Clarification so as to be clear.

[drumdude]

MG also forgets that most of us drove that ford pinto for years too. We spent plenty of time in the Mormon church.

[malkie]

MG also forgets that most of us drove that ford pinto for years too. We spent plenty of time in the Mormon church.

Surely you are not criticizing the car that Mormon god designed and had built specifically for us Saturday's Warriors to drive into battle.

Oh, ye of little faith! Go ahead and drive your Mercs, and Lexus, and Town Cars. The people who fight against Pinto will surely be smitten at last!

[MG 2.0]

I think the biggest problem with MG's crusade is that he goes meta on every and all topics immediately and stays there. If I think a certain car is the best I'm looking at factors like horsepower, comfort, reliability, traction through a tight turn or maybe in the snow. With Morley's latest highlight, instead of getting into the details of that engine, it's like, "critics and naysayers who don't agree the Ford Pinto is the greatest driving machine ever built desperately pile on vague arguments: it's underpowered, the warranty wasn't very good, it's not stylish, but at what point do the scales tip into undeniability territory? At what point can we definitively say with no reservations that the Ford Pinto isn't the greatest driving machine ever?"

I think I see what you're driving at (pun intended). I might say in response that the road we're on, the criteria, assumptions, and how we interpret the world...the framework from which we operate within...is just as important as the engine under the hood. Specs might be interesting, but it's important to ask/remember how we're measuring them. When folks point out the Pinto as being underpowered or unstylish, that's a claim embedded/found within a framework of values, expectations, and comparisons. What might be even more interesting than that is asking how those judgments are formed and why you feel they carry more weight than that of another?

Every other MG argument is more of the same. I've driven this Pinto for years and I'm saying it's the best car ever made. You guys are stuck in relativism, but there can only be one best car. Do you think that maybe when you were younger, you refused to ride in a Pinto, and maybe that's why now you can't admit it's the best all of these years later?

Here I might ask if any truth claim can be meaningfully weighed without first agreeing on the scale. I think that your critique might miss the deeper question. What makes a car "best" in the first place? Again, how are we measuring the data? What tools are being used? What is the lens that we are viewing 'the car' through? Belief isn't a delayed reaction as you seem to be implying, it's a dynamic process shaped by evolving values, accumulated evidence, and priorities that might bend/flex over time. Nuance, less black and white thinking. You and others here seem to be fixated on whether a Pinto or a Ferrari/Cadillac/Etc. are 'best'.

My point, again, is the kind of road the vehicle...we...are traveling on and the direction we are headed.

I think the car analogy works because arguing about cars relies heavily on facts but is also incredibly subjective. However, even with all that subjectivity, I don't recall the Top Gear guys ever going meta. They don't spend any time on the possibility of knowledge -- how do we know what we know? What is the truth, really? How would we definitively say what counts as a good warranty and what doesn't? But that's all MG talks about. Oh look, this other reviewer said a different car is better. How about that? How can you be so confident your pick when this other guy appears pretty darn intelligent?

Top Gear is reviewing cars, not worldviews. If we're talking about torque and trim vs. truth claims and historical narratives, the terrain changes. Intelligent people can look at the same information/data and reach different conclusions. Over and over again I think we've discussed what counts as evidence. This is where we find ourselves traveling different roads that lead to different destinations. Whether I'm driving a Pinto or you're driving a Ferrari may not really matter.

One thing for sure, the Ferrari owners are always going to make fun of those driving a Pinto (I drove one in one of my areas while on my mission. Not such a bad car. )

Just as we can’t say which grain of sand makes a heap, we can’t pinpoint the exact contradiction that topples a belief system. It is going to vary from person to person. I've pointed out that I think it is unfortunate that some folks leave before they have really looked at what makes the 'whole heap'.

I'm not defending the Pinto (church) as being flawless, it's not, but to simply question/argue whether the criteria for “flawless” are stable, shared, or even coherent. I think those presumptions are going to vary from person to person based on a number of factors. Some beyond one's control in some instances.

Regards,
MG

[Marcus]

Gad called it perfectly!!!!!!!

in the middle of going fake-meta, mentalgymnast accidentally admitted what he really thinks about his inferior pinto :

One thing for sure, the Ferrari owners are always going to make fun of those driving a Pinto...

[Physics Guy]

The car analogy is clearly better than my breakfast cereal idea, since decisions about religion are apt to be bigger investments. To me the important point is that thinking about religious beliefs should not be a different kind of thinking from thinking about what car to buy.

I like to say the same thing about science, that "scientific method" is not a special kind of thinking which is somehow more reliable than ordinary reason. I like to emphasise that scientific reasoning is just the same hard-nosed common sense that people use when buying used cars. The only thing that gives established scientific conclusions so much more authority than ordinary opinions is that more work has been done in kicking the tires on scientific conclusions than most people imagine ever doing for anything.

Religious conclusions are certainly not as firm as that, because that much evidence isn't available about every important question. Compared to physics, chemistry is a vague collection of rules of thumb and unifying myths, but this is only because chemistry is much harder than physics. It is at least as important. Biology is a collection of vaguer myths and empirical lists, and even more important to humans. The style of thinking remains the same: we're trying to buy a used car. We look as hard as we can, but sometimes we really need some kind of car, so we make the best guess we can, and then sign.

The appeal to experience is legitimate up to a point. The epistemological authority of scientific experiments is not so easy to explain philosophically, but it has a huge weight nonetheless. When the theory says that you should measure something very close to 2.3, and you measure 2.28, you go, Dang. It wasn't obvious in advance that it wouldn't be 147 or -312, but the theory called for 2.3 and you got 2.28. That theory can't be too wrong.

Experience has its own biases. Dowsing convinces people because the twigs or the wires or whatever really do seem to move by themselves, when you're over the water. You have to be a seriously hard-nosed child of a dog to check whether the twig moves the same when you can't tell by any other means that you've over the water.

At the end of the day, though, I think that the lesson of science is not that experience is unreliable. You have to be critical and skeptical about experience, like everything else, but experience does have more weight than pure theory.

Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.

[Limnor]

I like the car analogy, and I think you’ve actually uncovered part of the architecture behind why the apologetic logic presented here can feel both circular and self-reinforcing.

To continue your analogy: It’s almost as if the Pinto owner wants someone to argue that the car isn’t the best, because that opposition and making fun of the Pinto becomes proof of its greatness.

The prophesied “opposition in all things” turns into a self-validating feedback loop: the mere existence of critics is evidence that the Pinto prophecy is true. You can know the Pinto is the greatest car ever because the scriptures foretold people would disagree and laugh at you for owning one.

Slick move, Joseph and team.

[Gadianton]

Specs might be interesting, but it's important to ask/remember how we're measuring them.

Well yes, there's no doubt about that, but my point wasn't that how we measure isn't important, but the MG version of Top Gear would consist of literally nothing but how we measure. The race would be 20 seconds and the rest of the show would question the reliability of the results -- so long as MG's car didn't win.

I think that your critique might miss the deeper question. What makes a car "best" in the first place? Again, how are we measuring the data? What tools are being used? What is the lens that we are viewing 'the car' through?

Actually, you just proved me right. In the MG version of Top Gear, every episode only contemplates the deeper questions. What makes any car good or better than any other in the first place? It's certainly possible the Pinto won against the Ferrari and our measuring was wrong, or the test itself was wrong, and so we can never get beyond admitting the possibility that the Pinto really wins hands down against the Ferrari.

Top Gear is reviewing cars, not worldviews. If we're talking about torque and trim vs. truth claims and historical narratives, the terrain changes. Intelligent people can look at the same information/data and reach different conclusions.

Whoah -- you're shooting yourself in the foot here. First, you went against your own claim by saying torque alone can't answer the question because we don't know the terrain. There is a ton of subjectivity in car debates. But it's dangerous to suggest that worldviews are totally different when it comes to religion. It's a two edge sword. You suggest that in order to protect Mormonism from criticism: if Mormonism is incommensurable with other frameworks, then nobody has the authority to say it's wrong. But the rub is that Alma 32 is now circular, it's only valid within the Mormon paradigm. The whole point of Alma 32 is to find some kind of common, sensible ground that non-believers will accept. And so parts of Mormonism must translate well into other worldviews in order for those people to perform your test.

As far as Ferrari vs. Pinto, you do have a point because Ferrari is a cult, much like Mormonism. If you own a Ferrari and try to modify it in any way, or present it in media in unapproved ways, or talk about it in certain ways to anybody, then Ferrari's version of the SCMC will come after you. In fact, you can't even buy a Ferrari, at least from a dealer, without first having the equivalent of several interviews by the missionaries and priesthood leaders. And, even if you're approved to buy a Ferrari, you can't just walk in and become a "High Priest" even if you're a billionaire. You must work up the ranks, and own less expensive used models before you're allowed to buy newer models.

[I Have Questions]

Gad called it perfectly!!!!!!!

in the middle of going fake-meta, mentalgymnast accidentally admitted what he really thinks about his inferior pinto :

One thing for sure, the Ferrari owners are always going to make fun of those driving a Pinto...

I suspect MG thinks he’s the Ferrari owner, here to make fun of us Pinto owners. He tells himself he’s sticking it to us.

[Gadianton]

The car analogy is clearly better than my breakfast cereal idea, since decisions about religion are apt to be bigger investments. To me the important point is that thinking about religious beliefs should not be a different kind of thinking from thinking about what car to buy.

I like to say the same thing about science, that "scientific method" is not a special kind of thinking which is somehow more reliable than ordinary reason. I like to emphasise that scientific reasoning is just the same hard-nosed common sense that people use when buying used cars. The only thing that gives established scientific conclusions so much more authority than ordinary opinions is that more work has been done in kicking the tires on scientific conclusions than most people imagine ever doing for anything.

Which isn't very methodical. Why don't we just have AI look at all the experimental data it can and then give us the algorithm for arbitrarily making scientific discoveries? That's why I don't believe in a scientific method. Skeptics help MG when they play the scientific method card in any of its forms (such as dropping Ockham's razor as the reason it wasn't a ghost), whenever an outlandish claim is brought to the table. And there's no reason for it, I'm happy to bring in James Randi and look for a way to test the claim because I know who is going to win. It's those with the weak or obsessively lazy hand who call "incommensurability" to protect their beliefs. Why help them? DCP steps his toes into the world of what's testable all the time because how else to sell his product? Nobody want's to hear the claim that I saw a flying saucer with my spiritual eyes during my sleep -- they want to hear that I saw it driving home from work and two other guys also got out of their car and saw it, and you can hear the conversation on my phone audio and I got a pic but just as it was shooting into space. There's at least 10M guaranteed social media hits. Once I'm popular, if holes in my story come up, I can play defense and claim spiritual eyes and people will still believe me. Once the fish is on the hook it stays on the hook. But getting it on the hook almost always requires venturing into the world of real facts. "I have real gold plates in my basement".

Concerning how religious decisions are made, I agree that there's nothing special about it vs. car buying, it's very similar in fact, which is why my dad immediately went out and bought a car that he couldn't afford when he retired and my mom had to make him take it back. And why I've had my current car since 2012 and it's still going strong, and I have a spreadsheet ready to plug potential purchases into when the time comes. But it's hard to say who really is making the better decision; after the fact, a good case could be made that my dad should have kept that car and that some of my numbers were wrong or my spreadsheet was more about personal entertainment.

But there is a problem with saying people make religious choices the same as any other choice. While it's obviously true, what else could it be? It leaves us with the bad result that most people will never make the best possible choice (find the one truth faith), and most religious people believe that salvation is zero sum -- one faith is true and all others are false. Everyone who is born is required to pick the best religion or they lose the game. Pragmatism is inadequate for the task. Those who get the top of the market, were just lucky -- if Mormonism is the one true faith, MG picked it because he was born into it, it was easy, luck -- and so life is meaningless from the religious view.

[MG 2.0]

But there is a problem with saying people make religious choices the same as any other choice. While it's obviously true, what else could it be? It leaves us with the bad result that most people will never make the best possible choice (find the one truth faith), and most religious people believe that salvation is zero sum -- one faith is true and all others are false. Everyone who is born is required to pick the best religion or they lose the game. Pragmatism is inadequate for the task. Those who get the top of the market, were just lucky -- if Mormonism is the one true faith, MG picked it because he was born into it, it was easy, luck -- and so life is meaningless from the religious view.

Mormonism is a theology of progression...AND post-mortal opportunity where luck isn’t the final word, and sincere seekers aren’t punished for being born in the wrong showroom. Inherited belief isn’t a free pass, it’s a starting point... for anyone born anywhere in any religious system or lack thereof. Staying in a high demand and 'truth exclusive' religion such as that found within the CofJCofLDS, especially in the face of critique, complexity, and personal evolution, requires its own kind of engagement. Being born into the faith isn’t just a stroke of luck or a shortcut to salvation, it’s a stewardship.


One might say, "Where much is given much is expected." I think I've heard that somewhere before...

Jesus said that where much is given much is expected and that he that is greatest among you let him be a/your servant. You folks keep saying that being born into the LDS Church is some kind of 'elitist' kind of thing where members feel as though they are better than their neighbor. This just isn't true. If the message of the CofJCofLDS is indeed true then members have an obligation to serve their fellow man and be the 'light upon the hill'. Critics that have left the church, of course, see their LDS friends and family whom they have separated themselves from, at least religiously, as being somehow subject and/or willing to subject themselves to blind loyalty and passiveness to authority...without the ability or desire to 'be in the world' fully.

I think that is where the whole 'cult' thing comes into play. Just a bunch of dumb Mormons that are not to live fully and expand intellectual horizons, etc. Those that see themselves as driving Ferrari's and other 'acceptable' and 'up to date' cars look down on those that might be driving Pinto's without giving any real credence to the possibility that it's not the car...it's the road traveled in the car and where it may lead.


Regards,
MG