Before I begin the next few years of blogging, I wanted to give some reference. I've experienced some major shifts in my worldview in the past years that are actually a product of the thirty years that preceded them.
As a warning. I will feel free to expand, edit, and redact my posts if I so desire. In some regards, I will be creating a history I may reference myself from time to time. I may at times be blunt in my discourse. I do not intend to offend. Generally, I feel more unrestrained in my writing than I would in a face to face conversation. I will try not to ramble. I will also put this forward: These are my feelings and experiences. I will try not to project them on others. My life, my words.
Some of you may know my real name. I ask that in any comments, you refer me as Darth, Darth Bill, or my preferred "DB". I will be moderating comments to verify that they aren't spam or if something may be too private to post comfortably. I invite comments. I'm more than willing to dig deeper into any topic that I might bring up.
Since this is one of those religion/philosophical blogs, I will start with my own excursion into this realm. I was baptized at the age of 9 by my brother into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. To say I didn't really understand anything at this point is a foregone conclusion. This was the church my mother belonged to. We went there because she did. Aside from occasional crushes on girls that attended, I can't really remember much about this time. I don't think were were very active otherwise. My mother felt needed because she could play the piano and the branch didn't have any other resources. I think I attended until I was 10 when I believe my parents had a rough spot in their marriage and family demands dictated that we spend our time elsewhere.
During my family's inactivity and while my brother was attending college, he drove down to Florida with friends and when the car broke down, they abandoned him. He was stuck in Macon, Georgia without any friends, money or support and my parents suggested that he contact the bishop of the church there, to see if he could help at all. My parents didn't have many resources to draw upon. Unknown to me at the time, I would be going through a similar circumstance in Kansas with my new bride in -25 weather some time later. The help that the bishop provided my brother would be remembered by my family from then on. It was foundational in my relationship with the church and drove many of my feelings and passions throughout my life. I'm sure I will expound on this in later posts. I am pretty sure that my brother's years of activity following this event were based upon this event also.
While I was in 7th and 8th grade I capitalized on the issues my family was having and I did quite a few things to cause a loss of trust with my parents. I also realized I was on a path that I didn't want to be on. After a particular encounter with law enforcement, I decided to change my life. Since I really didn't have anywhere else to turn, I turned to religion. I didn't have any other way that I knew of to reform my life. I turned to the only way I knew....Jesus. Like many other converts, I spent a great deal of time experimenting with the religion. I wanted to know what I was doing was the right thing. I was disappointed and hit my first frustrations. I wanted to know what was right, but to ask for a sign was sinful. The cognitive dissonance was beginning. Goody.
In order to create some peace and order in the family, my parents determined that we were to go to church again. My father, who wasn't a member, went also even though he visibly didn't enjoy himself. He went to make his wife happy. I also didn't enjoy the church of my youth. I was 15 and the LDS church meetings were not something that I found engaging. When we first started attending, we only went to the Sacrament Meeting. Later, I was to attend all three meetings. At some point there was meeting consolidation so the meetings were at some point sequential. I can't remember the details. I didn't enjoy the church, I didn't believe the teachings (what little I knew) and I was starting to desire to rebel. I decided I would come to an informed conclusion so I pulled out the blue-covered Book of Mormon that I had and started reading....
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Just between us
I think it's time for us to recognize
The differences we sometimes fear to show
Just between us
I think it's time for us to realize
The spaces in between
Leave room for you and I to grow
Well "DB" we've known each other since high school and of course I didn't know of these reservations you had about your faith, but they do make sense to me. I will reserve just a few comments for this reply as I need to start a blog of my own for everything I eventually want to say about this and aspects of my own journey. That will hopefully come when I'm close enough to finishing my current project to feel that it's at least under control. There's just too much to this to be very comprehensive here.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I want to commend you on being that honest with yourself and with others. It takes a lot of guts to do that and I really admire what you're doing. I think you may be doing better than the vast majority of humanity with that, perhaps including myself. I find it very unfortunate that most Christians don't even know the biblical definition of the word "Israel" is "He who wrestles with God" (NIV). Something I see a lot of in the Bible, and not so far with what little I have read so far in the B of M. There seems to be a lot of patriarch exultation in that book. Just about every Biblical patriarch (and matriarch) had some major flaws well exposed, yet we still tend to sterilize them and turn them into heros.
About the nature of "sin": The short of it is, I agree with you, at least mostly, and I think an objective Biblical view clearly supports much of what you are saying. I think the problem most people have is not the very idea of sin but how we tend to conceptualize it, which really is a caustic attitude and tends to eventually cause a major backlash. The Apostle Paul said "'Everything is permissible to me', but not everything is beneficial." Yes, as people argue, Paul was just quoting a statement of his day. But you notice he didn't voice disagreement but rather acknowledged it as true and then offered an alternative view of sin as unhealthy behavior. That, I think, should be our attitude. Also, while I believe in taking the entire Bible in context, I find that I Cor 12 and 13 really give excellent views of balance that to me are much more clear and concise than diving into historic theological arguments about sin and the nature of salvation. Not that there aren't always questions and apparent contradictions. To me, it only makes sense that a God that we can fully wrap our human minds around rather than wrestle with conceptually, is more like one we've conveniently made in our own image than any glimpse of a real God.
One of the things that really started my questioning the BoM was the High Christology that I found present. It really didn't come to the fore until the 400s but is found everywhere in the BoM. I rationalized it for a long time as Joseph Smith was the filter of the translation...but still, if this was translated by the gift and power of God, it had the 19th century christology all over it. The more I worked with the "Suffering Servant" motif of the OT, the more it conflicted with the BoM. The view of Christ that we have today just flat out didn't exist back then. And yes, there is hero worship throughout the BoM. Nephi is such a hero he almost is a charicature. His brothers, the same in the opposite direction. It really hurt when I conceptualized these people as real, and I just didn't know how to react to such a person. They WERE fictional. I just couldn't make the real.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment. 1 Cor 13 is a good chapter, christian or not. Lots of good concepts there.