ClarkGoble wrote:
By and large the typical member has barely read the scriptures and couldn't pass a test on pretty simple theological and scriptural claims that are important official parts of Mormonism. I say that not to criticize them simply to note that for most people religion is not primarily about knowledge of theology, history or even scriptural narratives.
Nothing I'm saying really is that controversial within Mormonism and it's not hard to find prominent general authorities who have held the views I've outlined (except perhaps some of esoteric physics that got brought up - here just meaning the theological claims). The most controversial thing you could get in what I've said is about Noah but there's pretty prominent writings by John Widstoe saying the same things. Further probably the majority of professors at BYU believe the same sorts of things....the need to move away from the classical definition of a God who is omni everything
This actually is quite old and goes back to Joseph Smith. Again none of this is really controversial and it even used to be taught explicitly in church manuals.I think you are missing a big problem here. These miracles you are reexamining, these myths, stories and so on to which you are attempting to provide a more naturalist view, are part and parcel of what defines Mormonsim. In my opinion when you remove the miraculous from these stories you are taking away the divine. What is the point of worshiping a being who is just a greatly advanced scientist?
I don't think I'm taking away the miraculous. What I'm suggesting is that miracles accord with natural law and that we tend to read the stories in a fashion the texts themselves don't warrant. i.e. there is a much wider range of acceptable readings. Typically when I make these readings I try to go out of my way not to say this is the only reading. Just that some readings are more defensible than other readings.
To the larger point, that's the key theistic debate point. Is a more limited materialist God (which is very much what Joseph Smith emphasized) more or less worshippable than the more Greek like conception of God as the source of all being.
The interesting point there is that of course the traditional view of God is losing adherents. The major thrust of philosophy in the late 18th century onward was the problem of such a God. (This is the point of Nietzsche's death of god in a way, although it was more his noting that despite claiming they didn't worship such a god philosophers were still holding on to the ideas of such a god in their arguments) You have Heidegger noting that the traditional God is not a "God before whom one could sing and dance."
So the question then becomes what makes God worthy of worship? Is it the Greek conceptions of God? (which are essentially bound up in arguments for his existence) To me the deist implications of such a conception of God as either Being or the source of Being is that I can't even figure out what the point of worship would be for such a thing.
Not arguing against those who do. Just that to me the distinction between atheism and this omni God is pretty negligible. It's just that the atheists note that it's hard to get excited about God as Being.
Rather than parse your statement, which I am not a big fan of, because I think it breaks an argument into parts which don't really represent the whole, I think I would like to continue on about the divine and what makes it worthy of worship, a question I have never really felt had a good Mormon answer.
I suppose I would call myself agnostic. I see, from that viewpoint, much more to consider worthy of worship in a non-contingent being upon whom all existence rests that I do a being who is constrained by the same natural laws we are and who may be just as contingent as we are. The former because of the simple fact it the ground of being God is a state/being which no one else can attain, it is the unknowable of miraculous if you will, that creates the divine.
So as I read your attempts to place the Mormon God within the bounds of natural laws and to try and show how events which most LDS feel are miraculous I get the sense you are illustrating a god within which there is nothing divine, he is simply a very advanced being from us. Why worship him any more than we would consider worshiping our own earthly parents? So on the one hand you cannot think of anything that the LDS God does that is contrary to the laws of nature as we understand them but on the other hand I am sure you consider him divine is some sense, so I would be interested in hearing more from you on what it is exactly that makes him different enough to worship?
By the way, fair warning, it is in this area that I think your really have to gut traditional Mormonism to get to a god with divinity as opposed to a really smart being who is just a few millennia advanced from us.
Thanks
