Potential Russia Nuclear Counter Strike in 1983
Cognitive Disonance Why do we view prophets as if from an ivory tower?
A simple post from powerline on the radical un-chic
Can the spirit lead you out of the church I don't think the comments were willing to really tackle the question. It is a really good one. It was followed up by this one
Some great comments on how some church pratices that apparently seem quite differnt, turn out quite similar when you look at the again
A good post on the importance of intent, Actually it was about how important just being a good person is, but I thought I would generalize it for my self.
Ways of Knowing II I tend to agree with how lazy we treat revelation. The story of Gideon and the wool in the old testamanet was one of my favorites on my mission. I think we are too afraid to ask God to repeat something. Obviously part of that may be similar to what happened when Joseph Smith lent out the 112 pages. I think the is a fundamental difference between asking the same question repeatedly, and asking a question from slightly different perspectives each time. The former seems like you are trying to get a different answer, the latter seems similar to looking for a range of values. Or perphaps it is an exercise in learning how to be precise.
Here is a great series of posts on the problems of pinning down mormon doctrineNew Cool Thang Blake on T&S, Jim F on T&S and Jim F again on T&S
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4 comments:
What did you think about my comments on silence?
Stephen, can you give me a link to which post they are on? I have a notoriously bad memory for things.
Oh, sorry, I found it on your blog. It will take me a bit to read it thoroughly though. You are a much better writer than I. I hate to miss subtlety.
I wonder if one of the reasons for silence is to let us make God in what ever image we want. If we want a god who is visible at every moment, we can find god in everything. If we don't want a god at all it is easy to find naturalisic explanations for everything. I think it depends on the way we envision god, not necessarily what we want him to be like at any given moment.
In this light, the scripture, have not other Gods before me is interesting. Various conceptions of God certainly are useful. I think at different points in life, we need to focus on different aspects of God. I don't think the absolute correctness of this tendency is always as important as some might think. Continued belief in God requires a belief that he represents ultimate goodness. Sometimes the sacrifice of absolute correctness gets offset by what we are able to accomplish with partially correct ideas. (For instance I much prefer some partially correct approximations in physics to absolutely correct conditions that are functionally impossible to solve). I wonder if the silence of god you talk about allows for this flexibility. It allows us to make god in the image needed for him to work in our lives.
The caveat is that these creations should never be placed ahead of him. To me this means we need to know that they are just approximations and never get too attached to them, Once they take preference over his reality things become problematic. Living in a fantasy world becomes too enviting. However, while fantasy provides essential hope, to me, it is really only useful if it builds something. This then changes initial conditions. If it doesn't build anything, initial conditions never change, and fantasy is a trap.
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