EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
I know what you're here for. What's his bias? Politically I at least like to think of myself as a true moderate, maybe (in US context) slightly naturally right-leaning but currently politically left-leaning if I had to be more specific.
User ID: 1043
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
Ah, I see. You could call it selfless love, though, from Jesus' perspective? I guess I understand how you'd think from a judgement of God the Father's perspective that seems kind of messed up.
Answers obviously vary, but my own religion (LDS/Mormon) actually has a bit of a different view in that God obeys certain laws, and among them are that sinful people literally cannot enter heaven. In our setup, there was basically a big meeting before the Earth was created where everyone already existed, and God proposed a plan for human growth and development, including obtaining physical bodies and learning to overcome temptation. Jesus volunteered to overcome death and make it possible there, and we all also agreed to participate. Thus it's not all about sin directly, it's more about growth, and if you don't grow enough you don't quite go to hell either - you just go to a place where you feel most comfortable, with people of a similar level of purity and goodness together, and sinful-character people wouldn't feel comfortable in God's direct presence. That is to say as well, the Fall and its consequences wasn't a disaster, but a pre-planned opportunity to propel directional growth. I got off topic but in that perspective God is quite literally constrained to set it up this way rather than making a deliberate choice to torture his son to death. In fact, we move the "main event" to the garden of Gethsemane rather than the cross for much this same reason, emphasizing the elective nature of it while the cross is more about the victory over death (why the cross is not used, we view the resurrection as also more important than the crucifixion). Thus it's not purely legalistic, but rather a setup that allows mercy to assist with the innate natural spiritual consequences of bad/immoral choices, while also allowing for true moral agency to exist. Although the details can vary significantly, there are other evangelicals who believe something similar and more in line with what you describe, that sin literally requires punishment, so Jesus was performing a kind of legal act in assuming the sin. You're right that some related framings there indicate God defines what is good and bad, it's not independent, which might be more problematic in that context.
This isn't universal across Christianity, I should note: some sidestep the whole issue and never address if Jesus' suffering was actually necessary or view it as strictly inspirational, others don't think the cross was about guilt at all, but in fact was breaking the power of death as a kind of liberation (forgiveness is free more independently of Jesus), and still others think the cross was more about God identifying with humanity as an act of ultimate empathy (I think Eastern Orthodox is roughly those last two, though I'm sure our motte residents could tell you more).
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
I will be very interested to see if English persists as a lingua franca for business even if the US and UK have their influence significantly decline. It may be that English has hit a critical mass among businessmen that it is self-sustaining, though I'm not totally confident this is the case (and perhaps AI translation is already at a point where it becomes less necessary on an everyday level). For example, if someone from Japan wants to talk with someone from Germany, chances are they do so in English, right? The nature of international trade is often such that major bilateral partners only covers a smallish percentage of the total, so a mutually common language is useful for practical reasons. Though that dynamic will have more to do with how large Chinese bilateral trade links grow in other countries.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
So is Churchill basically the British Abraham Lincoln, in terms of domestic praise? Or is this more about foreign perceptions of praiseworthy Brits?
I wonder if the same historiographical trends and forces that have happened to some extent over Lincoln have clear parallels for Churchill, or if the trajectory is very different. For example, modern emphasis on how Lincoln was willing to end the war keeping slavery intact, or suspending habeus corpus, was a racist, or a mini-tyrant. Unfair IMO, I think he deserves top billing as one of the best presidents alongside Washington.
You mean the animal sacrifice aspect of Judaism? I agree it's definitely seen as somewhat barbaric by modern Western standards but for a good chunk of history it was pretty normal. Still practiced in parts of Hindu India and some Islamic countries, plus in Santería where that's a thing. You have to remember that part of that is because for a lot of history, animals were a major source of wealth. Judaism deliberately requiring the sacrifice of the "firstborn" or most "unblemished" of their flocks served multiple purposes - one, the fact that it was a bit of a waste was kind of the point, showing your devotion via valuable things; two, at least at some points in Jewish history, the meat would be used as a revenue and food source for the Levites, the priest tribe, who otherwise didn't have their own land; three, there's some doctrinal symbolism, both for Christians and Jews although the symbolism's exact flavor varies. I think that's relatively emblematic of the use of animal sacrifice in religion more broadly: ideas about drama, tribute, and symbolism (blood is a very obvious expression of life). I guess obviously, if you feel as a modern atheist that we are overcoming human nature or something, sure it might be
Or do you mean the moral idea of sin and guilt in general? I feel like that's pretty natural and human. People struggle with guilt in non-religious contexts all the time. Wanting someone or something to take away that guilt follows pretty logically. Even psychologists think a certain degree of guilt is healthy - it's more the shame side of things that can be harmful, or when it's excessive.
Edit: What exactly is the vile part? The animal sacrifice (poor animals, barbaric butchery) or the guilt bit? I guess you could consider wanting other people or things to take away guilt as somewhat maladaptive. But a full absolution via zero personal action/responsibilty is not typically the connected belief, except for maybe some born-again Christians, but I think they tend to be the minority, most still feel like some steps of personal improvement or reconciliation are needed (i.e. repentence).
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
See my other comment but I'm puzzled that you'd feel Chinese is a bigger cultural transformation when there are more Spanish speakers, as a percentage of the population, than there are Black people in the US. I might be biased from living in the West, though.
What? Who believes that? It's my understanding that a strong majority people across all political sides think [European] WWII was preventable, it's just that the reasons vary. I think there are, broadly speaking, about three camps that conveniently tend to align with modern political positions:
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The people of Germany should have been better at fighting back and denouncing Nazism when it was rising and/or after Hitler took control (Left)
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The other nations around Germany should have been better at drawing firm lines in the sand for what was allowed and what was not, it was appeasement that let Hitler get out of control (Right)
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The winners of WWI shouldn't have imposed such an overly strict and emasculating treaty of Versailles which led to German resentment and decline creating an environment of radicalism and lawlessness (Center)
I mean these were all reasons, but I think historians (to the extent that they agree) roughly rank those reasons above in ascending order of importance. I guess you could add underestimating Hitler (first bin), failure of the League of nations (first bin), economic factors (second bin), criticism of the Weimar democracy (third bin) too.
The argument for non-preventability rests on what? Actions from Versailles and foreign leaders are pretty agentic and led to many of the other reasons, I guess you could call the Great Depression non-agentic, or simply say that the world hadn't yet learned these lessons because similar situations hadn't existed yet?
(edit: formatting)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
"Scapegoating" itself as a word comes from Jewish tradition where the sins of the entire nation would be laid on a single literal goat who was then released into the wilderness (practically, pushed off a cliff outside town), while another 'innocent' goat would be sacrificed on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year. Jesus literally and symbolically took the role of both being innocent and being sacrificed, and it's quite literal in Christianity that he took on him the sins of the world there, which sins would otherwise prevent us individually from reaching heaven. Reasons for why exactly he was capable of doing this differ across sects but usually are some variant of him being innocent or of godly nature.
In modern discourse being scapegoated is seen as a bad thing (i.e. avoiding responsibility) but Christians would agree that you need some action yourself to obtain this absolution, though it's "free" in a more general sense. Here is the key point where the various sects differ greatly, what action? Some believe that you need to follow some kind of true regret/restitution/prayer process, others that you need to confess to a priest, others that you actually don't have to do anything other than once in your whole life ask for forgiveness and that's it.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
It depends on what parts of the Bible. Some, absolutely. My very-atheist hometown of Portland, OR (suburbs but still) had a "Bible as Literature" English elective class in high school! No, I didn't take it, sadly.
Not all chapters are equal, and it also depends on the translation. KJV has a pretty famous poetic style, though the NRSV keeps a good bit of the charm while updating the language somewhat. Read some famous passages in the ESV though and you might feel like a toddler, it's pretty bad. There's some of the Psalms, of course, parts of Isaiah with nice imagery, the start of Genesis is a bit of a classic. In the New Testament, it's a little more parceled out into particular chapters, though John and Luke are definitely more literary than the other Gospels.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
It's definitely true that most Spanish-only-speakers have developed coping strategies already, or are bilingual to an acceptable extent, so the returns aren't as starkly defined as with other languages. However, it does expand your ability to vacation in most all of the hemisphere, allows you to be a better "neighbor", and furthermore allows you to communicate somewhat acceptably with those who speak Italian or Portuguese (French to a more limited extent), so there's that extra marginal effect too. I just yesterday had a whole conversation with someone from Brazil, cross-language with him in Portuguese and me in Spanish, and it was pretty effective. So you kind of get 1 + 2 * (1/2) languages for the price of one. On top of that, since the linguistic roots are so similar, learning Spanish also has the effect of boosting English vocabulary (and vice-versa)! It's extremely common for regular-use Spanish words to have less-used English equivalents. As a trivial example, the word for "to chew" in Spanish is "masticar", which you might recognize as related to the more archaic English word "masticate" with an identical meaning. By contrast, Chinese offers practically zero cross-over knowledge in vocabulary, the script itself, and some intonation.
Again Chinese is definitely #2 on that list of most-useful languages, though. It's just hard to argue with the numbers. Most people rarely leave the country, and even if your Spanish is functionally decorative with 80% of all Spanish-speakers, there's still twice as many Spanish-speakers where it would be useful as there are Chinese speakers domestically (for which similar arguments could be made anyways). Sure, there are still 2-3 times as many global speakers of Chinese, but IMO you really need to weight that heavily by exposure chance. An unused language is still vaguely helpful developmentally as I mentioned above, or as a hobby, and might get you some attention from women, but overall it would still be a poor investment to learn a language never used.
Status-wise, there's no doubt Spanish has a lower socioeconomic association, so if you're trying to raise your kid to me a major climber, Chinese might be better if that's your primary goal. However, Spanish is the kinder and more practical option. So it might come down to values/priorities in some sense.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
Just on the language piece, Spanish is absolutely and infinitely more useful in the US. Wikipedia says that in the US it’s something like 42 million vs 3.5 million and the Spanish one feels like maybe even an underestimate. I’m not saying Chinese is useless - personally I’d view it as #2 most useful second language? But a 10-fold difference increase in speaking opportunities is pretty stark. Frankly everything after that falls off pretty quickly in usefulness, possibly with the exception of French, where the point of learning is more for its own sake rather than an actual expected ROI of any kind. (They say that a second language eventually can help mental development, after a brief confusion period depending on the age, so language of any kind might still be a mild net benefit even without a lasting return, but the significance of this is debated.)
You may have a point about the Chinese school. It’s not all sunshine and roses though, as noted below, but I’d say directionally it sounds like an idea worth exploring for sure.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
To be clear, at least in the context of the arguments today as I understand them, the major question of relief was not actually for individuals but for states who would bear a very large administrative burden if birthright citizenship were struck down (3.5 million babies a year born, would they all need to provide residency papers? That’s a lot of paperwork and paperwork costs money). So at least in the current form of the debate, unborn kids are not directly relevant (though this indication is something the SC might address, so it’s still a valid question)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
Yeah it’s a good question. Other outlets like the NYT actually mentioned that Kagan quote. On the other hand, the three he did list without Kagan seem to be the ones many court watchers think will be on the losing side of a 6-3 decision, so maybe that was what he was trying to imply?
I don’t think there are full remarks available online - actually it was also Politico who were the original source on Kagan here and I will say the context does matter. The larger thrust of her answer (as framed in the original source, which is just snippets with paraphrasing or summarization) was about over-politicization of the law more broadly. I note that when Harvard Law Review last year in tackling the nationwide injunction issue, cited the exact same quote, it was as evidence that she wanted to limit judge shopping, not as directly against injunctions, though clearly the two are still intertwined. So I think there’s at least some space for Frost here.
I think an interesting point is also just how the nationwide injunction issue doesn’t quite cut neatly across partisan lines, both parties have been frustrated by it and I don’t get the sense there is broad alignment here, regardless of whatever Trump’s lawyers are arguing. They’ve twisted themselves in pretzels before.
So yeah, emergency expedited Supreme Court oral arguments were today, about - contrary to what the headlines might initially seem to tell you - whether district court judges can issue national injunctions. More specifically, on if "relief" can be given to non-parties in a lawsuit, unilaterally by judge's decision. This is not on its face about Trump's birthright citizenship claims though of course that is more immediately at issue. I highly recommend this piece with a classic back-and-forth between two law professors who disagree about whether or not they should be allowed (disclaimer: both are, however, strongly against the Trump interpretation of birthright citizenship), a format I feel like is way underrepresented in today's news landscape (but weirdly overdone and trivialized on cable TV). NPR would never. Ahem. Anyways...
Some mini-history is these injunctions, as best I understand, basically did not exist until the mid-2000's when suddenly they started showing up a lot, and on big topics too. DACA, the Muslim travel ban, the abortion pill ban, various ACA issues, it has tended to cut across administrations though often the pattern is they show up against the one in power. Both professors agree that the Constitution itself doesn't really say much about the subject one way or the other beyond generalities, so it's going to rest a little more on general principles.
The central and immediate disagreement between the two seems to be whether or not you can or should trust the national government, when it loses a major case, to go back to the drawing board and/or pause the losing policy because narrowly slicing it up doesn't make sense, or whether you might as well do a nationwide injunction because of a lack of trust or simply that the application fundamentally isn't something you can legally slice up finely.
The more general disagreement, and this is the one that to me is more interesting, seems to be what to do about judge-shopping and partisan judges having disproportionate impacts, with some very different ideas about how to address that, contrasted below:
Is this frustrating for you [Professor Bagley] — for this to be the vehicle that may finally be forcing a resolution on the availability of nationwide injunctions?
Bagley: I suppose it’s a consequence of having developed a position over time and across administrations. What it means to have a set of principles is that they don’t change just because you happen to dislike the inhabitant of the White House.
I think a lot of people — and I’m not speaking of Professor Frost here at all — come to this issue out of righteous indignation against the president of the opposite political party, and that’s actually my big concern.
We want to put our faith in these judges, but these judges are just people too. There’s 500-plus of them, and they’re scattered all over the country. Many are smart. Many work hard. Some are dumb. Lots are political. Many are just outright partisan hacks.
All you need to do in order to get a nationwide injunction is file your case in front of one of those partisan hacks, and then we’re off to the races — with these immediate appeals up to the Supreme Court, where hard questions are decided in a circumscribed manner and where the courts themselves reveal a kind of highly partisan pattern of judging that calls the entire judiciary into disrepute.
I would love this birthright citizenship [executive order] to be blown up into about a billion pieces. It is a moral, ethical, legal, constitutional travesty. I don’t know that the engine to do that is a nationwide injunction. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s not.
That said, I think no one who’s looking at 21st century America right now thinks to themselves, “Things are going great.” There are a lot of deep problems. I think our democracy has misfired in a pretty profound way, and some of the institutional constraints on the president that previously held are starting to give way.
I don’t think we give up much by giving up the nationwide injunction. I think we help right the ship, but I don’t know that I know that for sure.
And I think anybody who comes into these debates with extraordinary confidence, one way or the other, about the long-run consequence of doctrinal shifts like this, ought to have their head checked. I have a view, but, like many things in life, it is provisional and what I think is a principled and thoughtful view.
But lots of other people, who are also principled and thoughtful disagree, with me.
So in short, it's too risky to allow judges this power.
Professor Frost, you’re probably not in disagreement on all of these policy and practical issues. Where do you see agreement and disagreement?
Frost: First, I do not think there’s a single judge that exercises this power — in the sense that, yes, that judge issues the nationwide injunction in the district court, but it can be immediately appealed up to an appellate court of three judges, then immediately taken up to the U.S. Supreme Court, as was the case in the mifepristone case, as is the case in most of these cases.
You could say, “Well, we’re now forcing the Supreme Court to decide cases more quickly.”
Wait to see what happens to the court if each and every one of the children born in the United States has to sue to protect their citizenship. Courts will be overwhelmed in that situation.
The consequences for courts are not always great when they have to quickly respond to nationwide injunctions and reverse them, but they can do that. If it does quickly get reversed, then it’s just a couple of weeks, a month or two, that it’s in place.
I will also say that if forum shopping is your problem, your solution is to address forum shopping. And there are proposals out there by the Judicial Conference for more random assignments, and I absolutely favor those. I think forum shopping is a problem. I think politicization of the courts is a problem, but the answer is not get rid of nationwide injunctions. The answer is end forum shopping.
Nationwide injunctions are literally saving our nation at the moment.
It’s not just birthright citizenship, although that is the poster child for nationwide injunctions, and it’s an excellent vehicle in which to consider the issue for someone like me, where I’m worried about a world without them.
Think about the Alien Enemies Act. We have an administration that says it can deport people without due process, and when it makes a mistake, it’s too bad, too late.
If that could not be stopped through an injunction, I think we should all be afraid. And that’s one of many, many examples of an administration that wants to unilaterally rewrite the law without the impediment of Congress or any sort of legal process. Without nationwide injunctions, each and every person potentially affected would have to sue to maintain the rule of law.
So in short, national injunctions are sometimes infinitely more practical, and not the direct problem at stake to begin with, more problems lie upstream. However:
I hear Professor Bagley and the other critics as to the downsides, and here are the downsides.
While the nationwide injunction is in effect, the law is being stopped. This is the frustration Professor Bagley was [describing] about how the government can’t implement its policies. And maybe six, seven, eight months to, at most, a year, the Supreme Court rules and says, “Actually it’s a perfectly legal policy,” and we’ve lost a year.
I recognize that as a cost. However, I’d rather live in that world than the world where a lawless president, or even a president that’s edging toward that, [can act without that constraint].
Obama and Biden did a few things that I thought were lawless, even though I liked the policy, like Deferred Action for Parents of U.S. citizens, which was enjoined by a nationwide injunction. That was an Obama policy.
The imperial presidency is a reality. They are all trying to expand their power, and I’d rather slow them down with the loss of some useful policies that I think are good at the end of the day and prevail in court, than allow for running roughshod over our legal system, as this administration is trying to do.
It's come up here from time to time whether the slowness of the system is a bug or a feature. This debate in at least some respects reflects that tension. Is it acceptable for judges, even well-meaning ones, to pause things for up to a year? One might reasonably ask then, can the Supreme Court thread the needle and simply restrict national injunctions to more narrow occasions (as just one example, the current citizenship case where precendant including Supreme Court precedent is pretty clear), not completely get rid of them? Bagley again:
And the trouble is, in our hyper-polarized environment, that kind of claim is made by partisans on both sides of the aisle whenever somebody is in office who they disagree with. So it is, I think, a comforting thought that we can just leave the door open a little bit, but if you leave the door open a little bit, you’re actually going to get the same cavalcade of nationwide injunctions that we’ve seen.
I’d be open to a narrower rule if I’d heard one that I thought could restrain judges that were ideologically tempted and willing to throw their authority around. But I haven’t seen it, frankly, and, until I do, I’d be pretty reluctant to open that door at all.
I know we've seen some vigorous discussion over the last while about activist judges. But one interesting theme I've been picking up over the last few months especially is, how much work exactly do we or should we expect the judges to be doing? For example, we had the overturning of Chevron, which ostensibly puts more difficult rule-making decisions in the hands of judges. An increase in work for them, championed by the right. But then, we had the right also start claiming that having immigration hearings for literally every immigrant would be too onerous and they should be able to deport people faster, perhaps without even (what the left would call) full due process. Too much work. And now we have the right claiming that each state or district would need to file its own lawsuit, or even assemble an emergency class action to get nation-wide relief, for an executive order with nearly non-existent precedent. An increase in work across all districts. Traditionally the right is against judicial activism in general, saying judges are too involved, implying they should work less. Maybe this all isn't a real contradiction, but still, an interesting pattern. What does judicial reform look like on the right, is it really a coherent worldview, or just variously competing interests, often tailored right to the moment? A more narrow, tailored question would be: what is the optimal number of judges, for someone on the right, compared to what we have now? Do we need more and weaker judges, or fewer and weaker? Or something else?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
Honestly, I think the article does itself a disservice by not breaking the problem down into the two major but separate issues, detailed below. Instead it bounces between the two in an effort to provide an engaging article, but it's very important to realize that these two problems are largely separable problems. They both involve AI, but that's the extent of the overlap.
Problem One: Scientific research clearly indicates that the difficulty and engagement with a task is directly proportional to learning. The neuroscience points out that different parts of the brain are activated when asked to perform "recall" instead of mere "recognition." Unfortunately many students are unable to recognize the difference! Recall is something like: "tell me something about this" and you work from scratch, recognition might be a looking at your notes or a nice summary and going "oh yeah that makes sense", or answering a multiple-choice question where you have plenty of cues to work with. Some have even argued that it's possible to create in-class notes that are too good at their purpose, thus "offloading" the work to an external knowledge storage device, in a sense. The key point however is this: not only is recall far more potent than recognition in terms of how likely the information is to make it into long-term memory in the first place, it's also worth stating that the more connections that are made during the learning process, the more likely the brain is to be able to retrieve that information from long-term memory as well.
ChatGPT in its most common use case, entirely "short-circuits" this process, depriving a student from forming connections, and developing a kind of "base knowledge" that could be helpful on less foundational topics later. This does not necessarily have to be the case - a good prompter might use ChatGPT to self-quiz, or ask smart follow-up questions, or give deeper explanations that trigger more connections (ignoring hallucinations for now). I think this kind of advanced usage is a small minority of college users, though. In short, this is the most serious problem for AI in college.
Problem Two: How important are essays, anyways? We can't really escape the classic "calculator problem": remember plaintively asking your math teachers why you needed to learn this if a calculator or graphing software could do it just fine? Obviously that's a complicated question, and this one is too; a certain level of familiarity with numbers and how they work is critical if you go into any kind of later applied math, not knowing your times tables can cripple the ability to engage with algebra, but frankly there were absolutely some questions that were designed to be deliberately difficult rather than to emulate any kind of real-world situation. So, essays. What good is an essay? Honestly I think the evidence has always been a little hand-wavy and weak for essays. Not only did virtually all humanities professors go way overboard on being strict about formatting in a misguided attempt to help students (I've seen some horror stories where well-written essays get absolutely demolished due to stupid rules like "you must exactly rephrase your thesis at the start of the conclusion") but it's hard to see if the act of writing essays noticeably improves vague notions like "thinking critically". Now, I might be behind the times on this particular area of research (if it even meaningfully exists), but it has always seemed to me that essays were more crude attempts at prompting students to do plenty of recall via independent research and synthesis. Thus increasing learning. But this was always an artifact of how difficult the task of assembling an essay from scratch is, something clearly no longer difficult with AI.
Thus, the essay must die. Perhaps professors should ask for a wider variety of writing formats, more applicable to life. Perhaps the standards should shift to the end-result of the writing - is it enjoyable to read and factual and the right length/complexity? Perhaps live or oral assessments should be more prominent. Or maybe professors should focus on teaching smaller and more broadly useful writing tips, about the writing itself, or even consider teaching tips about how to best prompt an AI for assembling a piece of writing. Is there any evidence writing essays actually increases the capacity or ability to wield "critical thought"? I say no, if you want to teach critical thinking, you might as well attempt to do so directly and not default to weak proxies like essays.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
This could be partly because they are more likely to use their foreign language with more people, more often, which is well known to increase language learning speed. Seriously, as someone who does speak another language, it's always a little difficult not to laugh at people who claim they are trying super hard to learn, but when pressed, admit that 95% of this effort is simply Duolingo, and that they actively avoid using it IRL unless on specifically on vacation.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
I'm going to go against the grain and say rather than the Pratchett novels, where I've read two but felt they were kind of uneven and mostly just imitations, just go straight to the original delight: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the original trilogy. The quotes are literally next-level.
EverythingIsFine
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2mo ago
All you’ve done is mistake familiarity with openness, and mistake newness with secrecy. They are not the same. Obviously if I were to convert to Islam, I would have more homework and research to do than if I were to become a Southern Baptist, but that doesn’t somehow mean that Islam is a secretive religion trying to hide things from you…
Ironically, the push to call ourselves by the mouthful “members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints” was prompted by a desire to be more transparent, not less. The reason being that sometimes people thought we worshipped a god named Mormon. That’s not linguistic poisoning. It’s accuracy. Our church’s name has been identical since 1838 (first 8 years had a few variations, but never Mormon, not internally, though Smith was known to use the phrase “Mormonism” from time to time.) A fact that is betrayed by your own words (!): Joseph Smith is not “the” central figure. It’s still Jesus Christ. Joseph Smith is by our own doctrine like, maybe third at best? Joseph Smith to Mormons is definitely a weaker link than Muhammad to Muslims, for example.
The precise degree of and debate over what doctrines are essential and core vs merely informative is common to all religions, but it seems surprising to me that you think you are better suited to answer this than an actual member?
Funny enough, unlike many other religions, we do actually have a standardized “worthiness interview” that asks about basic questions of faith. You can look them up. They are quite simple and are, generally, yes/no. On that basis I’d argue we are MORE transparent than other religions, where beliefs vary widely within a congregation (let alone sect or branch) even on self-admitted core topics with little to no effort at correction, and where most members wouldn’t even know where to look to find, for example, what makes a Baptist a Baptist and not a Methodist instead (at least that’s my personal experience).
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
I think you can almost make a purely secular argument for the Crusades, to be frank, and the same is true for a number of seemingly religious conflicts. Many states are inherently expansionist, the Seljuk Turks in particular as a faction made their name and wealth off of military expansionism to start with (their jihadist ideologies were certainly there too but we can't ignore the physical and practical), and who ended up answering the majority of the obviously self-interested call for aid? Not the immediate fellow Christian neighbors, no, it was mostly bored warrior castes from farther Western Europe (and some peasants and minor nobles too at first with other reasons to leave home). Yep, people fighting for money and a share of the spoils. I don't want to overstate the case, here, religion is still all over this, but it wasn't a conflict completely unique to religion. Honestly war happens with or without religion's help, is my view, and in some cases religious commonalities also prevent war, though that kind of thing doesn't explicitly show up in history without additional scholarship.
In fact much of humanity was still religious during WWII with the exact same weaponry... but honestly the track record isn't that bad overall in the last 100 years for religion. The major ones I can think of are like, India-Pakistan conflicts, obviously everything to do with Israel (though ethnicity also factors in too), maybe a few minor civil wars and a few revolutions? But not even that many.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
You kind of do, though, to some extent, at least for the kind of standards you're hinting at.
I mean, since we're already talking about Catholics, you could plausibly say the same thing there, no? Maybe less so for non-denominationals, but most churches have some history or niche beliefs that might be relevant to "actual beliefs". It's my understanding that a potential Catholic convert (who, by your own standards, would need to spend years of time on historical research to find out what they "really believe") is expected to spend about six months going through a catechumen. That doesn't sound too crazy or too unusual. LDS baptismal standards vary across region, but the overall new convert experience from baptism to what you might call a "full member" is mandated to last at least one full year.
And if you read the Book of Mormon, which is basically mandatory for those wanting to be baptized, exactly what you describe is found in the Introduction right in front of you... where even a quick skim would quickly demonstrate several factual errors in your summarization. I mean, if you call the literal introduction to a mandatory and fundamental text of the entire religion "hidden" I have no idea what to tell you other than that's not what the word means.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
For what it's worth, I totally agree with you on the temple ceremony thing (though very specifically for members who have already experienced the modern version), and have been censored on faithful reddit forums for even suggesting faithful members consider looking at them. That could plausibly change in the future, but who knows. At that point anyways it's a little... I mean I dunno, almost not a big deal however, in the sense that assuming for a second the LDS faith is true, then the most one would gain from looking at the past would be more insights for the present? And if you believe, then doctrine says the most recent version is all you really need for salvation and exaltation, so there's no major downside.
In a more general sense of talking about the past, although the LDS faith did go through a low-key phase of "don't talk about it", the Joseph Smith Papers Project has done a pretty excellent job of surfacing plenty of stuff for interested members and non-members alike in the historical record, credit where credit is due.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
That was me. Looking back I made my point pretty clumsily and also in poor taste, given especially how it came across as a "dunk" or something, so for that again I apologize. The point I was trying to make was the one that was drawn out a little bit better later about how Tradition - at least to some extent - forces Catholicism to treat potential changes to Tradition with more seriousness than other religions might, with my own as a bit of an extreme example. It wasn't my intent to focus on the alleged inconsistencies as much as to comment on how from the outside alleged inconsistencies seemed like theoretically kind of a big deal for Catholics. I appreciate Oracle's replies and your own self-control both in that respect.
The best claim to Mormons being Christian is the everyday practical reality of being Mormon. At night you pray to “God the Father”. You ask for forgiveness of sins, something you believe is only possible through the sacrifice of “Jesus Christ”, and a request you believe is mandatory to receive “salvation”. I mean if you had to pick like ONE thing that defines Christianity, wouldn’t you say that it’s more or less exactly this thing? Either you think Jesus died for your sins, or not?
Also, gosh, you can go to the literal official website, not even the one dedicated to explaining our beliefs, and whaddaya know, right there on the front page is a section "What We Believe", with the first link in the section "Learn About Jesus Christ". Clicking this link contains such totally heretical (/s) topics such as:
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Jesus’s Divine Mission
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His Ministry Gave Us the Perfect Example
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His Teachings Show Us the Way to Salvation
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His Sacrifice Means You Can Live with God
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Jesus Made Forgiveness Possible
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Because of Jesus We Will Live Again Someday
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You Can Follow Jesus
If you wanted details, although it's dated in a literal sense, Joseph Smith wrote out exactly an answer to this question ("What do you believe?") in 1842 and we call them today the Articles of Faith which are relatively succinct and also has the advantage of doubling as a primary source.
On a more practical level, i.e. wondering what modern practice is like, I would direct you toward the resource Gospel Principles which has 47 chapters and honestly? Having both read through it and taught lessons from it, I personally consider it the perfect balance of succinct and descriptive for probably 95% of all purposes, as well as quite honest. I'd be extremely surprised it if missed even a single notable modern doctrine or practice, because for many years it was the basis for the first year of lessons for recent converts, so there's obviously not much reason to "hide" anything there, because most of the people using the book were already baptized members. The book is also extremely careful of its wording, and contains some handy scripture (Bible and otherwise) references that offers some further clarification
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
Did you attempt to read the Book of Mormon, or merely dismiss its provenance and not bother? I think that's usually more valuable than extra-textual criticism. I'm not in the habit of being a Book of Mormon apologist or promoter on its non-spiritual merits, like some members might, as I still believe reading it is the best way of assessing it as scripture rather than dealing in endless speculation or attempting to make some scholastic proof (and honestly, the same could be said of the Bible)... but I will mention a few points in response. I agree that if the Book of Mormon is fraudulent so is the religion. Thankfully, I do not think this is the case. Even if you do, the case you have presented above has at least some major misunderstandings. I it was going to be brief but I guess it ballooned. Oh well. Hopefully the thoughts are in a roughly coherent order. Not that this is really the proper forum for this anyways, and we're way off topic, but maybe this can provide some further unfamiliar information at the minimum.
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Internally, there are some passages that allude to the script being somewhat of a rare skill in the first place, and likely not even corresponding to the typical spoken language of the people there. In-text there is further described a tendency of the victors to burn the loser's records and texts, a classic and historically accurate thing to do, so we wouldn't really expect much writing to survive. We hardly had any Mayan codices to begin with, even before the Catholics started burning it all, plus there were an estimated 200 or so languages spoken in the region before 1500, we hardly knew all of them to start with. Finally, contrary to popular belief, historians seem to have found that although writing itself is excellent and obviously useful, not all cultures adopt writing systems even when there are examples nearby, or can die out for other reasons, especially in more ancient contexts. Even in mesoamerica itself, while the Mayans had a system, their neighbors for centuries generally did not, and when they did it was pretty limited. (On top of all that, it was largely assumed by most in Smith's region at the time that all Native Americans were basically illiterate, even knowledge of the complexity of Mayan script wasn't yet popularly known, a point to be revisited below)
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I also think that you are mistaken about a core point about the people involved -- these are not, in fact, Egyptian people. This is a set of Jews, primarily a family of merchants (perhaps metal traders), who left Jerusalem at a known point in time, and we have seen (limited but existing) evidence of a denser Egyptian script mingling with Hebrew in exactly that time period. The text does describe with remarkable precision a route out of Jerusalem that matches known geographical features, as well, again something Smith had no knowledge of (e.g. their coastal boat-building site was described as lush, something you wouldn't expect out of the Arabian desert coast)
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The text does describe several attributes of mesoamerican people not yet popularly known, but since confirmed, and moreover avoids a ton of Indian stereotypes common at the time and in Smith's region, which is notably odd (no teepees, no scalping, they aren't savages, all the stereotypes don't fit at all). As one example, you can map major battles to months recorded in-text, and viola: we see a clear pattern of historically accurate seasonal warfare. Not really what fan-fic usually does, seems like a weird choice that would actually undermine contemporaries' opinions about it. It also doesn't do the sci-fi fiction thing where descriptions of certain things are subtly hinted at to the reader. Nope, we get at times some random words or items dropped in and described, with the assumption we'd know what they are.
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There is Hebrew-style poetry in it that was also unknown to scholars at the time, as well as other Hebrew literary elements, and at least a few genuinely Hebrew-inspired names, in addition to some strange turns of phrase one assumes are linguistic artifacts of the original language ("and it came to pass" as the classic example, is repeated a lot). We even get a random olive tree parable, that actually gets a lot right about the growing process, that's not a New England thing. There are over a thousand intra-textual references, quotes, and callbacks as well, a lot to keep track of. On top of that, Smith makes the seemingly strange decision to relate slightly different versions of Isaiah and the Sermon on the Mount, and some of these departures show up in the Dead Sea Scrolls or early Septuagint versions even, since discovered. The records are mostly of the nobility among the people, often following lineages and select spiritual stories and developments, not intended as primarily historical, as is the case for many ancient records in terms of focus. Compare for example the Mayan Dresden Codex - a record mostly of the nobility, following select lineages and with select stories bolstering the nobles' lineage. Yep, sounds familiar in format.
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I would add that the internal setup is that of two specific people assembling and in some long stretches summarizing and paraphrasing this largely spiritual set of events, hundreds of years worth (there was never the allegation that "one person" witnessed it all, I'm not sure where you got that from?), this is a little over half the book, so that is a bit different in format than the Bible, but it's far from all. In fact, the story internally references a variety of source texts, splices them in at a number of points, and engages at times in periodic flashbacks offering different perspectives of the same event. There is some clear internal evidence of different author tones and styles, reinforced by modern textual analysis techniques.
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There are random digressions into migrations, descriptions of different internal cultures, notes about the calendar, weight and measure standardization listed on the reign of a new king with similar natural ratios as those we find in authentic ancient records. We have over 150 named people, 200 place names, 600 relational geographic passages, no map, but the info we have is internally consistent. Plenty of stuff perfectly fitting the internal editorial decisions as well as what ancient records tend to digress about.
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With respect to the plates themselves and the manuscript resulting, first of all the idea that records would be written on metal plates at all was at the time ridiculous, but we have since found a few examples. In terms of timeframe, there is significant evidence that the whole book's 'translation' was produced at a pretty fast pace, a little over 2 months, with significant complexity and references and setup as described above in part, and obviously some spiritual teachings too that many have since found to be extremely faith-promoting (the actual point of the book), and this is the quite factually the case even if you think his scribes were all in on it too. I only briefly touched on the spiritual aspect, despite the bulk of this post, but there's some genuinely interesting and unique theological concepts there inside that need to work for any of it to work at all. This chapter has some interesting doctrines about sin and the fall. This one has some great teachings about insecurity and grace. This one contains a timeless analogy about the process of nurturing faith in God. This one and the next three chapters is a classic sermon encouraging faithfulness, but with fiery rhetoric about taking care of the poor and our purpose on earth. Faith, charity, and repentence are constantly emphasized. Aren't those the main takeaways from the gospel anyways? But the classic challenge is, can you write a similar amount in two months, and have it be spiritually enjoyable to read, let alone display the depth and complexity described in all the points above? Press X to doubt.
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And lastly, when it comes to the physical gold-looking (probably a lighter alloy) plates themselves, we actually do explicitly have more than just Joseph Smith's word - although some of them are family or friends, there were 11 total people who signed testimony they saw them or handled them or saw an angel present them, with a half dozen more besides, none of whom recanted despite several leaving the church or thinking Joseph has become a fallen prophet.
Which, by the way, sounds more likely to me than just a straight con job. Has any other con artist in history ever produced something comparable? In word count it's like half the full Lord of the Rings trilogy, for comparison. There was the Hitler Diaries, I guess, but a lot of the heavy lifting was done by matching up existing newspaper accounts and plagiarizing, and they were pretty quickly shown to be fake, and excessively tropey with known Hitler flourishes. Scientology and Hubbard's writings? Maaaaaaybe? Eh, no, not really. Connection is a bit weird, because he was quite literally a science fiction writer. Then took a detour into self-help psychology. Then gave some lectures. Then and only then near bankruptcy he starts dropping in spiritual-ish stuff, and boy is it a gradual process over decades. So yeah, prolific writer, but bad comparison, and he took decades to accomplish not half what Smith did in two months. Ellen G White of Seventh Day Adventist fame also was a book-writer and vision-haver. But her visions are atomic, continuations and plays on her normal writings, occur throughout her life, and don't have the same demand for consistency of course due to their nature. (Atheists might also note she was, in fact, literally knocked out with a rock as a child as the start of her spiritual awakening. I don't know enough to opine). The only other thing I know or have heard of would be the Ossian Poems, according to AI, where some guy in the 1700s wrote his own poems of warfare and romance with some maybe some legit old Gaelic inspiration, blended them together, then claimed to only be the translator of them (but refused to show the allegedly too-delicate manuscript). Still a bit of a far cry from the potent Book of Mormon claims and its own textual complexity.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
No big surprises there :) There's a reason more books have been written about the Bible than any other topic!
Could it possibly be a misremembered version (or local variant) of Temiya, the Mute Prince? The overall story arc is there for sure, where the son pretends to be mute despite many many attempts to shock or persuade him out of it (not singing though), all in order to get out of being made king so he can do Buddha things instead. He eventually speaks after the king orders his death and he tries to fake his own death, and he successfully sheds the responsibility.
The other candidate I have for your consideration, more of a long shot but still fits the general pattern and with a sudden twist involving a chicken, is The Decapitated Chicken. A woman has 4 mute, unresponsive, almost insensate sons, who are only entertained by loud noises and bright lights, eventually neglected, and then finally a normal daughter is born who gets all the attention. Later, the sons witness a chicken beheaded and get fixated on the blood, and re-enact it by suddenly murdering the daughter, horror-style. It's not clear if this is truly a "fix" though.
Both seem like decent bets, considering how memories can be altered, misremembered, or conflated if it's been a really really long time. Or, could it have been more of a joke than a story? A children's book of some type? Dunno if I would have found it if so.
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