…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.

Russell: ah yes

Me: Or that the Mormon church is worthy of being believed in because its doctrines are true. Composting the richness and complexity of Joseph’s life to make new metaphors for the world is not the same as saying that Joseph was a prophet who was what he claimed to be–who founded the true church, etc.

Russell: Hmmm. I suppose I see those ideas in a more compatible light…the former, for me, provides sustenance for the latter idea.

Me: But I feel that if you were a Catholic, you would spend your life defending Catholicism–finding ways for it to be beautiful and productive and consistent, and that there wouldn’t be a breaking point or a criteria that would allow you to move from belief to disbelief.

Russell: But to me, that denies my own sense of empowerment…as though my faith were like the color of my hair.

Me: I don’t know what your grounds are for staying or leaving. What could make something untrue for you?

Or something truer than something else? What would convert you?

Russell: These are good points. So you’re saying that my beliefs are not particularly scientific…they aren’t falsifiable? So if I were to tell you how convinced I am that the idea of Mormonism is not at all the same as the Church of Mormonism you would generally respond that this is a rhetorical technique to silence discussion? Am I correct in that?

Me: well I think they are different, too. But it makes me very leery because I think it dodges the way the question usually shows up existentially, which is: Is there actually a God and is this his/her church? Rather than: Is this a good metaphor that can enrich my perspective? Because if God makes sense of my world for me and enriches it, but there is not actually a God and I don’t live after I die, then I got some great poetry out of the bargain but it wasn’t existentially true.

Russell: The “terrible questions,” you mean. Pascal’s wager? I mean…it sounds to me that your major beef is whether we have the capacity to understand and even know truth.

Me: Not necessarily. I want to know what the difference is between apologetics, which teases meaning out of any big idea, and the idea that something is actually true–that you can stake your life on it, that it has consequences.

Russell: Right. So let’s take postmodernism as an example of a “big idea.” Is that an idea worth staking one’s life on? Does it win in Pascal’s wager? Suggesting that postmodernism is a kind of secular god…are we getting a win-win situation out of the deal?

Me: Well, you have to define what you mean by postmodernism.
Russell: Hahaha. Touche. Good luck to me on that one. Let’s say for the sake of discussion 1) that words are utterly incapable of conveying Truth, 2) that symbols are incapable of conveying Truth, and 3) we are incapable of comprehending Truth, that the very best we can do is know society-based truths. I use this as an example because I’m planning on addressing it quite explicitly in a panel discussion.

Me: Well for me the question is, ironically: Is that a true representation of the facts ‘out there’? Is it true that you can’t know truth? Because that is my whole point.

Russell: That’s why I say “good luck on defining postmodernism”

Me: I know that is misusing postmodernism, to judge it by a correspondence theory of truth. But I want to know if there is a ‘there’ there.

Me: If the theory of postmodernism actually comports with the facts–because if there actually was a God than postmodernism would not be a fact, it would be a good metaphor. (I know it does not claim to be a ‘fact’, but I am simply saying that there would be a way for it to be outstripped by a fact ‘out there’ that bested its claims.)

Russell: So is this incessant questioning actually helpful? Is it worth staking one’s life on?

Me: No, I simply want to know that if I am saying something is true,  it is at least partly because it corresponds to a fact out there. And if there is nothing to correspond to, then postmodernism is ‘true’–its claims at the meaninglessness of symbols is ‘true’. (I know that word makes a good postmodernist rightfully mad.)

Russell: But postmodernism insists that even that truth has a small t.

Me: I know, but it gets itself into a bind, because in a way it is still making a systematic claim that there is no capital T truth.

Russell: Right, and that becomes a truth! So is this approach worth it?
Me: i don’t care yet!

Russell: Ha ha. Okay, okay.

Me: Because the other way is just as bad. There are lots of ways to make the symbol of God meaningful. But I also want to know if my belief in god

Russell: but notice, we still have a common symbol…

Me: actually corresponds to a God who does live, and who does hear prayers, and who can grant me immortality. And for all my nice english-majoring around, I can’t say that I know that, even though I can still get lots of mileage out of the metaphor, and I know that the word corresponds to a feeling
I have felt. But assigning the word ‘God’ to that feeling–or Mormonism for that matter–is not the same, however rich, as making the existential claim, “There is a God.”

Russell: Then even a postmodernist would ask: Under what circumstances you felt that feeling?

Me: It is the difference between a descriptive word and an existential claim

Russell: right

Me: The difference between ‘god’ being the feeling that you get when you pray and “There is a God”–which is the existential claim you make when you have felt the feeling ‘god’ enough times when you have prayed  –is always a leap. It is always a leap to connect descriptive words for feelings with existential claims.

Russell: Totally understand. Kierkegaard. So is it a worthwhile endeavor trying to give expression to these feelings?

Me: What do you mean?

Russell: So we have feeling X…let’s not even try to describe it–not yet. What are we to do with this feeling?

Me: I am confused

Russell: Sorry. So you talked about having a feeling, right?

Me: What feeling is that?

Russell: “I know that the word corresponds to a feeling.” (Your words.)

Me: Okay, yes. So when I pray, I feel warmth and love and I am able to reconcile things that were impossible to reconcile before.

Russell: Right. But you’re submitting that we should be leary of ascribing an existential claim to those feelings?

Me: No. Well, kind of. My original point was that I think you are very thoughtful and smart, but sometimes I think that you would be a thoughtful and smart apologist in whatever religion you were born into. My point was that if there is not something “true” about mormonism, then it is just a lot of beautiful defenses that give meaning to the world, but are not the same as a grounds for an existential claim.

Russell: How would you reconcile that with my own crisis of faith?

Me: Well I would like to know what prompted it, what it was about, and how you resolved it.

Russell: World problems prompted it. Nihlism. Musty old documents can’t hold a light to the reality of starving children and cancer-ridden patients. And how I resolved it? Well, I was basically teetering on a postmodernish philosophy, where history would become my God. Empiricism, in a sense. But then, thanks to the help of (and I PROMISE you this is the honest, hard-nosed truth) G.K. Chesterton and your grandfather…
And I had read MUCH by apostles on theodicy, and nothing touched me.

Me: And why were you on the brink of this? What factors pushed you toward it–whether they be negative (the Church did something negative or did not answer a question you had) or positive (postmodernism was compelling for such and such reasons).

Russell: A realization of tremendous suffering in the world…of the frailties of man (I had just started my history degree at BYU). Postmodernism was not compelling, but it seemed the only way out.

Me: Explain.

Russell: Actually, not postmodernism precisely. I would entertain it, but empiricism would have been my guiding philosophy. In any case, I could handle documents. I could quantify them. I could trace them.

Me: Okay, I need you to explicate this more. You saw how cruel human beings are to each other, and then what? The Church did not adequately address it? You could not believe in God?

Russell: Well, i knew the old answers.

Me: because he allowed suffering? And then what? Take me through it.

Russell: Okay. So I’m getting this steady diet of slavery, of naturalism. Add to this that I’m being made more and more aware of joseph’s plural marriages, and of possible deception on his part. So something that I have vehemently defended is being undermined by credible documentation–not scholars, but the documents themselves. I didn’t even know Joseph was physically intimate with his wives until the mission. And the old cliche: “Man has his agency” simply was not cutting it. And the old cliches of how “no matter what, Joseph is still a prophet” was REALLY not cutting it. I was thinking, “If Joseph really was like another person and didn’t have the morals that the Church now teaches and would disqualify anyone from being a bishop, then why believe him?” So I began to read. Soaked myself in the literature. Read Daynes’ “More Wives than One,” read Todd Compton’s article “A Trajectory of Plurality,” read the GOOD FARMS material (I read the snide stuff too, but that was more entertaining than helpful…I needed DOCUMENTS), read Bergera’s conflict in the quorum, Barringer-Gordon’s work on polygamy, read Bushman several times, knocked out a chunk of Donna Hill. You get the idea. And then something Bushman wrote struck me. An article called, “A Joseph for the Twenty-First Century.” You see, the landscape of American history is STREWN with visionaries, mystics, odd sects. Joseph should have been another casualty in the landscape. He was a radical. Luther, however, was remarkably conservative–put down the Peasants rebellion, at least rhetorically. Calvin, Zwingli…the Reformers in general had little influence on doctrine…no major questioning of assumptions about the nature of God and man…only tweaking assumptions about such academic questions about faith and works. Actually, don’t trust that bit about Calvin and Zwingli…I’m not a Reformation scholar, so I might be opening up a can of worms unduly.

Me: Okay.

Russell: But there was definitely no questioning of assumptions. So, in spite of the ambiguities of Joseph’s life (which have since found some resolution elsewhere for me), a major step in the process has been to see Joseph as someone who shook things up, who could be a city-builder/visionary–a seeming paradox at least historically, but he did it with some success…in spite of all hell breaking loose on him (the Kirtland Safety Society should have destroyed him). So here I am…looking seriously at a man who could shake up the landscape…but I still have no good theodicy. I’m still wondering why empiricism isn’t the way to go. I could still respect Joseph through it. But then my friend, Doug, G.K. Chesterton, and your grandfather changed that. They helped me to cast empiricism, post-modernism as -isms in the same way that Mormonism is an -ism: -isms in which I placed a religious faith. Indeed, I realized that I was placing faith in my own mind’s capacity to reason, to comprehend reality. So what made my mind better than Joseph’s mind? Better than the pioneers’ minds? because I could speak Hmong? Because I could read?

Me: Define empiricism and what allure it had for you. How could it help or save you? What problems did it address or resolve?

Russell: It didn’t help solve problems as much as it helped me isolate myself from them. I told mysef, “We all have eyes. We all have ears.” (I’m not counting the blind and deaf, of course…so I must qualify my statement.) So whether right or wrong, it’s something we can all relate to. So if we’re wrong, we’re all wrong together, and if there be a God, he can’t hold us too accountable for just trusting the eyes and ears he gave us. And in some ways, I still believe that. I believe the secularists will have a few breaks given them provided that they were humble about their disbelief. So yes, empiricism provided me a way out of ambiguity, but it ultimately would just isolate myself from other people, from any sense of meaning. Here’s a trite question that is asked w/o thinking, but I find it valid: “What explanation do documents, HARD documents, HARD data (not just philosophical treatises) offer us about the terrible questions or Christian orthodoxy, for that matter? That we are creatures, beloved creatures, that have only the most oblique connection to the divine–how does the famed “unbridgeable gap” show us an all-loving God? Rather, it makes God look like a pompous king who feels a sense of noblesse oblige and must pity the poor fools who find themselves in that pathetic existence called mortality. What a hopeful vision of human relations! (Sarcasm.) So while I can’t speak for others about the truthfulness of Mormonism, I believe that inability to speak for others is Mormonism’s brilliance. I can’t declare MOrmonism to be existentially true, and that’s how it was intended to be! It must be EXPERIENCED. Experience, unlike existence, is not a static idea. I’m talking too much, methinks.

Me: But wait! What is the failure of empiricism? I didn’t catch it. And how does belief in god or Mormonism solve for the limits of existentialism?

Russell: Copied from above: What explanation do documents, HARD documents, HARD data (not just philosophical treatises) offer us about the terrible questions?
Me: Okay, so you can’t document truth–at least the terrible truth. But then you say the belief is experiential.
Russell: Can you document experience even? Now I will admit…I’m not very good at the “experience” end of things. So in some ways, I put on my empiricist hat to act as the Lord’s bouncer, if you will.

Me: Ha ha. No, I am saying what if you have documents that someone was not what they claimed? That they lied? Or what if you had lots of contrary experiential or conceptual evidence that some claim was dubious or false?

Russell: I would need to use all the historical criticism available to analyze those documents. And believe it or not, we have that kind of documentation already. But there is competing documentation.

Me: I mean, isn’t any party of your testimony based on whether or not Joseph actually saw god? And wouldn’t it then be disturbing if, for example, you realized he changed the first vision story multiple times, or if you charted the trend of Joseph…
Russell: Well, I’m quite, quite familiar with the “changed the first vision” charge…
Me: …getting convenient revelations right when he need something to consolidate his power, or to get someone to agree with him.

Russell: wait a minute. I’m sensing a definite shift in tone. I don’t find his revelations to be very convenient. No one sought to carry them out more quickly than he did, and most of them involved tremendous suffering for him and his family. As for being a power-hungry tyrant, he certainly was a little too willing to broadcast his faults (as seen in the 116 pages revelation).

Me: I am simply trying to understand where your testimony is located–what its grounds are.

Russell: To quote Farrar: Evidence does not create faith, but it clears out room where faith (read: experience) can grow.

Me: Is there then any evidence that would make you lose your faith?

Russell: There’s some, but it can only exist in the hypothetical at this point.

Me: What do you mean?

Russell: I can suppose that a signed confession from Joseph would shake it, but I don’t know that for certain. There are so many other things that Joseph himself can’t account for. Even saying that he got a hold of metal to make plates, that he was high when he had the first vision…I know people who are delusional…and there’s a divide between them and rational people. Yet so many reasonable people were empowered by what Joseph said. I have found that the same criticisms that have been laid on Joseph have been laid on Jesus (Celsus, in particular).

Me: Okay so you are a phenomenologist partly? Meaning, if the phenomenon is powerful over time–if it has the power to produce meaning over time–then it is true? Because it makes the world show up as true?

Russell: In part

Me: Okay, so here is my question. How would you determine if something is true if you are a contemporary to its outing? If you lived in the early 1800s, how would you decide? For example, there is supposedly a man in Lehi…

Russell: I would like to think that I would have gone through the same thought process

Me: …who has declared that the world will end soon. He is gathering people on his farm and asking them to deed land to him…
Russell: but there’s more to Joseph than that…

Me: …Everyone I talk to thinks he is a farce, and I am talking about Mormons here!

Russell: That’s my whole point. Joseph was not just some rural visionary.

Me: …and you know, despite whatever staying power Joseph had and despite differences, that many many people saw him that way, that the law of consecration was an attempt to manipulate people into deeding their property. n retrospect, we vaunt it.

Russell: But was Joseph JUST “the law of consecration,” even at the time?
me: No, I am bringing up a broad point with specific examples. I am asking why you don’t believe that guy in Lehi, but you do believe in Joseph.

Russell: But that’s the problem with specificity here…
Me: If you can only decide in retrospect, according to how much phenomonelogical staying power the doctrines have–how rich they are, and versatile and adaptive–that gives you no criterion for deciding in the moment what is and isn’t true.

Russell: How rich are this guy’s doctrines? Joseph’s were rich at the time. Otherwise, he couldn’t have maintained the base he did. Brigham Young joined the church without even meeting Joseph. He thought Joseph was a weirdo when he met him.

Me: Okay, but what is your point? I am asking you a broad question. What is your criterion for deciding, in the moment, if something is true?

Russell: I understand. Let’s see…For one, does it make people happy? They might weep, cry, feel pain–but do they feel more content with life based on the doctrine? (Content in a good sense, not a status quo sense.) Two, do they speak to the issues of the time?

Me: Okay, so let’s talk about me. I don’t feel that the Church speaks to the issues of the time, and I don’t feel content. So you can say “go ahead and leave, if it isn’t for you”…

Russell: Note: I didn’t talk about the Church.

Me: …but the problem is that the doctrines say something very different. Okay, so forget the church. Let’s talk the doctrines. Joseph Smith revealed a gospel that radically, as you said yourself, revised old notions–or revisited them. But these doctrines themselves say that Christ is the only way to salvation, that God does exist and that he will judge our souls, that we are immortal, that there are prophets who will guide us, that the Church is the true Church, etc etc. So now, according to you, I am in a situation in which my experience of the gospel/religion makes me want to leave it but the doctrines put me in jeopardy for doing so.

Russell: Well, I don’t think we can identify “this is the true church” as a doctrine…
that’s circular reasoning. As far as “this is the true church” goes, we have only one way to realize that and that is through subjective experience. I like what Kathleen Flake noted. She believes in Mormonism because of the God it points her to.

Me: Okay, so it is preference?

Russell: She wouldn’t say so. But honestly, sure. Preference.

Me: I want to insist that what you have articulated–while I personally agree with it–is not at all what the documents of the Mormon religion or gospel suggest about themselves–not at all the self-descriptions they use to define themselves.

Russell: …and preference, incidentally, IS orthodoxy.

Me: The Book of Mormon does not suggest that I choose what feels good and that that might be personal preference. It posits a very correpondence-based notion of truth and which church is true.

Russell: Actually, “we are our own judges.” And where does it say that?

(Conversation ended there, but I would have said that it is supremely odd and dangerous to suggest that one’s experience of religion leads you to suggest that it is preference and metaphor while the documents and edicts of the religion demand a very document-based, history-dependent, correspondence-esque notion of truth that depends on its claims being based in true, historically actual documents that correspond to the truth “out there,” and that is why–whatever my personal convictions–I refuse to confuse the idea of a religion being metaphorically powerful with a religion being true in its own claims and its claims to correspond to the ‘fact’ of a living God and his power to grant salvation.)