God can write straight with crooked lines.

[Limnor]

This is truly a remarkable game, one in which disagreement counts as agreement and every jump lands in bounds, well, once you redraw the grid.

Fun!

[Morley]

This is truly a remarkable game, one in which disagreement counts as agreement and every jump lands in bounds, well, once you redraw the grid.

Fun!

Yeah, it’s not Claude Monet, it’s Lewis Carroll. And God is the Red Queen.

[Limnor]

This is truly a remarkable game, one in which disagreement counts as agreement and every jump lands in bounds, well, once you redraw the grid.

Fun!

Yeah, it’s not Claude Monet, it’s Lewis Carroll. And God is the Red Queen.

Yep, Wonderland hopscotch.

[Limnor]

God allows evil for the greater good is essentially the crooked lines metaphor. Mountain meadows was justified by some intricate least sum algorithm but this was a long time ago.The victims, on the other hand are either rewarded later or partially to blame. That seems to be a def con one.

Def con two? How about the Mark Hofmann bombings? God's collective mouthpiece on Earth are led on a couples ruse where the leaders dance a tango with Mark leading to extremely jagged lines and a ragged line of misery.


Def con Three? The Lafferty case. An example where prophetic 5d chess leads to individual claims of prophetic retribution. Victims in the wake are collateral damage for one JAG of the line.

Def Con Four. Natural disasters taking out thousands and millions of lives creating a fractal jagged line with no explanations.

Def Con Five. The Holocaust. The greater good is allowed because of this which paves the way for seismic jagged lines viewed with a smile.

I agree. This list really breaks the metaphor. If atrocity can be justified by redrawing the lines, it’s seriously problematic.

[Morley]

The Red Queen can write straight with crooked lines.

[Limnor]

The Red Queen can write straight with crooked lines.

Right, very painting the roses red. If the line looks crooked, just repaint it.

[Philo Sofee]

Actually, this reminds me of some of J.R.R. Tolkien's ideas in his magnificent Legendarium! How interesting bringing it up MG......

I've read Tolkien's Rings series but I'm not familiar with Legendarium. Care to share more?

Regards,
MG

The Legendarium is the vast group of myths, histories, languages, and philosophical reflections created by J. R. R. Tolkien to give depth and reality to Middle-earth. It is not like a single story is involved. It's more like an entire mythic world like a secondary reality with its own creation account, ancient wars, fading ages, genealogies, poems, and invented languages.

The Legendarium explores how creation, freedom, pride, sacrifice, decline, and hope unfold across time. Events are shaped not only by heroes and villains, but by music, memory, and moral choice. Power is dangerous when seized, healing is often quiet and costly, and the greatest victories are frequently acts of endurance rather than conquest. And it is more to the small and unimportant who effect greater change than the mighty and heroic.

Tolkien's books like The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings are expressions of this larger mythic framework, each telling only part of a much older and deeper story. JRR's son Christopher gave us the Unfinished Tales as well as the 12 volume History of Middle Earth which so many are just not aware of in any kind of detail, since the movies only focus on a small part of the 3rd Age of Middle Earth, while the entirety is in 4 Ages. The Legendarium treats history as layered and fragmentary, full of lost songs, half-remembered truths, and competing perspectives, much like real ancient myth.

In short, the Legendarium is a mythology of meaning: a world built to feel older than the stories told within it, where light diminishes, memory matters, and hope survives not because evil is absent, but because goodness refuses to vanish.

[Gadianton]

"God writes straight with crooked lines" doesn't always give us this kind of testable "if I do Y, then Z must happen within a certain time frame, otherwise providence is false and/or doesn't intervene in the affairs of men.

That's correct, in fact, it's saying that there is no possible evidence for God, rather, we must assume that God may have intervened no matter what we see. The cost of denying the skeptic the power to question God's providence is that all non-providence scenarios are thrown out the window, unavailable to the believer, who needs them just as badly as the skeptic.

Case in point: Elder Hollands "wrong road" talk. Holland prays about which road. Our straight-line expectations tell us road "A" is the right answer, because it's the actual way home. But God is playing crooked-line hopscotch, and answers "B". B is discovered to be a dead end, but on reflection, he realize it was also a very short path, and now he can turn around and hit "A" with confidence and peace all the way home, knowing it's right from the process of elimination.

Fine. But if that's the answer, we must take it seriously. In other words, the "right" or "best" path to take was "B" not "A". In other words, had they taken "A", they would have taken the wrong (or at least lesser) path, because they would have been stressed out of their minds for many hours unsure whether it was going to get them back or not. Obviously, you can laugh at this and say that taking either road would have worked and had its perks, but you're not laughing at me, you're laughing at Holland. The point is, there most be "wrong" choices in order for there to be "right" choices. If all choices are equally right then you have no story to tell that demonstrates God's providence, and in fact, it becomes totally pointless to pray.

[Gadianton]

This is where Monet really earns his keep. The closer you look, the more detail gets in the way. But just step back farther and the picture slides into focus. The injuries don’t disappear, nay, there are just refocused, like one of those 3D posters where you have to cross your eyes to see the dinosaur.

I appreciate your humor quite a bit, Limnor. I will say that a God-at-a-distance is so far the closest I can get to a version of God I could possibly accept. But in this case, God isn't micromanaging, which Plantinga is happy with (free will), and God isn't personal. It's what I call the Amazon Rainforest God. The Amazon (I think) is about the size of the entire US. Imagine just how heinous the ecology of a densely packed forest teeming with diverse life in every square inch but goes on for millions of square miles. It's ludicrous to imagine God determining the life of every bug, or even observing all of it and finding meaning in the step of every ant. The amount of pain experienced by living things there must be off the scale. Can it be seen as beautiful? Or better to destroy it? The creative, horrifying ways creatures kill each other there is very disturbing for me. Yet, I'm open to it as a thing of beauty that should exist, but as its own neighborhood. We study it a little, but don't get too involved. What happens there stays there.

We don’t need to know the ultimate outcomes to know how to act. Rather, Jesus grounds moral action in simple terms: Love your neighbor,

It's a good suggestion, and I actually did consider it as an objection: we have a few simple rules and God takes it from there. Well, we've got to consider the criteria for good and evil. What makes something good? Utilitarianism tells us that we can add up happiness and suffering; if you take that seriously, then I don't think you can really say we're off the hook just because the calculations are hard. We simplify somewhat with rule utilitarianism -- I stop at the light every time -- but my kid is bleeding and there's no cars on the road? If my kid is starving and theft is the only way, I might steal and hope to make it right one day. Mormonism teaches that Adam's transgression of taking the forbidden fruit wasn't a "sin" because it fulfilled the higher law of multiplying and replenishing the earth. Adam had to learn crooked-line hopscotch. Well, all of this relies on teleological ethics -- consequences are what mater. If consequences matter, it's hard to absolve our duty to think beyond the rules when the rules are inadequate for maximizing goodness.

But if morality is based on either duty, or obedience to God, and we say consequences aren't the criteria, then you have the famous Kantian situation where "would you lie to the German soldiers to protect the lives of a Jewish family hiding in your basement?" And the answer is "No". Virtue ethics would also skirt outcome calculations. If we constrain God's Bible edicts to virtue, duty, or obedience, then they don't need to optimize aggregate outcomes, but that's because aggregate outcome optimization has nothing to do with morality. So in that case: "We have a few simple rules to live by" full stop. There is nothing for God to do beyond that to make things "better" or "worse".

[Limnor]

Yes—that’s closer to what I was trying to get at. There is a motivation factor in there somewhere as well. While there are specific situations in which a long calculation of potential outcomes is appropriate, generally I think people act from their heart, and I think a basic groundwork can start from a very local, relational event: receiving mercy from an enemy who calls you friend and even dies for you. That doesn’t solve all of the potential ethical dilemmas (I might have lied to the Nazis, I don’t know, and glad I wasn’t put in that position), but it can affect how I act toward the person in front of me.

I don’t think that the local-ness makes it trivial, it just asks me to become the kind of person who acts justly, and responds to that mercy with mercy. I wouldn’t try and blanket “love your neighbor” around moral difficulty (remember I’ve directed weapons employment against enemies—and I love me some satire and parody) but I do think it provides a solid bedrock for daily interaction with people.

I also wanted to see if I’m tracking your other points above. I think you are saying the issue isn’t whether God “can” work through crooked lines, but what it costs if that idea is used to explain every outcome. Outside the LDS faith, people pray, decide, and sometimes misjudge things, but generally outcomes aren’t treated as proof that God intended that path. Sometimes it’s viewed, by me anyway, as a means to grow through prayer and action to align better to acceptance, peace with circumstances, “doing unto others,” and that sort of thing.

In LDS practice, though, it seems like specific guidance is expected, and when outcomes don’t match expectations they’re often reinterpreted as “right all along.” So if no outcome can ever count against claimed guidance, prayer stops guiding decisions and only explains them afterward? Is that close?