Certain people can't ever get it right

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mentalgymnast
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Re: Certain people can't ever get it right

Post by mentalgymnast »

Gadianton wrote:
Mon Feb 01, 2021 3:42 am
MG wrote:I would be more comfortable referring to Fowler’s Stages of Faith. I can tell you that I am a stage 4-5. I think there are too many people that ‘jump ship’ on religion/God and the LDS Church without having been able to move beyond 2-3.
To the limited extent Fowler can be taken seriously...
I look at Fowler’s stages as being more or less a template which provides some lines of demarcation resulting in useful categories. But I would refer you again to the Sorites Paradox. Lines are drawn, but they are fuzzy and are subject to evaluation as each sort of application presents itself. I don’t see myself as being strictly categorical to the letter as a 4-5, but I feel comfortable wandering around within that part of his template.

As one goes through various faith crises and reconstructions it is inevitable that moving beyond stage three is necessary if one is going to keep the faith, so to speak. Folks that bow out and leave religion, and LDS’ism in particular, often find that moving from binary thinking (stage 3, generally speaking), to something requiring a kaleidoscopic view of the world is something more than they signed up for.

Or so they think.

Regards,
MG
honorentheos
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Re: Certain people can't ever get it right

Post by honorentheos »

I'm bringing this up here because it applies to you, MG. From the SP forum:
honorentheos wrote:
Sun Jan 31, 2021 8:19 pm
I don't know if anyone ever saw the movie, In the Mouth of Madness, by John Carpenter that came out in the mid-90s. It's not particularly great, and I'd guess it hasn't aged well in the way many mediocre movies go rotten over time while the standouts from the same time period manage to hold up.

Quality of movie aside - and spoilers I guess - the central premise of the movie came to mind this last week after a particularly discordant series of Facebook posts from the diehard Trump followers among my friends and family. The movie is about a Stephen King-styled immensely popular author who writes modern Lovecraftian horror who disappeared before his latest promised book was due to be published. Sam Neill plays the hardboiled skeptical insurance investigator who is sent to find him, all the while believing it is a publicity stunt by the publisher. Instead, the author has become a Lovecraftian godlike conduit between the horrors he has written about and the material world. How? Because, as he puts it to Sam Neill, more people believed in his stories than believe the Bible. This belief becomes for him a supernatural power that the horrors that had been speaking to him use to manifest as he writes them into existence. Sam Neill goes mad as the reality he knew existed is taken over by the world being written into reality by this author. It ends with him laughing maniacally while in an empty movie theater showing the movie the viewer just watched. Like I said, the movie isn't great. But the concept is now on full display as the reality we inhabit collectively is one where the claims of a stolen election have been grafted onto decades of claims liberals are outright evil (baby murders, sloth sponsors, freedom haters, power mad villains) such that the reality we live in is not created out of facts but beliefs so far fetched and in conflict with the evidence it feels Lovecraftian. It's always been this way in that we have always lived in world created from beliefs about facts, but it's taken a serious turn for the potentially disastrous as those beliefs from a critical mass of individuals have strayed into horror.

The challenge here is that the disastrous beliefs are what need replaced to reverse their manifesting reality, but we can only argue facts which are not as effective as we like to think they are in changing belief patterns. So what is? I argue it requires challenging one emotionally. Jan. 6 had some effect because it sparked fear in some, shock in others, and disgust in even more still. To see an attack on our Capitol had a visceral effect on people who otherwise were fine believing the lies being sold that the election was stolen, the courts were dismissing cases for procedural reasons rather based on the lack of actual evidence, and overall would have been ok if Trump had succeeded in overturning the general election. Now, with emotional distance, the facts haven't changed but the beliefs that made Jan 6th possible are regrouping, stronger than ever. The partisan machine is spitting out piece after piece reasserting the same narratives that feed - and feed on - the hate that gave rise to Jan. 6th.
When you talk about nuanced thinking, you aren't doing so as an actual nuanced thinker. Instead, you mistake the allowances you give for Smith and others to have been wrong in part as balanced while your belief in God is black-and-white and binary. It's rigidly binary. It's also fully informed by Mormon teachings and culture making your views binary Mormon views that sweep aside facts in favor of this core, immoveable faith in there being a god that meets your criteria. This belief forms the reality you inhabit so completely it's the water to your fish. You could no more engage it with nuanced allowance for it being wrong as a fish could live on the moon.
Lem
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Re: Certain people can't ever get it right

Post by Lem »

Gadianton wrote:
Mon Feb 01, 2021 3:42 am
You're assuming that just because you've stayed faithful, that it means you must be a nuanced and complex thinker. It may just mean you've been able to rationalize.
Or simply, to remain an immature thinker. That's the kindest term one can use for someone who participates here with such an obvious intent to divisively troll.
Morley
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Re: Certain people can't ever get it right

Post by Morley »

mentalgymnast wrote:
Mon Feb 01, 2021 1:58 am
Morley wrote:
Mon Feb 01, 2021 12:01 am
MG, since you're back, will you answer the entire post I asked you to respond to?
No. Not interested at this point. But if you would like to go back and condense your questions into one or two that really matter to you, go for it.

I ask questions all the time that never get answered so don’t feel left out. ;)
Oh, I don't. You've already made painfully obvious the extent to which you’re not able to explain yourself. It's kind of your MOA. Such is what you call nuance.

Be well, MG. And stay safe.
.
Chap
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Re: Certain people can't ever get it right

Post by Chap »

Let's see where we are. We started out with this:
mentalgymnast wrote:
Thu Jan 28, 2021 11:59 pm
Chap wrote:
Thu Jan 28, 2021 10:59 pm
...out of respect for the people who were once in deadly earnest about this deity, we could just leave that whole bundle of contradictions and fumbling nonsense in the toy cupboard of ideas that once looked worthwhile but turned out not to be, and get on with confronting the real and terrifying problems that currently threaten the entire existence of humanity.

Just a suggestion.
Many of these problems could be alleviated if people had faith in a creator God who has given commandments which if obeyed would help solve a good portion of the world’s ills. Rather than move away from God I think it would be a darn good idea if we were a bit more “deadly earnest” about trying to know and obey Him. But you’re right, there are a lot of people fumbling in a slew of nonsense which results in real problems.

Regards,
MG
Since then it has been agreed that:

1. There are an awful lot of different deities to choose from, with whom a variety of sometimes incompatible commandments are associated..

2. None of these deities turns up in person to tell us how to act. We have to rely instead on those human beings who claim to have the right to tell us what their particular favourite deity wants.

3. In order to be able to advise people how to act ethically, it is not in fact necessary to speak in the name of a deity.

Now mental gymnast tells us:
mentalgymnast wrote:
Sun Jan 31, 2021 9:12 pm
[...]

Western societies have endured thus far in peace and without internal dissolution because of a foundation of Judaeo Christian principles. You and most of the people you associate with are the beneficiaries. Most of us practice ethical behavior because of the historical foundation we rest on. Even in a place like Russia you will find a large segment of society acting in accordance with Judaeo Christian principles because of their Christian heritage. In the Far East and other Asian cultures we have the influence of sages influenced by the moral and ethical teachings spawned by the Axial Age.

Unfortunately we have the ‘bad players’ that have come along throughout history and had profound influence on the actions and beliefs of many people to their detriment. As we do today. Over time and generationally will these bad players influence and overtake the foundational principles of moral/ethical behavior and thought that western societies have heretofore been built upon? Time will tell. But I am concerned. Especially with the increase of those who are a ‘light unto themselves’.

On this I would comment:

A. "Western societies have endured thus far in peace and without internal dissolution because of a foundation of Judaeo Christian principles." I am simply gobsmacked by this claim. How about:
- the huge societal and international conflicts that followed the fracturing of the western church after Luther? The burnings, the long and horrible 'wars of [Judaeo-Christian] religion' - right up to the English Civil War.
- The French Revolution, followed by the 19th century revolutions in other parts of Europe and finally the Russian Revolution, all of which cost humanity a vast amount of blood and misery.
- the world conflicts of the 20th century, principally motivated by conflicts between historically Christian countries, with huge civilian casualties and a determined effort by one nation of Christians to exterminate a whole people, the Jews.
This is not just a matter of a few bad actors. I leave aside the ruthless exploitation by western powers of non-Christian nations, the large-scale extermination, dispossession and enslavement of those powerless to resist.
And why is Islam left out of the club of Abrahamic religions?

B. The whole idea that the human race owes its capacity to act decently and kindly to religions and world-views that came into being as a result of the creation of complex religions and philosophies in what is called by some the 'Axial Age' (reckoned by Jespers as being from the 8th-3rd centuries BC) has always struck me as back to front. In the first place, the idea that (in effect) the Israelites looked at the commandments Moses had brought down from the mountain and said "No adultery? No stealing? No murder? Wow, if only we'd known before!" is just silly. Hunter-gatherer peoples who have never had cultural contact with any 'civilised' religion or philosophy seem to manage their lives at least as harmoniously and decently as does an actual average New Yorker or Londoner. I don't think I am in any way ethically superior to them from having read a stack of Christian deity-centred literature in my time. Nor do I think they are ethically superior to me from not having read that stuff (so, no 'noble savage' illusions). If there was an 'Axial Age' (which some doubt), it did no more than embed the basic ethical insights long possessed by the mass of normal human beings before writing was invented in a mass of intellectual, textual, cultural and political structures, by no means all of which have been beneficial to us in the long run. I don't think we need feel any particular gratitude to Zoroastrianism, post-exilic Judaism, and so on.

C. I note that we are now no longer being asked to treat deities in themselves as important to us - but instead we are being told that we should feel grateful to the religions that claim that such deities matter. That's quite a step away from the original claim that "Many of these problems could be alleviated if people had faith in a creator God".
Maksutov:
That's the problem with this supernatural stuff, it doesn't really solve anything. It's a placeholder for ignorance.
Mayan Elephant:
Not only have I denounced the Big Lie, I have denounced the Big lie big lie.
mentalgymnast
1st Counselor
Posts: 450
Joined: Fri Nov 20, 2020 6:29 pm

Re: Certain people can't ever get it right

Post by mentalgymnast »

Chap wrote:
Mon Feb 01, 2021 4:45 pm
Let's see where we are. We started out with this:
mentalgymnast wrote:
Thu Jan 28, 2021 11:59 pm


Many of these problems could be alleviated if people had faith in a creator God who has given commandments which if obeyed would help solve a good portion of the world’s ills. Rather than move away from God I think it would be a darn good idea if we were a bit more “deadly earnest” about trying to know and obey Him. But you’re right, there are a lot of people fumbling in a slew of nonsense which results in real problems.

Regards,
MG
Since then it has been agreed that:

1. There are an awful lot of different deities to choose from, with whom a variety of sometimes incompatible commandments are associated..

2. None of these deities turns up in person to tell us how to act. We have to rely instead on those human beings who claim to have the right to tell us what their particular favourite deity wants.

3. In order to be able to advise people how to act ethically, it is not in fact necessary to speak in the name of a deity.

Now mental gymnast tells us:
mentalgymnast wrote:
Sun Jan 31, 2021 9:12 pm
[...]

Western societies have endured thus far in peace and without internal dissolution because of a foundation of Judaeo Christian principles. You and most of the people you associate with are the beneficiaries. Most of us practice ethical behavior because of the historical foundation we rest on. Even in a place like Russia you will find a large segment of society acting in accordance with Judaeo Christian principles because of their Christian heritage. In the Far East and other Asian cultures we have the influence of sages influenced by the moral and ethical teachings spawned by the Axial Age.

Unfortunately we have the ‘bad players’ that have come along throughout history and had profound influence on the actions and beliefs of many people to their detriment. As we do today. Over time and generationally will these bad players influence and overtake the foundational principles of moral/ethical behavior and thought that western societies have heretofore been built upon? Time will tell. But I am concerned. Especially with the increase of those who are a ‘light unto themselves’.

On this I would comment:

A. "Western societies have endured thus far in peace and without internal dissolution because of a foundation of Judaeo Christian principles." I am simply gobsmacked by this claim. How about:
- the huge societal and international conflicts that followed the fracturing of the western church after Luther? The burnings, the long and horrible 'wars of [Judaeo-Christian] religion' - right up to the English Civil War.
- The French Revolution, followed by the 19th century revolutions in other parts of Europe and finally the Russian Revolution, all of which cost humanity a vast amount of blood and misery.
- the world conflicts of the 20th century, principally motivated by conflicts between historically Christian countries, with huge civilian casualties and a determined effort by one nation of Christians to exterminate a whole people, the Jews.
This is not just a matter of a few bad actors. I leave aside the ruthless exploitation by western powers of non-Christian nations, the large-scale extermination, dispossession and enslavement of those powerless to resist.
And why is Islam left out of the club of Abrahamic religions?

B. The whole idea that the human race owes its capacity to act decently and kindly to religions and world-views that came into being as a result of the creation of complex religions and philosophies in what is called by some the 'Axial Age' (reckoned by Jespers as being from the 8th-3rd centuries BC) has always struck me as back to front. In the first place, the idea that (in effect) the Israelites looked at the commandments Moses had brought down from the mountain and said "No adultery? No stealing? No murder? Wow, if only we'd known before!" is just silly. Hunter-gatherer peoples who have never had cultural contact with any 'civilised' religion or philosophy seem to manage their lives at least as harmoniously and decently as does an actual average New Yorker or Londoner. I don't think I am in any way ethically superior to them from having read a stack of Christian deity-centred literature in my time. Nor do I think they are ethically superior to me from not having read that stuff (so, no 'noble savage' illusions). If there was an 'Axial Age' (which some doubt), it did no more than embed the basic ethical insights long possessed by the mass of normal human beings before writing was invented in a mass of intellectual, textual, cultural and political structures, by no means all of which have been beneficial to us in the long run. I don't think we need feel any particular gratitude to Zoroastrianism, post-exilic Judaism, and so on.

C. I note that we are now no longer being asked to treat deities in themselves as important to us - but instead we are being told that we should feel grateful to the religions that claim that such deities matter. That's quite a step away from the original claim that "Many of these problems could be alleviated if people had faith in a creator God".
Chap, thank you for your thoughtful reply. A few things. Of course you know that #2 is open to question. 1st vision. Modern prophets. I happen to believe that these early and ongoing restoration events and calling of prophets happened and continue to happen today. If this is so, it makes the rest of your arguments moot.

Sure, people have always chosen to do good. The light of Christ is with everyone that comes into the world. Prophets give additional light and knowledge and encouragement to stay on the straight and narrow path that leads to even greater paths than the natural man can traverse on his/her own.

But those are my beliefs and the beliefs of others baptized into the church and are active participants.

I’m speaking in general terms in regards to the influence of Christianity and other Axial Age religious movements, including Islam. The moral and ethical teachings have influenced western civilization in promoting values that have enriched peoples all over the world. You and other secularists are the beneficiaries along with the rest of us.
Galatians 5:9
A little leaven leavens the whole lump.
Regards,
MG
mentalgymnast
1st Counselor
Posts: 450
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Re: Certain people can't ever get it right

Post by mentalgymnast »

Morley wrote:
Mon Feb 01, 2021 2:21 pm
mentalgymnast wrote:
Mon Feb 01, 2021 1:58 am


No. Not interested at this point. But if you would like to go back and condense your questions into one or two that really matter to you, go for it.

I ask questions all the time that never get answered so don’t feel left out. ;)
Oh, I don't. You've already made painfully obvious the extent to which you’re not able to explain yourself. It's kind of your MOA. Such is what you call nuance.

Be well, MG. And stay safe.
.
You didn’t come back with your questions. Are you not able to encapsulate your questions within a long post into one or two questions that you believe might cut to the chase? I’m willing to look at those. Shouldn’t be to hard to do that? Right?

I take issue with your belief that I am not able to explain myself. That is a rather binary statement you’re making. But of course, you know that...or do you?

If you don’t come back with your one or two consolidated questions then, as you said, be well and stay safe.

Regards,
MG
mentalgymnast
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Posts: 450
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Re: Certain people can't ever get it right

Post by mentalgymnast »

Lem wrote:
Mon Feb 01, 2021 5:46 am
Gadianton wrote:
Mon Feb 01, 2021 3:42 am
You're assuming that just because you've stayed faithful, that it means you must be a nuanced and complex thinker. It may just mean you've been able to rationalize.
Or simply, to remain an immature thinker. That's the kindest term one can use for someone who participates here with such an obvious intent to divisively troll.
Ms. Lemming, you’ve had very little if anything to offer of real substance here. Your contributions have been empty/vacuous and accusatory without elevating the conversation to any significant degree. And yet, here you are. Why?

You say that my purpose here is to simply ‘troll’. That is false. If anything, your intermittent intrusions would fall more in line with trolling behavior. Sure, the conversation evolved and tracked along a different path as the thread meandered along, but that happens. I’ve never figured out what gives you some special right to be a board nanny and pronounce judgement on those that you happen to take issue with as a result of your atheistic standing in the world of ideas.

Are you a cancel culture proponent? You don’t agree with someone battering on your bulwarks, and even possibly creating a breech here and there on your defenses, so you’ll do/say whatever is necessary to keep your view of the world as the only game in town in the marketplace of ideas?

Even stooping to the tried and true, or so you think, accusations of trolling, immature behavior, etc.?

Grow up and get a spine.

Regards,
MG
mentalgymnast
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Posts: 450
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Re: Certain people can't ever get it right

Post by mentalgymnast »

honorentheos wrote:
Mon Feb 01, 2021 5:13 am
Instead, you mistake the allowances you give for Smith and others to have been wrong in part as balanced while your belief in God is black-and-white and binary. It's rigidly binary. It's also fully informed by Mormon teachings and culture making your views binary Mormon views that sweep aside facts in favor of this core, immoveable faith in there being a god that meets your criteria. This belief forms the reality you inhabit so completely it's the water to your fish. You could no more engage it with nuanced allowance for it being wrong as a fish could live on the moon.
I believe that the views you and others have towards Joseph Smith to be binary. And I would rather not get into all the reasons why. My personal views towards God are NOT binary. Meaning that, even though there are certain structures of belief that are encapsulated within the dimensions of the restoration doctrines, there is a LOT that is not understood about God. A God of flesh and bone? What does that even mean? Etc, etc.

You don’t know me at all if you think that I am a fish swimming within the waters of Mormonism unable to view what is outside of the fishbowl and let my mind go to places far far away from my traditional Primary lessons of yesteryear. Dang. Sometimes It is frustrating to see that you and others are living within your own self created lock boxes. Or at least it appears so.

And the crazy thing is, you view those outside of your man made boxes of acceptable belief (non theistic belief being the order of the day), as being ignorant fish, so to speak.

Oh well, the great divide. Binary thinking in action.

Regards,
MG
Chap
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Re: Certain people can't ever get it right

Post by Chap »

I'll just address this point:
mentalgymnast wrote:
Mon Feb 01, 2021 5:35 pm
I’m speaking in general terms in regards to the influence of Christianity and other Axial Age religious movements, including Islam. The moral and ethical teachings have influenced western civilization in promoting values that have enriched peoples all over the world. You and other secularists are the beneficiaries along with the rest of us.
There is good reason to suppose that your average human being in preliterate societies was no worse (thought perhaps no better) in ethical terms than your average modern city dweller. A detailed acquaintance with the ways in which dominant groups in early literate societies appropriated basic human ethics as part of the elaborate structures of power and authority that became major world religions does not suggest to me that we are any better off as a result. If anything, we may be worse off. Hunter-gatherers do not have elaborate and authoritative structures of belief that may from time to time demand in the name of a deity that those who do not subscribe to them shall be killed or coerced into changing their beliefs. But all the Abrahamic religions have gone in for that big time, when they have had the power to do so.

So my sense of gratitude to the world's 'great' religions is ... limited at best.
Maksutov:
That's the problem with this supernatural stuff, it doesn't really solve anything. It's a placeholder for ignorance.
Mayan Elephant:
Not only have I denounced the Big Lie, I have denounced the Big lie big lie.
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