…in hopes that you will embrace me and put bangles on my feet.
As is always and forever the case with me, I refuse to write when I have the most to say. I have spent the last two weeks on a speaking tour for the Nader campaign, and I have had the fantastic fortune of getting to visit friends in New York and Yale. After approximately forty hours of 5-AM-type conversation, my brain is literally screaming for writing relief, but I am so overwhelmed at all the things I want to say that I don’t know how to begin.
I thought I would start by posting some randomalia that might help to frame the ensuing and sure-to-be several posts. Then I promise to brave up and write tomorrow!
The first is this Gmail chat (don’t judge me if you wouldn’t have done it and don’t envy me if you don’t have it) between me and my friend Russel. Read it as a preface to things I will surely write concerning metaphor versus truth and god-the-feeling versus god-the-person. I will post the second in a little while.
Russell: So I have a different question while you’re pondering over the first question. You know my general schtik…and my general approach to the Church, its history, etc. What is your general response to it? Am I just willfully blinding myself? Blinding others?
Me: I think it is good apologetics but it offers no means by which you could find it to be untrue. So it finds beauty, grace and wisdom in the ideas, and wrangles compromises between disparate ideas, but it can explain away too much. Finding meaning in something is not the same as saying that it is true.
Russell: What determines what “explaining away too much” is?
Me: Well I too have a knack for apologetics, and I can write a post like the last one I wrote, which essentially says, “Okay, if God exists this is what I think he would be like,” or, at least, explains such and such phenomenon. But that is not the same as me saying, “I know God exists and I can explain why he commands what he does and believe in the righteousness of what he commands.” It is not the same as an existential argument, or an ethical one.
Russell: are you proposing that I fall into the latter camp?
Me: No, not necessarily. I think that you can make the idea of Mormonism beautiful and reasonable, but that is not the same thing as saying it is true, in the sense that God actually exists. Continue reading ‘The Prodigal Blogger Returns’
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