Green Oasis

[The following is an email message to the Curriculum Development department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in response to their request for comments and suggestions on the new Teachings of the Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith manual.]

Greetings,

I am grateful for this opportunity to offer my feedback on the
Teachings of the Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith. I hope that
what I say will be helpful to you.

It seems, from what I’ve read, that this manual follows a pattern
established in the other lesson manuals. The manual portrays Joseph
Smith as monogamous, mentioning only his marriage to Emma Hale. This
one example represents in my mind a general pattern in materials
published by the church: presenting only a selection of the available
historical facts. I imagine that this is to avoid presenting
information that will damage the fragile faith of new members and
those who waver, those who “cannot bear meat now, but milk they must
receive” (D&C 19:22). I had once accepted this rationale with the
expectation that the meat of LDS history was available in official
church materials to those who sought it.

Having graduated from the church’s seminary and institute programs, I
believed that I knew the important facts of LDS history because I had
exhausted official church materials. All the same, I felt that I
should be more familiar with the details of church history, so I set
out to study church history with greater focus. Little by little, I
began to realize that certain materials from the church’s history that
could be seen as unflattering or doctrinally unorthodox were missing
from all official publications. I felt disappointed and a little
ashamed to learn that I was unaware of these facts because I needed to
trust that the church was providing me with all important information.
I also wanted to believe that my faith was founded on good
information. This feeling of disillusionment led ultimately to my
choice to renounce my faith.

I wonder if the leading councils of the church have hoped that the
general membership could avoid coming across bits of troublesome
history. I believe that the increased worldwide attention on the
church and wider availability of information on the internet makes any
such hope unfounded.

I have always valued the pursuit of and loyalty to the truth. I
treasure this as a legacy of my Mormon pioneer forebears. I want my
family who choose to actively participate in the church to have all
the truth. I worry that if I try to present the historical truth to
them that they will either perceive it as an attack or believe that I
am lying because their church tells a different story. I hope instead
that they can come to rely on their church to provide that history
openly and honestly, even when it isn’t flattering to the church’s
public image or doesn’t support its current doctrinal stance. I hope
the church can find a way to openly address the uncomfortable parts of
its past.

I ask that you consider making more of the troublesome historical
facts available through official church publications. Perhaps you feel
that the Melchizedek Priesthood/Relief Society manuals are not the
appropriate place to present troublesome history, but please find a
place somewhere in your curriculum. If you are already considering or
implementing this, please consider this message a voice of
encouragement.

Thank you for asking for comments and for taking the time to read my
message.

Something about his voice made me tune in. It was a cross between a kindergarten teacher reading storybooks and the voice-over guy who does almost all of the movie trailer narrations. The effect was simultaneously overly dramatic and condescendingly disingenuous. He sounded conscious of his own profundity. His tone grated on my nerves, but it made me listen to his General Conference talk about personal testimony, the only talk that I payed much attention to all weekend.

“If you want to know that you know that you know, a price must be paid.… I know what I know, and my witness is true.”

What does that even mean? What price do I have to pay if I want to know that I know that I know that I know? Can I get by with less if I just want to know that I know?

All joking aside, I can only make sense of what Douglas Callister said if what he means is that he is really, really, really confident that what he believes is true. That isn’t what he said, however. He said that his witness is true in some absolute, unmistakable way. “You can trust in me,” he seemed to say.

In fairness, he also taught that the only witness which counts in the end is our own, but his tone seemed to imply that we could rely on his beliefs until we knew for ourselves, no need to doubt.

I think most people will agree that we human beings are limited. We can’t know everything. Our knowing is confined to some subset of everything.

I would go further to say that we can’t know anything with absolute certainty. We rely on the trustworthiness of our own minds. To know anything absolutely, our minds must be in perfect working order with all the facts available to it. Here, we run into a bootstrapping problem: how can we know that our minds are in perfect working order? It is nonsensical to think that we can use our minds to judge their own fitness. If a mind is unfit, then it could erroneously judge itself fit because of its unfitness.

It is tempting to wonder whether God could intervene here making it possible for us to know something with absolute certainty. I can’t imagine what form that intervention would take. We would still be forced to wonder how we could be sure that our impression that God gave us perfect knowledge is true? How do we know that we know? Answering that by “prayer and fasting” we can know that we know seems ignorant of the problem at hand.

I can’t see any way to escape this trap. The honest must admit to themselves that they will never know something with absolute certainty. There must always be doubt, if we are honest. We may be very confident in our beliefs, but that doesn’t make them true. In other words we can say that we believe that we know, but anyone who says that they know that they know isn’t being honest with themselves (or the church).

I have been very grateful that the freedom, dignity, and integrity of the individual are basic in church doctrine. We are free to think and express our opinions in the church. Fear will not stifle thought. God himself refuses to trammel free agency even though its exercise sometimes teaches painful lessons. Both creative science and revealed religion find their fullest and truest expression in the climate of freedom.…

We should, of course, respect the opinions of others, but we should also be unafraid to dissent—if we are informed. Thoughts and expressions compete in the marketplace of thought, and in that competition truth emerges triumphant. Only error fears freedom of expression.…

We should be dauntless in our pursuit of truth and resist all demands for unthinking conformity. No one would have us become mere tape recorders of other people’s thoughts. We should be modest and teachable and seek to know the truth by study and faith. There have been times when progress was halted by thought control. Tolerance and truth demand that all be heard and that competing ideas be tested against each other so that the best, which might not always be our own, can prevail. Knowledge is the most complete and dependable when all points of view are heard.…

One of the most important things in the world is freedom of the mind; from this all other freedoms spring. Such freedom is necessarily dangerous, for one cannot think right without running the risk of thinking wrong, but generally more thinking is the antidote for the evils that spring from wrong thinking. More thinking is required, and we should all exercise our God-given right to think and be unafraid to express our opinions, with proper respect for those to whom we talk and proper acknowledgment of our own shortcomings.

We must preserve freedom of the mind in the church and resist all efforts to suppress it. The church is not so much concerned with whether the thoughts of its members are orthodox or heterodox as it is that they shall have thoughts.

(Hugh B. Brown as quoted at Equality Time)

If the LDS church had more Hugh B. Browns in the leadership, I’d have been much less likely to leave. He spoke eloquently on the necessity of free thinking, something I’m not generally accustomed to from the Mormon leaders. My experience has been quite contrary to his last statement.

Here’s another for the file of self-deluded martial artists. This man believed that he could perform a ritual that would protect him from his own razor-sharp blade. Result? He nearly hacks off his own left arm.

It’s fascinating what people can convince themselves of.

Warning: if you’re squeamish about the sight of blood, don’t watch. It’s not excessive, but there is blood.

Another example of how faith must be placed in things that are true. The damned hard part is finding out what is true.

I wonder what he learned from this. Will he try to shrug it off as inauspicious spirits? Or perhaps a lack of training? I hope for his sake that when the wound heals and the embarrassment wears off, he can let go of his dangerous delusion.

I’ve heard it repeated in a few places recently that atheists can be happy for theists the same way that parents can enjoy their children’s belief in Santa Claus. If it makes them happy, then we should be happy for them.

Everyone is free to believe what they will, but this comparison sounds more than a little patronizing. That’s probably not how it was intended, but that’s how it sounds. It’s not difficult to imagine the person thinking “I’m happy for those poor believers. They’re so cute when they think God answers their prayers. As long as it makes them happy.”

Personally, I can’t bring myself to be happy for someone else’s mistaken belief. I try to help correct that mistake if I can, without being a jerk. I hope they would return the favor.

My reluctance to play along probably stems from my stance on that old question about which is better: happiness or truth? I would generally rather have the truth than be happy. But that’s a personal preference. Other people would choose happiness instead, and I find it hard to fault them for it. It would be nice to ignore the truth in favor of happiness sometimes.

However, I would never put myself in the paternal position of thinking someone is better off blissfully ignorant in their mistaken beliefs. I respect other people too much. This condescending attitude is one of the things that I most resent about current LDS church practice. The LDS church teaches whitewashed history, presumably because they don’t want to damage the fragile faith and happiness of the body of the church with inconvenient truths.

I will try to be civil and polite with believers, picking appropriate times and places, but I don’t intend to ultimately play along with the charade that Santa Claus lives. I think they deserve better than a well intentioned lie or strategic silence.