There are people who're not particularly intelligent, who think god probably doesn't exist, for straightforward and simple reasons. There are people who aren't very intelligent, who think that god must exist, for straightforward and simple reasons. There are highly intelligent people, who think that god must exist for complicated reasons, and highly intelligent people who think that god must not exist for complicated reasons. There are intelligent people who think god must exist for simple reasons, and that people who try to turn it into a big philosophical discussion are fooling themselves, and there are intelligent people who think that god doesn't exist for simple reasons, and that people who try to invent justifications for believing anyway are fooling themselves.
In a world where a god doesn't exist, or doesn't judge people on their belief or lack of it, there's no reason that people must easily be able to converge on a single answer on whether a god exists or not. But in a world where a god does exist and judges people on their belief or lack thereof, I think we should expect much more convergence than we actually see, where people with good intentions who examine the question with an open mind consistently come to the same conclusions.
"I think it's worth recognizing that there are people who are very, very deeply devout, who live their lives around gratitude and worship for their creator, who examine the evidence further and ultimately come to the conclusion that their beliefs are probably not true after all. The idea that they're drawn away from their religion by a desire to sin is, in my experience, not usually borne out in reality."
- Yea, I deny this hypothetical. I do not believe that there are devout Christians who then examine their beliefs and realize they are probably not true, and then simply stop believing and also don't sin/aren't drawn away by sin.
First, because Christianity is true, and so further rational inquiry would not hinder faith, but would help. Sure, you can read someone wrong, but you're morally culpable to seek truth, and we are all drawn to truth. So if you read, say, Reza Aslan and are blown away, not only are you dumb, but you are also morally culpable for the sin of sloth.
Second, we are all drawn towards sin due to concupiscence. So without God's grace, we will be drawn towards and choose sin. Your hypotheticals are based on the idea of a sort of ethereal sinless mind that is just a regular "good person" and simply isn't convinced by the arguments. I deny there is such a person. All men's minds are darkened by sin, both will and intellect. And if you do not attempt to act as you believe, you will eventually believe as you act (Fulton Sheen).
"in a world where a god does exist and judges people on their belief or lack thereof, I think we should expect much more convergence than we actually see, where people with good intentions who examine the question with an open mind consistently come to the same conclusions.
This is really just a vague restatement of the argument that the diversity of religions proves or indicates the lack of a true one. I both 1. do not think we should expect more convergence because of A. historical contingency and B. The way is narrow and man is sinful and because 2. I think we actually see perfect contingence, where all those who seek find, although some imperfectly (think the virtuous samurai who tries his best and seeks the good)
I'm not really sure the point of the extended discussion of "how strong evidence are the facsimiles" if the only response is "maybe the copy is wrong or maybe Abraham hired an Egyptian artist" every single time it's pointed out that the interpretation makes no sense? I feel like this entire part could have been skipped if it's totally irrelevant.
Also, I think the title is misleading; this seems like a review of the entire history of Mormonism as much, or more than, the Book of Abraham.
The final question, while interesting, I think has a more mundane answer: selection effects. His father (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Smith_Sr.) was a puritan:
> Details of Smith's paternal line go back to his 3rd great-grandfather Robert Smith from Lincolnshire, England who settled in Massachusetts colony during the Puritan migration.
Which Scott has written about before (e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/12/puritan-spotting/). Joseph Smith moved to upstate NY (which is explicitly appears on the puritan checklist) at the age of 9. The whole period of Mormonism's founding happened during a much more widespread religious revival (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Great_Awakening) which, according to that article "rejected the skepticism, deism, Unitarianism, and rationalism left over from the American Enlightenment" which were some of the defining characteristics of those 18th and 19th century Puritan descendants. And we already know those Puritans achieved all of the pro-social benefits in the 1600s. I think that Mormonism is just the result of some of those people attaching themselves to a particular religion during a period of widespread religious revival, then moving to the desert long enough to form a separate community that could remain partially insulated. I'm not sure it has anything to do with the specifics of Mormonism, except insofar as groups which require sacrifices are more likely to stay together.
But even putting that aside, I think that calling a group "pro social" only by looking at the group itself, and not its effects on others, is entirely wrong. For example, they did have to get rid of the polygamy stuff, but there are fundamentalist LDS churches that still practice it, and it has substantial negative consequences on others (and on its own members, in fact).
This doesn't seem like a book review - it's instead an analysis of the history and authenticity of a book. It barely discusses what the book is about or what it says about life.
Independently, this seems like a long way to go to make the point "Many religious people are not relying on the historical provability of their faith, and may not even care about it's literal truth, but instead value community/tribalism," given that I think essentially everyone agrees with that, at least about religions other than their own.
In an earlier post, I called this review "somewhat amateurish and poorly edited", but it also appears quite poorly researched, at least where anything outside of Mormon church history is concerned. The author makes flippant reference to "mummy powder" which he claims was used as an aphrodisiac: "One day you’re Ozymandias, king of kings, the next you’re smeared on some guy’s dick to help get him hard. By "mummy powder" he means mummia, a medication composed largely of bitumen; part of the 12th to 17th century pharmacopeia, it was believed to have been scraped off the outer coverings of mummies. At no time was this concoction believed to have aphrodisiac properties.
Just to sow some doubt to this narrative:
* Fac. 1 is not obviously a funerary scene. The other examples show what looks like a sarcophagus on the table, with a very distinct style. Fac. 1 and the corresponding papyrus show a guy with his leg sticking up, suggesting he is alive, and drawn in a very different style.
* Look at the four characters that the author claims connects the discovered papyri with the GAEL, and the corresponding four characters in the margins of the GAEL. Is that how you would draw those characters if you were JS’s scribe? I don’t see the fit the author claims. It is not clear to me that this demonstrates that the BoA translation came from this exact fragment.
* The author claims the GAEL contains drafts of the BoA translation with source characters in the margins. He says it is “ironic” that JS said he was unable to give a translation of Figures 12-21 in the Caption, when he did translate them into the BoA, as evidenced by these characters being in the margin next to sections of text on the GAEL. I think a better reading of the situation is that JS’s comment that he was unable to give a divine translation of these characters is evidence that the GAEL is not in fact a draft of the translation, but something else - maybe a post hoc attempt to logically deconstruct the text.
* On a different topic, the story about hundreds of large boxes labeled “$1000” in the vault of the Kirkland “anti-bank” is not directly from Warren Parrish but comes at a late date by people hostile to the church. Other sources say the vault was small and could not possibly have held those fraudulent props.
There is plenty that is odd about the BoA and church history, but this narrative (based on Dan Vogel’s work - maybe he is the author?) isn’t quite the smoking gun it looks like at first glance. I’m glad he thinks we are awesome people though!
Facsimile 1 is definitely anomalous when compared to a typical lion couch scene. His depiction of the lion couch scene is unusual in the ways you highlight and strongly contrasts with the more conventional lion couch scene in Hor's companion Book of the Dead. The same is true of Facsimile 3, which bears striking deviations from iconographic convention without parallel among other known papyri. The illustrator may have been influenced by funerary stelae from the Greco-Roman-era tombs at Abydos - in contrast to all known depictions on papyri, the vignette appears to be fairly unstandardized when it appears on the Abydos stelae. It seems that the illustrator of Hor's Book of Breathings was rather unorthodox in his choice of iconographic elements and was probably specially commissioned to create a unique work.
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=8598&context=etd
Thousands of words, 200+ comments, and no-one mentions the obvious parallel with Tibetan Terma revelations? Squint a bit and it's most clearly the same process - people with claims to special powers, using magical means to find special buried artifacts, and then deciphering the (otherwise incomprehensible) stuff into religious teachings.
Makes me wonder how much more widespread these practices were, for American Joseph and a whole bunch of Tibetan Lingpas to have converged on mostly the same thing.
This isn't really a book review.
Fascinating read. Thank you for sharing this!
I have a question, though:
Why is the LDS church considered a branch of Christianity but Islam is not? The two are more similar to each other in many ways (some noted here) than either is to Christian Orthodoxy, Catholicism or even the more populous Protestant denominations.
I'd argue that while Mormonism and Christianity are doctrinally different, day-to-day, they are interchangeable in a way Christianity (or Mormonism) and Islam isn't. Plus, Muslims don't hold to the Christian label the same way the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does, it's even in the name!
To me that sounds more like re-stating my question rather than the answer to it. My question is WHY all the things you describe?
Are you wondering why the religions differ, or why people view the religions differently. They view them differently because Islam has more day to day changes.
For most of it's history Christian scholars have considered Islam to be a heretical form of Christianity. That's why in Dante's "Inferno" Mohammed is placed in the circle where schismatics are punished. People seem to have started thinking of it as it's own thing around the 16th century, when the Ottoman empire was conquering big chunks of eastern Europe. Also the Reformation probably changed things, as now Christians needed a new category to describe Protestant denominations as opposed to things like Islam.
Self-id seems important here. Mormons claim to be Christians while Muslims do not.
And then there are the naming conventions. We are familiar with the pattern we see with "Buddhist" and "Calvinist" and "Lutheran" which we understand to mean a disciple of Buddha, Calvin, and Luther, respectively. "Christian" fits this pattern and suggests a disciple of "Christ". This seems to be a more straightforward and conventional definition of "Christian" than we get from appealing to specific doctrinal positions like Trinitarianism.
There's also the historical/sociological element. Mormons emerged from the larger Restorationist Christian movement.
Self-id is certainly important, but it is just one of the manifestations of Islam not being considered a branch of Christianity (by the Muslims, in this case), not its cause.
Did Mohammed think of himself as a Christian? I don't think so. Joseph Smith did. Islam seems to think of itself as a restoration of the original monotheism. Mormonism seems to think of itself as a restoration of the original Christianity. I don't think that self-id is a result of exogenous categorizations.
It is a self ID and cultural thing. Mormons fit in better with American society by identifying as Christian.
But it is true that compared to Mormonism the differences between Protestantism, Catholicism and Orthodoxy are tiny.
People have good responses but I didn't see anyone say what I would consider the difference. Islam sees Jesus as a prophet (as I understand it) but Mormons believe Jesus is the Savior of mankind, the only method to return to God.
Apart from self-ID, there are at least a couple other things.
One is that Mormons were culturally an offshoot of the Western Christian and specifically the New England Puritan tradition. Smith and most other early Mormons come from Puritan country, and Smith himself scores around 30 points by my count in Scott's "Puritan Spotting" checklist ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/12/puritan-spotting/ ).
The other is that Mormons believe that Jesus is a divine figure worthy of worship, even if they see him as distinct from and subordinate to God the Father, while Muslims believe that Jesus was a mortal prophet like Abraham, Moses, etc. We already have the precedent of the Arian Heresy being considered Christian, and their defining believes about the nature of Jesus are in broad strokes fairly similar to Mormon Christology.
LDS doctrine includes Jesus as a savior. Islam includes Jesus as a prophet. LDS doctrine is fundamentally, radically different from either in that there is not just one, eternal, transcendental God in LDS doctrine. LDS doctrine is functionally and devotionally monotheistic, but its broader metaphysics is pluralistic and is often more accurately described as monolatrous or henotheistic than as classical monotheism. There is even a Mrs. God.
As is proud tradition for ACX book reviews, this isn’t a review of the book mentioned. It was an interesting read though. Reading through the comments was just as interesting, especially the nitpicking from the Mormons.
The review was far too long. Most of sections 1-5 could be shortened to one example and “the rest is like this.” Either you already have your Bottom Line written, or you think Joseph Smith was delusional or a fraud. So many people really want to believe Mormonism is true in some divine sense. If you show them hard evidence that it’s bunk, they’ll go search for the minimum required to give them permission to keep believing. We all do this to some extent, it’s just funny to observe it from the sidelines with clarity.
I’m an atheist, though like most outsiders nearly all the Mormons I’ve met have been great people and I have nothing bad to say about them. Given that the author clearly wanted to address that issue, it would have been interesting to tackle it a bit more. How do atheists get the benefit of a great community without having to believe false things? It’s an open question.
P.S. to the author: I can tell. The tells are pretty obvious when you spend enough time reading them. I’m quite surprised no one else has mentioned it given the vitriol this normally provokes, but good on ya for slipping it through.
Is that an AI accusation?
The rules prohibited AI this year and I'm not looking to get anyone in trouble. If its good enough that most people don't notice, is there really a point to the witch hunt?
Is there any point to the vagueposting if it's not?
For my part, I found the review shallow and repetitive, which often applies to LLM-generated writings, but with other flaws which I typically don't see coming from those programs (awkward sentence fragments, repeatedly ending sentences with prepositions). I don't recall seeing any "it's not just x, it's y" or similar, but of course a human could've gone through and edited those out.
You can't say to your buddies in the tavern "hey, you know Mary in the next village, with the wart and the black cat? I'm surprised no-one has said anything about her neighbour's cow suddenly getting sick and dying after they had that row, but fair play: I know I wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of her!" and then decry witch hunts.
I’m not convinced you need epistemic distortion to have long lasting, prosocial, high trust communities. See Quakers, Japan, Scandinavia. Secularism has only had 200 years to try founding such things; religion has had a much longer head start.
There seems to be a re-occuring pattern with "updated" versions of Christianity/Abrahamic religions. Some guy declares himself to be a prophet, and brings an updated version of the holy book, which is conveniently written in the local language instead of an ancient dead language. He tells everyone to follow this new version *very* devoutly and literally, fight for it if they have to, do everything he commands in the name of God, and, incidentally, let him take multiple wives. Like you noted, this is pretty much what Mohammed did with the Quran. We also see versions of this in the Moonies, the Rastafarians, and (to some extent) the Black Nazarenes, as well as a lot of small fringe cults. I suppose that makes for a religion that's much easier to believe than some obscure ancient text with lots of dull or confusing moral lessons and very few tangible benefits.
You can in fact rationally choose to believe one religion over another, and this is an excellent example. As a Catholic I of course cannot rule out that there was all kinds of similar evidence about Christ that was lost to time. But of course, there is no evidence to support that idea, lots of evidence against it, and that’s just what we have to deal with. Meanwhile, Mormonism is all based on well documented fraud. One of these things simply is not like the other.
Hmm, more of a religious rant. So being agnostic (chance of God ~50%), I always wonder why the atheists never explore the possibility that there really is a God. Oh and living in religious Christian society is easy. I live as if God exists, even though I don't have any belief (or non-belief). It is the right way to live. So why not, I ask.
"Wouldn’t it be nice if all humans on earth could enter into a collective brainwashing ritual where we all ended up thinking playing cooperate in the Prisoner’s dilemma is the correct thing to do?" I really hope everyone here has watched Pluribus. It's about exactly that.
Prefetch below has some good links from mormonr.org that get into detail on the Book of Abraham. I'd like to follow up with some links of my own:
Putting various parts of the Book of Abraham into ancient context:
https://pearlofgreatpricecentral.org/category/book-of-abraham/page/5/
A free e-book about how the Book of Abraham could be an adaptation of a Semitic source (addressing the question, "Where the papyri themselves literally written by the actual hand of Abraham?")
https://scripturecentral.org/archive/books/book-chapter/facsimiles-and-semitic-adaptation-existing-sources
And lastly, an extensive rebuttal to a list of anti-Mormon claims. It's a PDF, and I don't see a way to link to a specific page, but The Book of Abraham points start on page 24
https://debunking-cesletter.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Debunking-CES-Letter-10-9-15a.pdf
It's a short one you talked about faith I will share with you what I know about faith yes it can be a superpower it Shields you because when you know the mustard seed you understand that mustard seed doesn't ask to understand it and knows how to grow without understanding and without needing to understand and with an understanding that no matter what happens source is inside of you whether you want to call it God whatever it doesn't matter like this preacher on serenity says I don't care what you believe just believe in something I believe in my co-pilot being my Creator and I believe that the sentence I am the the way the truth and the light was not written the way it was supposed to be written and there wasn't supposed to be a moniker at the end telling you about pray to me after Jesus said don't pray to him to look within to pray in the closet I think that I am the way the truth and the light the am is capitalized and they forget to tell you the full sentence I am that I am I will be what I will become I'm not going back to capitalize I'm legally blind without glasses and if I don't already need them close to trifocal poor can't buy grammer and punctuation tools for you and the Google mic is better than the free stuff but no grammar no punctuation I hope your intellectual ability to read this helps you understand what I'm trying to say look inside that copilot that's God that's the spark that's the what I believe ball of energy that was spinning and spinning and spinning before the Big bang and created the Big bang and what is 7 Days in a cosmos comparative to 7 Days on Earth entirely plausible both happened plausible that Lucifer could have been Adam and the biggest trick Beezelbub played on everybody was to put the am in lowercase in that sentence and have basically people praying to supposedly God's only begotten son what was the first commandment again Jesus is not God even he said don't pray to him he was flawed I read the Bible's not in the words I read it in the words a long time ago and realized there was no story from Mary Magdalene or Judas but there was this Old testament telling me my Creator was an angry jealous spiteful God that was sitting on a throne with a bunch of angels around him singing beautiful songs all day long while he has only a ghost beside him instead of a wife and he has to have an angel go down so he has a son by proxy what the hell is that how much respect is that for your creator so I made my own and my Creator was the perfect Pearl and split apart to create and in so doing is not an equal it's equalitative of power yeah that keyboard mic really likes to try to change that equalitative word a lot of the times because of the agenda and the keyboard listening tagging words that need to be subtly changed on you so it is best to go back and at least skim through my post I don't always do it and I really should know I didn't used to have to either way Jesus said the church is of Satan why would Jesus want the Old testament in there and the lineage of the Kings especially sorry but Jesus didn't walk with Kings did he he said the meek shall inherit the earth not the preachers in their jet planes mansions with their gold all over their Church while the homeless sit on the stoops at night because it's the only place that's halfway sheltered yeah I don't think Jesus would agree with Donald Trump either I don't think he'd walk with him because even if he's not part of the Ring he is protecting the Ring of pedophiles those monsters letting slip victims information and photos and in the meantime making sure every predator is completely safe and unnamed do you see how that works just because you didn't do it doesn't mean you're not just as guilty for protecting those who do and they never stopped sorry I went off because it does connect these are satanists running the world they are direct minions of Beelzebub who is the real Satan and the real Genesis tells the story of the real first created woman in the Genesis 1 he made them both man and woman and then all of a sudden halfway through Genesis 2 it's like oh we made Eve out of Adam's rib that doesn't sound really like what the hell okay so you made it Eve out of the bone marrow does it have genetic properties because either way if Adam and Eve were the only two people on Earth where did Cain and Abel's wives come from and so there you go with the science part of an alien species which makes sense with the shifts like the agricultural and the war weapons it does every man every religion has a seed of Truth but you have to look within when it comes to Faith sorry this went a little longer than I thought it would but I hope this helps you
Each year reading some of these other reviews I think how part of what makes Scott's book reviews great is he gets the length *just* right.
Lot of hate for this one but I loved it. Long after AI is superintelligent, I still will probably rely on Scott to curate blog posts that match my taste exactly.
I think the discussion of the facsimiles needs a bit of fleshing out. For example, the author asks whether it is so implausible that a priest might have performed a sacrifice on an embalming table in ancient Egypt. I truly do not know the answer to this. Did Egyptians often practice human sacrifice? This seems like a question Egyptologists would have some information about. Maybe this is well known and I'm just showing my ignorance?
Am I the only one who reads a bunch of Claude throughout the document? Some sections were extremely obvious.
The writing is certainly shallow, repetitive, and meandering, but I have never seen Claude output anything as awkwardly broken up as
"In a very literal sense, faith is the opposite of rationalism: you’re knowingly trying to believe something with a greater conviction than what is warranted by the evidence. That’s epistemic rationality though. Instrumental rationality is about achieving The Good. In that sense, faith can be very rational."
certainly some claude chunks in there, yeah
otherwise enjoyed the writing/narrative structure but really takes you out of it when you hit one
e.g.,
"Read these doctrines as a design spec. They are almost surgically optimized for psychological and prosocial output. Death anxiety: you’re eternal. Sense of purpose: you were chosen by name. The problem of suffering: you consented to this in advance. Tribal bonding: the people in the pew next to you are your pre-mortal siblings, also chosen, also noble, also great. Long-term motivation: infinite, the trajectory only goes up."
A couple thoughts:
(1) Not all book reviews need to be book reviews, but I do wish this one had more to say about the actual contents of the book.
(2) To better make his point about epistemic versus instrumental rationality, the author is both unfairly negative toward Joseph Smith and unrealistically positive about Mormon community as it actually exists.
(Also, the gap between the "modern" LDS view on what Joseph Smith was doing with the Book of Abraham and what Joseph Smith said he was doing is not as big as the author makes it out to be. Joseph Smith's first big writing project after the Book of Mormon was a "translation" (his word) of the Bible that was *openly* not a translation in the usual sense of the word. It was understood by all that Joseph Smith was not sitting in front of Hebrew and Greek manuscripts when making this so-called Bible translation. Instead the project mostly involved receiving "missing" parts of the Bible by revelation with the KJV text as a prompt.)
"The problem of suffering: you consented to this in advance."
Yikes, is that actually part of Mormon culture (implicitly or explicitly)? That sounds like something that would backfire very, very horribly in the context of an abusive relationship, and all the more so because it would be your entire community reinforcing that message.
The teaching that we accepted this life while knowing it would contain suffering is used in the community to answer questions like "why did God let this happen?", but I haven't seen it used to claim "you should accept your situation as it is and not try to change it". Mormon culture puts a lot of emphasis on agency, works, and being an active force for good in your own life, not just accepting yourself or your situation as they are.
Mormon culture can sometimes cause problems with abusive relationships, but not for that reason - more so because marriage and family are strongly encouraged while divorce is allowed but discouraged. There's often an expectation that both parties should try to build a marriage that can last for eternity, and if it doesn't last for eternity it was a failure.
The last section gives an inadequate answer to the question it starts with: what makes Mormonism specifically "one of the most highly optimized, high-trust, pro-social engines of human coordination on the planet"?
As the review explains, Mormonism is built on absurd and falsifiable doctrine, so it's built up the muscle of habitual rationalization. But so has every other theistic religion, as well many secular movements like flat-earthers. Every devout theist has the light in his eyes of literally believing he was personally selected by God etc. etc.
But most other religions don't disproportionately represent higher levels of wealth and education today. Neither do flat-earthers and the like.
So what makes the difference? Is it not rationalization but also the doctrines of pre-mortal existence, foreordination, the council of heaven, and eternal progression?
That needs to be justified further -- because most religious communities share some of those doctrines, but are still in aggregate much less "successful" (in secular pro-social terms) than the Mormons. While a few lack some or the other of those doctrines, but are even more disproportionately successful than Mormons (e.g. Parsis/Zoroastrians or Hindus in the USA don't believe they signed-up in advance in a divine council).
This is a response on your comments so that you get the algorithm but specifically for annoyed is that what his name is whoever was bitching about my f****** cursing start out no f****** commas no f******. No f****** grammar like he couldn't figure it out and if he couldn't figure it out maybe he's intellect isn't smart enough to be listening to because when you actually do the studied science you will see that someone who has no glasses is poor and has no vision and is just above the poverty helpline I wear no glasses on this because I can't see it with my glasses legally blind means I'm disabled you want to come pay my bills you go right ahead then I'll do all the proper grammar and sentence structure you want I'll leave a space for my paragraphs someone with 4.2 English yeah right okay you go right on you you play your own game little boy @AnarchyCynosure if you reply are you going to use more than one sentence or do we need to get you a binky
> Maybe there’s some other pro-social, faith-increasing collective brainwashing ritual we can all participate in together that will make the world a better place.
I am tired of the assumption rat-adjacent people seem to keep making that, since people around them highly value truth, surely compromising on truth should bring them dramatic gains since it's a big sacrifice. It gets some people some benefits sometimes, but I don't think it's good for individuals or society for people to pursue pragmatic falsehoods more.
> If my religion is a bunch of crap, then fine. But I still got a great life, and a bunch of people who love me.
I have a decent life and bunch of people who love me and *don't* want me to believe falsehoods and have 5 babies and abstain from homosexuality. It's better.
(Yes, it's possible those people will ditch me someday! But it's also possible a Mormon community would do similar.)
One of the big problems with the "pragmatic falsehoods" model is that it really really depends on the falsehoods. Who designed the falsehoods, to what end?
And also, once you believe the falsehood, your future reasoning potential drops dramatically.
The more you are dealing with complex circumstances that the falsehood writer didn't foresee, the larger the chance of a bad reaction between one of the false beliefs and reality.
I am wondering if this was written by a foreign English speaker? Maybe not ESL but bilingual from early age? I'd buy that to 60%, so to speak.
And I'm very intrigued by some of the deeply diving details and other completely flippant basic inaccurate dunks. And the wild swinging between generous attempts at steelmanning to laughing at the obvious absurdity.
Not unhappy this exists but would recommend the other commenters who linked sites like mormonr for a more comprehensive coverage of the historical questions in question.
For anyone who is fascinated by the question posed in this review - whether there are ways to do what Mormonism does for human civilization, without religious delusions - I highly recommend Tove K's series on madness and civilization, especially
https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/civilization-was-built-on-madness
Her short answer:
> I don't mean to say that delusions were, or are, the only reason why humans cooperate on a larger scale. When humans see that cooperation works, they tend to join in. Delusions are only needed in order to overcome the initial collective action problem.
As a (non-Mormon) boy growing up in Salt Lake City in the 1950s-early 1960s I learned from (Mormon) friends about the celestial kingdom vs. the telestial kingdom, righteous souls becoming Gods after death, etc. So for that reason alone I found this "review" to be very stimulating and informative.
On a deeper level, I found this "review" (essay, more properly) to be very good. It's not a review of any book but it drives effectively at an inference that would explain a great deal about religion, not just the LDS church but other religions as well: the moral content of fact-free founding myths can create community, and institutionalized rationalizations can effectively reinforce such myths. Doesn't work with everyone though.
Also, the myths are separate from whatever spiritual, mystical, or what have you experiences that religious founders typically have. The experiences are spiritually and biologically real, but such experiences come prior to interpretation.
> That’s epistemic rationality though. Instrumental rationality is about achieving The Good. In that sense, faith can be very rational.
Religions have existed for a long time. No one sat down with a game theory textbook to carefully design the instrumentally optimal religion. No one calculated the cost of the sacrificed goats to work out if the costly signaling was worth the price. No one worried what effect having such obviously false beliefs would have on the overall progress of science. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/
Throughout history, there have been many cases of religions fighting each other for "heresy".
Religion is mostly not a functioning coordination mechanism. It's functions mostly as a memetic disease. Some varieties might have some coordination benefits, but overall, the mix of benefits vs bad effects is generally not great.
Nobody sat down with a biology textbook to design the human eye, yet it functions quite well.
Religion has prevented some progress in science, but it also enabled infrastructure to allow it in the first place. There's a selection process going on. You cannot do science effectively unless you have a stable society with working supply chains and enough surplus to allow people to read books instead of plowing the field.
Regardless, why do we care about history? Religious people in the modern world still go to school to study physics. And the church is not preventing anyone from building AI or rockets.
> Nobody sat down with a biology textbook to design the human eye, yet it functions quite well.
Sure. Because of evolution. Notice that, in general, organisms with better vision have a survival advantage.
There is some sort of memetic pseudo-evolution selection pressure on religions.
Most of that pressure is towards fitting the flaws in human psycology, in order to spread better. Not towards promoting game theory cooperation.
> You cannot do science effectively unless you have a stable society with working supply chains and enough surplus to allow people to read books instead of plowing the field.
Granted. But also, some ancient societies seemed to divert a lot of their limited agricultural surplus into building temples, not doing science. I don't know how much credit, if any, religion should take for stable societies with agricultural surplus.
> Regardless, why do we care about history? Religious people in the modern world still go to school to study physics. And the church is not preventing anyone from building AI or rockets.
There are more modern examples of religions causing problems, whether it's trying to ban gay marriage, or trying to get creationism taught in schools.
There do exist some religious people who study physics, but most of the best physicists are atheist. It turns out it's somewhat hard to fit the full religious indoctrination package, and the full scientific questioning of everything, into the same brain.
Religion has lost much of it's political power since the middle ages. So religious ability to interfere with the practice of science is greatly reduced. But not zero.
I think that, as a general principle, giving power to nonsense has a tendency to backfire in hard to predict ways.
The existence of priests and monks and monasteries has given people the education and free-time to sit and study things and is therefore beneficial for knowledge production. Scriptural scholarship is historically linked with general scholarship. What is the realistic counterfactual to compare this against?
Anyways, I broadly agree with many of your points, but the real crux for me depends on a more sophisticated understanding of history than I have right now.
> The existence of priests and monks and monasteries has given people the education and free-time to sit and study things and is therefore beneficial for knowledge production.
The priestly classes extracted a large fraction of the available agricultural surplus, and sometimes, when they weren't wasting their time on the bible, a few priests did useful things.
If you throw enough money at any old random thing, there will be the odd useful side effect (amongst all the harmful ones).
If you were trying to design an institution of learning, you could trivially do a better job. If you were trying to be fairer, you might compare to other real historical institutions, such as craftsmans guilds, and rich landowners who were curious.
Yes, religious scholarship is "associated with" other scholarship. Modern day homeopaths try to associate themselves with real doctors, and the only reason they aren't more successful is the real doctors generally want nothing to do with the homeopaths.
Long ago, there was less evidence available. Religions were less obviously stupid. Religions also had more social power so it wasn't a good idea to publicly disavow them.
I'm not actually sure there is a "realistic counterfactual" to compare with. Given that religion is real, any hypothetical past counterfactual that doesn't contain religion is in some sense unrealistic.
The goal of the hypothetical is to show the general principle that believing false things can backfire in various ways. Even though a hypothetical world in which no one ever believed any false thing is unrealistic, I suspect this hypothetical world is better than our current one.
> If you were trying to design an institution of learning, you could trivially do a better job.
Don't you feel this type of sentence triggers some alarm bells? It reminds of statements like "if you were trying to design an economy superior to capitalism you could trivially do it" forgetting that it has to work in the real world with real humans and institutions and be stable over time.
You cannot say the existence of religion has been bad for science unless there's a better realistic counterfactual. I can make the claim that Newton was bad for science because there's a hypothetical ultra-Newton that would've one-shot modern physics.
> I'm not actually sure there is a "realistic counterfactual" to compare with.
I imagine it as an optimization process where a point moves along a loss curve. Any local change is "realistic" and global changes "unrealistic". I.e. whatever institution you implement has to be compatible with the society that already exists. The evolutionary analogy would be that "realistic counterfactual" means going down a different evolutionary path in the past, while "unrealistic" would be a one-shot jump from fish to hyper-fit Octocrabs that instantly conquer the world.
"realistic" here also implies robust to perturbations. A very spiky local minimum will instantly collapse, while a flatter basin is stable. The analogy here could be that capitalism is far more robust than communism.
This implies that when evaluating the sentence "religion was historically bad for science" you need to compare it against other institutions that could've realistically evolved without instantly collapsing.
> Don't you feel this type of sentence triggers some alarm bells? It reminds of statements like "if you were trying to design an economy superior to capitalism you could trivially do it"
What about "if you were trying to design a an ecological system that's superior for food production (ie basic farming) you could trivially do it".
I think that the statement you gave here about capitalism is mostly false. (Well it wouldn't be too hard to design something that was 90% capitalism with a few obvious improvements, it would be hard to design something that was totally not capitalism, and still better.)
I don't feel that this type of sentence, in general, triggers alarm bells. I think that it's false in the example you picked because capitalism is already pretty good as an economic system. There are theorems that say that capitalism is optimal. Those theorems involve unrealistic assumptions about externalities not existing. But they still suggest that capitalism is far better than any old random thing.
> You cannot say the existence of religion has been bad for science unless there's a better realistic counterfactual.
In a sense, fair. But by that same sense, you can't say that the existence of science has been good for science if you can't make a proper counterfactual without science. The standards you are applying seem to rule out historical "x has been good/bad for y" in general.
> I imagine it as an optimization process where a point moves along a loss curve. Any local change is "realistic" and global changes "unrealistic". I.e. whatever institution you implement has to be compatible with the society that already exists. The evolutionary analogy would be that "realistic counterfactual" means going down a different evolutionary path in the past, while "unrealistic" would be a one-shot jump from fish to hyper-fit Octocrabs that instantly conquer the world.
Ok. But imagine that "realistic" world. The fish evolves into a slightly different fish. This evolutionary trajectory isn't what's likely to happen if evolution was left alone to do it's thing. It's like there is an omniscient being with the power to make tiny tweaks to DNA who is slowly guiding these fish down a path towards the hyperfit octocrab. And this introduces an element of sophisticated long term planning that evolution doesn't have.
As someone who grew up Mormon yet stepped away ten years ago, I feel such a strange relief of no longer living in this space of “ how can I make the impossible make sense.” Mormon me would have read this article unscathed hearing only my faith shaped message. However for myself (and a lot of friends and family) we leave not because the evidence got good but because of the inherent paradoxes that draw you in ultimately give you permission to go.
Biased a bit from having skimmed all the other comments, but whether it's AI or an organically poor native command of English, the writing was pretty painful on this one. Editing as well, I did not enjoy being constantly yanked around on tangents while trying to juggle an increasingly complex web of plot threads and "hold that thought"s in my context window. It's the sort of post that I make myself finish reading to make number go up on the Scott Completionist achievement, but would have ducked out early if it were on any other blog. Somewhat tired form, too: "lol religion is fake" is so 2000s, "maybe we threw out the baby with the bathwater, whoops" is so 2010s. Yes, the coordination problem remains intractable, and LDS has a lot of narratively-interesting elements to distinguish it from standard Boo Xian fare. But I feel like I've read this general argument many times before, much more eloquently too. Sometimes on this same blog!
Contrast to last year's Joan of Arc review, for example - that's doing apologia ITT steelmanning right, and in a deeply entertaining, well-written way too.
Mythological thought rears its head in the New World.
“Sort of a catalyst”? This is how modern Mormons handwave this fantasy, they call it a catalyst.
What kind of a parody of analysis is this? “Mormonism is a bit too obviously incorrect for my taste though.”
And what religion is less obviously incorrect, or obviously correct?
Okay, so I know next to nothing about Mormons, and I going off what I just read, but...
What Joseph Smith did to these women is sexual abuse, right? If not outright rape?
Even leaving aside the obvious crushing power difference, about 7 of the wives were between 14 and 17 when he chain-married them. And given that he married about 30 wives over three years, it seems unlikely that he maintained any sort of durable relationship with them.
Like, I feel like the whole article is very euphemistic, "bang their wives" and such, and from what little research I've done it seems most of the women spoke up very little about their experience of the ordeal. The sources focus on the scandal, the breach of norms, not the women's lived experiences.
But... we have to read between the lines, right? Of *course* women who were sexually abused by a man their community sees as a martyr prophet, who were groomed into keeping the relationship secret, wouldn't conceptualize the experience as rape, and wouldn't ever publicly speak up about it in those terms.
If we look at the facts, at the judicial and military power that he had and apparently used, at the humiliating position these wives would be in, seeing him publicly claim with indignation that they didn't exist, it's hard to imagine that most of those marriages were made with the women's consent even by the standards of the time, let alone modern standards.
What's going on with facsimile 2? The cropped parts of it that are stated to contain nonsensical characters appear nowhere in the full image of the facsimile.
This is the full original printing of facsimile 2: https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/book-of-abraham-excerpt-and-facsimile-2-15-march-1842-abraham-219-521/5
Which contains those characters from the crop, although written with different handwriting.
You can compare the Abraham papyri characters with the characters in the original printing linked above and see that they are the same (although maybe a bit hard to read)
...Where? This appears to be the same image of the full object as in this post.
Exactly where it is indicated by the crop. I.e. on the right side/top-right. Although since you're not seeing it I'm probably misunderstanding what you mean. Or you're confused by the fact that they're in differently written copies of the same characters.
What do you mean "differently written"? It's supposed to be a crop of the exact same image. Why would there be any difference?
I've put the images side-by-side and drawn an arrow pointing to a character from the supposed crop. Could you draw another arrow pointing to the same character in the full image?
https://imgur.com/a/FB5INQt
Haha. Yeah I can see how you have hard time matching them, but they're the same. I'm at the gym rn, but I'll do it when I get home or tomorrow
Actually I just did it on my phone: https://imgur.com/a/Vm3RkXm
I drew lines between the 2 characters and then also the adjacent ones.
Btw the Mormons had many different drawings of the same facsimile. The one published originally in their newspaper is one of them. The crop I believe is from one of the copies from the Kirkland Egyptian documents.
There is one canonical one released by Joseph, right? Why is there any inconsistency? A) that's a completely different character- even if I had to copy this by hand I expect I could do a better job. And B) why would the post author use a crop from a low-quality copy rather than the real image they had just posted above?