The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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But I already told you that I don’t believe that. It’s actually not required for me to express that belief! At least, nobody has required me to thus far. As I said, the missionaries who spearheaded the process of my baptism are aware that I don’t believe that! It was part of the very first conversation I had with them, before I even went to church with them!
Now, there are things I was asked to affirm in my baptism interview to which I could only answer “yes” given a non-literal interpretation of the question. An example would be, “Do you believe that the Church and gospel of Jesus Christ have been restored through the Prophet Joseph Smith? Do you believe that [current church president] is a prophet of God? What does this mean to you?” Now, the Church does have an official stance on what it means that “the gospel was restored”: because of the Great Apostasy, God revoked the keys of the Holy Priesthood from all earthly churches, until finally providing several otherworldly visions to Joseph Smith in the 1820s and then leading him to discover and translate the plates containing a historical account of Christ’s true teachings to the Nephites. This account shows humanity how to return to the pure gospel and worship practices given to Adam and promulgated among the first generations of human prophets.
I don’t take this account literally. I don’t believe that Adam was real, which means I don’t believe that he was the first prophet of the “true gospel”. Because I don’t believe this part of the claim, the rest of it can only be interpreted symbolically or esoterically. The way I approach the idea of a “restored gospel” is informed by conversations I have had with intelligent Catholics and Orthodox, in which their account of what they actually believe about God and creation and the nature of the cosmos is so wrapped up in mysticism and symbolic reinterpretation and thousands of years of commentary by church leaders that it becomes totally impenetrable and incomprehensible. I do not want to have to sift through 2,000+ years of biblical hermeneutics in order to even begin to grasp God’s plan for my salvation. By clearing away those millennia of cruft and theological rabbit-holes, the LDS church can return to a reading of the Bible which embraces plain language and concepts that normal people can work with, while also building a High Church structure similar to Catholicism without all the historical baggage. It’s a sort of “post-Protestantism” that takes what works about Catholicism and Orthodoxy, discards what clearly doesn’t work, and allows for a 21st-century reinterpretation of Christianity.
The church’s concept of “continuing revelation” and its relative youth mean that its theology is still very much being built and codified and refined as we speak. It can respond in a more agile way to emerging scientific disciplines such as genomics, archaeology, and astronomy. It’s not beholden to millennia-old canon. To me, all of that is what I mean when I say that this church is “the restored gospel of Jesus Christ”. Whether or not the golden plates were literally written by ancient Hebrews is irrelevant to me.
When we’re assessing the value of a particular Noble Lie, we have to assess what belief in that lie actually demands of its believers in the here and now. I would argue (and have argued) that the belief in universal human cognitive homogeneity is bad not simply because it’s false, but far more importantly because of the specific object-level beliefs and political actions which it obligates. If somebody agreed with all of my political positions, but did so basically by accident as a result of false-but-useful beliefs, it would be counterproductive for me to try and reason him out of those beliefs.
Furthermore, many Noble Lies have a neutral or even unambiguously positive effect on their believers. For example, let’s say I was actually adopted at birth, but raised to believe that my adoptive parents were my biological parents. Now, we can come up with reasons why knowing the truth might be (or might at some point become) instrumentally valuable for me: perhaps I have some hereditary predispositions toward certain conditions, and knowing my true parentage may help me more effectively navigate my medical decisions; also, if there is some not-insignificant chance that my true parentage will be revealed to me later in life against my will, it would have been better for me to have been made aware of it early and in a gentle way, so as to reduce the feelings of betrayal and identity crisis. That being said, for most adopted individuals, it’s actually far more adaptive and identity-affirming to go their whole lives believing the “lie” rather than to be confronted with the truth.
So, is any given religious belief more like a lie that makes its believers stupider and more evil? Or is it more like a harmless lie that is, on average, equally as — or more adaptive than —knowing the truth? Certainly the religion to which I’m converting does demand some pretty specific object-level beliefs and actions. I happen to think that, with the exception of the prohibition on coffee and tea, the demands it makes of its members all have very clear benefits from a consequentialist perspective, and generally make its believers into better people, with better political beliefs and a better lifestyle, than the alternative. Go peruse /r/Mormon, and especially /r/ExMormon, and you’ll get an idea of the sorts of people who hate the church: the most cynical, MSNBC-brained, Reddit-poisoned people in existence. If those are the church’s enemies, I have to say that I prefer those who have figured out how to live with the Noble Lie.
I mean the problem with this approach is that the church fathers have written down things from the beginning. We have a pretty good idea of what they believed about the gospel, Christ, sacraments, church structure and so on. It does not match with Smith’s restoration. Ignatius of Antioch refers to Christ as God before we have a codified New Testament. There are references to bishops in early Christian texts, there are references to sacraments. The earliest known Christian catechism is the Didache, it’s pretty short and you can read it online. It’s not Mormon. There’s no mention of preexisting souls, God once being a physical being, or Christ and Lucifer being related, etc. it’s not present in the early church.
This makes even a metaphorical restoration nonsense.
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Your Mormon apologia isn't of much interest to me–I can get similar superficially convincing treatises on why Catholicism or Protestantism or Islam is Actually Very Sound and Rational and The Best Way to Understand God from their adherents. You've chosen to believe, and it looks to me very much like you wanted a religion and went shopping and chose the one that suited your goals and lifestyle. Cool. But choosing which things you believe ala carte is very much against the spirit of most religious practices. That is of course between you and your faith. Whatever.
But your defense of the Noble Lie is profoundly unconvincing and even amoral. Adopting a false belief system and pretending to believe in it is wrong even if you find it instrumentally useful.
If someone accidentally agrees with all of your political positions because he thinks God told him you're a prophet, you might appreciate his support, but it would still be wrong of you to encourage him to believe you are a prophet. Telling an adopted child he's an actual biological child? In fact, I do believe you should tell an adopted child the truth (at an age-appropriate time and in an age-appropriate manner), and that not doing so is, in some sense, evil. There was another thread recently about Santa Claus. I don't have strong beliefs about letting little kids believe in imaginary things, but I will say there is definitely a point at which you should stop encouraging it. I am not saying telling a lie is never, ever justified under any circumstances, but in my opinion, those circumstances are extremely limited, both in situation and time.
If you think religious Noble Lies are good because it makes believers behave in an appropriate manner, I wonder why they can't be persuaded to behave without those beliefs. I am sure you are familiar with the old dialog between a Christian and an atheist: the Christian tells the atheist he's scary because without belief in God, the atheist can just decide that murder is good. The atheist responds that the Christian is scary, because he's saying it's only his belief in God that keeps him from murdering.
Needless to say, I find the atheist position more convincing. I think people should be convinced murder is bad without resorting to "Because God says so." If you want people to live a Mormon-ish lifestyle, you should be able to sell them on the virtues of that lifestyle without fables about Lamanites and golden tablets.
As for measuring them by who hates them, that seems a particularly poor way to choose who's right. The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. In my blacker moments I won't say the thought of voting to make wokes cry hasn't occurred to me, but I've never considered joining a church to own the libs.
Then you have clearly missed what I have said, both here and elsewhere, about this church specifically. My mother was born into, and baptized into, the LDS church, before leaving it as a teenager. I come from several generations of Mormons, going all the way back to one of the earliest waves of Scottish converts. It is the only extant religious tradition to which I can claim to have an authentic ancestral connection; my dad’s side of the family, so far as I can tell, has not had any serious religious convictions for several generations now. Mormonism is all I’ve got in terms of an inherited faith.
One of the primary things that attracts me to this church is precisely the fact that I’m not just choosing it a la carte from a menu of options. If I was, this isn’t the one I would pick! I would just pick one that still allowed me to drink coffee and beer and a nice glass of white wine. I would pick one that didn’t have such an improbable origin story and didn’t require so much epistemic legwork to accept. The fact that I’m instead twisting myself into some knots epistemically in order to make sense of this church’s claims should be evidence to you that I’m not just opening up a menu of religions and picking the one that suits me the best.
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