Question for bomgeography about the flood

[_Physics Guy]

Maybe this should be a separate thread—or actually it's probably already been several threads—but the question strikes me now, so what the heck:

Why are there so many different opinions about what is or is not LDS doctrine? I don't mean this as a critical question; I don't see either loosely or tightly controlled doctrine as being better, so I really don't mind either way. I'm just curious.

I think most Roman Catholics agree pretty closely on what it is that their church officially teaches. (How much they themselves agree with what their church teaches is another point.) In fact I think most mainstream Christian bodies have relatively little disagreement about what their own church officially teaches.

I would naïvely have thought that living prophets and apostles would make for a more tightly managed doctrinal position, but from a lot of thoughtful and devoted Mormons I seem instead to see a lot of variations on, "I don't know that we teach that." Why is this?

[_tapirrider]

I think we're equivocating over what it means to be church doctrine here. I suspect some brethren have strong positions on the matter and the practical politics of that mean some ensure their views get into some manuals. I don't think that makes it a doctrine of the church. i.e. I don't think the manuals always reflect the official teachings of the church. Indeed quite often they don't. (The D&C Institute manual is horrible in that regard for instance)

There have been times when the church has paid far more attention to what ends up in a book. While I don't think it reflects church doctrine either (except in a very loose way) from people who worked on the Encyclopedia of Mormonism Pres. Hinkley and others were very engaged in it partially to offset the 'authority' of books like Mormon Doctrine. To the Ensign I've simply known too many people who have worked on it or the manuals to think they always reflect doctrine. There is of course politics involved in it all.

The scriptures of both the Old Testament and the Book of Mormon passages lead readers to believe it was a global flood. But even more than that, the LDS church is built on the premise of living prophets and apostles. So what they teach in General Conference ought to be inspired instruction to help members understand the scriptures. But that isn't really what happens, is it? What it means to be church doctrine is comparable to trying to nail jello to the wall, even with the alleged mouthpieces of the Lord trying to help us. At least that is how it looks to me. It isn't any better than bofmgeography's claims about haplogroup x2a and x2a'j. The evidence doesn't support his claim of migration from the Near East to America during biblical timelines any better than it supports Noah and the survivors landing in the Near East after sailing from Missouri. None of it including the Bible and Book of Mormon claims of a flood matches up to our understanding of the world's history with the science of geology, core studies of pollens, etc. There is no evidence of a worldwide flood and there is no evidence of all humans but 8 souls on earth being destroyed in a flood, whether it is global or local.

[_Maksutov]

The global flood sits on the shelf. The scientists know it's wrong. The religionists can't shed it. I still see people struggle with the "death before the fall" conundrum. I've known intelligent people who rejected vast swathes of our natural science because it was incompatible on this point. Most of them occupied themselves with studying subjects far from the sciences or hobbies that were artistic.

[_Philo Sofee]

Maybe this should be a separate thread—or actually it's probably already been several threads—but the question strikes me now, so what the heck:

Why are there so many different opinions about what is or is not LDS doctrine? I don't mean this as a critical question; I don't see either loosely or tightly controlled doctrine as being better, so I really don't mind either way. I'm just curious.

I think most Roman Catholics agree pretty closely on what it is that their church officially teaches. (How much they themselves agree with what their church teaches is another point.) In fact I think most mainstream Christian bodies have relatively little disagreement about what their own church officially teaches.

I would naïvely have thought that living prophets and apostles would make for a more tightly managed doctrinal position, but from a lot of thoughtful and devoted Mormons I seem instead to see a lot of variations on, "I don't know that we teach that." Why is this?

This is just my opinion on this fascinating subject. The reason they can't figure out what is doctrine, I suspect, is because what used to be doctrine has been so thoroughly refuted that they have to say well that was just his opinion. The further science marches forward toward truth and light the further and further away from that truth church doctrine goes.

The idea of doctrine is a once for all final absolute unalterable truth. That is precisely how I was taught all through my youth. Now that those "absolute truths" have been refuted, it's downgraded into opinion. And now they don't dare declare what is doctrine because that too is going to end up becoming refuted and outdated.

In other words the church is backpedaling and there's nothing to stop that. Even the idea of continuing revelation no longer holds any validity because the earlier revelations that some of the earlier prophets had has now been downgraded to their mere opinions. So that means today's prophets and their revelations in the future will also be downgraded to their mere opinion. In other words all revelation is just the philosophy of men mingled with scripture. Everything they teach... it's just opinion. That in my opinion is why it is so difficult to nail down just what is doctrine in Mormonism.

[_Maksutov]

Philo, these guys constructed a careful house of cards over generations. Then one morning they woke up to find a 52 card pickup on the floor. They don't know where to start.

[_ClarkGoble]

So what they teach in General Conference ought to be inspired instruction to help members understand the scriptures. But that isn't really what happens, is it?

That seems a big assumption. It seems to me that while God does inspire he's purposely left us to figure most things out for ourselves. A lot of the criticism of the church here depends upon presuppositions about what God ought do. Yet that is itself a hypothesis that ought be open to question. I do think that many who leave the church do because they have trouble reconciling their preconceptions of what god would do with what the church thinks he does. Yet I always go back to questioning ones priors. Not enough people do that.

The idea of doctrine is a once for all final absolute unalterable truth. That is precisely how I was taught all through my youth.

Can't speak for what you were taught but I agree it's a problem to teach that. I think it ends up being conflating two different yet important notions. The idea of truth as what is and our hypothesis of what the truth is. We can have personal and community revelation, yet even with that we see through a glass darkly. The problem is that some people (sometimes even prophets) think revelation is completely clear and understandable. I just don't see evidence that's the case. Some is more clear than others, yet we always have to interpret it and we always bring our assumptions to it.

My sense is that the greatest threat to people's testimonies is adopting a fundamentalist protestant conception of revelation. Eventually people will find out that's not correct. Rather than moving to a more defensible view of revelation and God they instead jettison the whole thing due to these false ideas.

[_Physics Guy]

The global flood sits on the shelf. The scientists know it's wrong. The religionists can't shed it. I still see people struggle with the "death before the fall" conundrum. I've known intelligent people who rejected vast swathes of our natural science because it was incompatible on this point. Most of them occupied themselves with studying subjects far from the sciences or hobbies that were artistic.

This is a lot more true than I wish it were. Man. indeed.

Believing crazy things about ancient history is the sacrifice people make to appease the demanding god of Scriptural Authority, so that it will continue to provide reassurance about things that actually matter to them, like whether they will see their dead loved ones again in another world. Within the Scripture are many pages which heap scorn on the idolators who sacrifice like that to false gods made by humans; Scripture itself has been made such a god.

[_Lemmie]

Philo, these guys constructed a careful house of cards over generations. Then one morning they woke up to find a 52 card pickup on the floor. They don't know where to start.

That is great imagery! Perfect.

[_Themis]

I think we're equivocating over what it means to be church doctrine here. I suspect some brethren have strong positions on the matter and the practical politics of that mean some ensure their views get into some manuals. I don't think that makes it a doctrine of the church. i.e. I don't think the manuals always reflect the official teachings of the church. Indeed quite often they don't. (The D&C Institute manual is horrible in that regard for instance)

There have been times when the church has paid far more attention to what ends up in a book. While I don't think it reflects church doctrine either (except in a very loose way) from people who worked on the Encyclopedia of Mormonism Pres. Hinkley and others were very engaged in it partially to offset the 'authority' of books like Mormon Doctrine. To the Ensign I've simply known too many people who have worked on it or the manuals to think they always reflect doctrine. There is of course politics involved in it all.

There is no official doctrine, it just doctrine. Doctrine is what a church teaches and it's policies. The church has only taught global flood. Most material deals with Noah and the flood without talking about whether it is global or not since that is not the intent of most material. You bring up one such recent material produced and printed in the church's official magazine to answer the question about the church's position and doctrine on the flood being global and the tower of babel being a literal event and the same one told in the book of Ether.

Well again it depends upon how to read these passages. If we read in a kind of fundamentalist way where all texts reflect a god's eye view without any error and as if written by one of our peers in a fashion to our regular communication then that's a problem. I'd just note that Ether is written by Moroni who has his own reading of the brass plates and his own assumptions about what it all means. That means we shouldn't just uncritically accept what Moroni says. Ether 1 doesn't even mention the Tower of Babel. (It just says great tower) That's in the chapter heading written by Bruce R. McConkie who tended to adopt a fundamentalist protestant way of reading these texts. All Mormon writes is that the language of the people was confounded. But what that means isn't clear. There are tons of ways to read Ether 1:33-36. One way common way of reading it is that it relates to textual writings. i.e. some event happened leading to a breakdown of a civilization center and these people were worried about being able to read their texts. The analogy would thus be closer to what happened to the Mulekites than the more extreme fundamentalist way of reading the Tower of Babel narrative.

Two stories with a tower and confounded tongues, both happening in the old world. The story of a tower and confounding language is quite specific. It why it is such a problem for the Book of Mormon being a true story of real people. The event timeline is also similar to that of the Bible, and you have everyone involved supposed to be commanded by God and the ability to get divine translations/revelation. Not your typical translation problems, so not good for the much less literal views like you want.

[_tapirrider]

So what they teach in General Conference ought to be inspired instruction to help members understand the scriptures. But that isn't really what happens, is it?

That seems a big assumption. It seems to me that while God does inspire he's purposely left us to figure most things out for ourselves. A lot of the criticism of the church here depends upon presuppositions about what God ought do. Yet that is itself a hypothesis that ought be open to question. I do think that many who leave the church do because they have trouble reconciling their preconceptions of what god would do with what the church thinks he does. Yet I always go back to questioning ones priors. Not enough people do that.

It isn't my assumption, it is what the prophets and apostles taught me in General Conferences. It is what used to set the LDS church apart from other churches, that it was led by inspired prophets and apostles and gave deeper clarity and understanding to the scriptures.

Leaving us to figure it out for ourselves is the very thing that I was taught caused the great apostasy. Without the priesthood on the earth, men were left to try to figure it out and it caused all of the variations in the doctrine and creeds that were found in Christianity at the time of God's restoration of the true gospel on the earth through His prophet Joseph Smith. No ClarkGoble, it isn't my assumption, it was one the biggest claims made by a church.

I'm not making a presupposition about what God ought to do. I'm going off of the doctrine I was taught. I didn't leave the church over my preconceptions of what God ought to do. I left because I came to the realization that the Book of Mormon is not true and that the so-called prophets and apostles were wrong.

And let's be realistic for a moment, OK? The very idea that living prophets and apostles can't clarify to the members of God's true church whether the flood was global or local seems like a huge failure. I mean, really, it is such a simple point is seems ridiculous that something like that ought to be left for each person to figure out.

What has that led to among members of the church? It has led to some who claim that there was a total worldwide flood where all humans but 8 were destroyed. It has led others to a limited flood belief, where only those from the family of Adam were destroyed while other humans lived. Then comes the problem that if they weren't from the family of Adam were they even human? It leads to the idea of pre-adamites and co-adamites and the shattering of the Biblical teaching of the unity of mankind. It leads some like bomgeography to imagine a limited flood that did destroy all humans but all of them only lived in the region of the United States at that time.

If it is too big of an assumption to think that what is taught in General Conferences by living prophets and apostles is truth and follows the doctrine of Christ's true church, then it is only one more short step to conclude that the teachings against same sex marriage and Blacks having the priesthood, etc. are nothing more than opinions of men and not to be considered doctrine. Then it is up to everyone to decide for themselves.

Who is right and who is wrong under those circumstances? Who is really in-line with what God really wants of us and who is disobeying? There is no reason to believe that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the true church under those circumstances. There is no reason for anyone to claim that it is the only true church if that is the best that can be gained from listening to prophets and apostles, to just consider that their words and teachings are just their opinions and each person must figure it out on their own.

As for me, when I realized that the Book of Mormon was false, everything else fell apart and I had no reason to remain a member.