Didn't Major in Journalism...So I Took Up Blogging

CLOSING TIME

2011-05-14T14:57:00.000-07:00

This will be my final post. I am officially moving to a new location entitled The Slow Hunch. Hope to see you all there!

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

"GOOD BYYYYYEEEEEEEE"

2011-01-18T16:03:00.000-08:00

School starts tomorrow for me. So, I will be taking an indefinite break from blogging for the next couple months. I know you are all devastated.

So Long, Farewell
The Sound of Music at MOVIECLIPS.com

100% HOME TEACHING

2011-01-16T14:13:00.000-08:00

I WANT MY MTV

2011-01-15T19:04:00.000-08:00

In another Duff/Cooper moment, Canada has banned Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing" for the use of the word "faggot." Apparently, after becoming a 1985 hit and enjoying 25 years of radio airplay, it suddenly has become unfit for Canada's airwaves. I hopefully shouldn't have to list the amount of hip-hop, thrash metal, techno-pop, and "gangsta" rap songs that are beyond offensive and far worthier of banning. But perhaps it is worth pointing out that the song is referring to the 80's MTV rockers of its day:

Can you blame them? I'll just add my protest to those that have already taken place:

A MUSICAL RUSH

2011-01-14T14:34:00.000-08:00

I've often been laughed at (by the wife, for one) for my tendency to cease talking, increase the radio's volume, and enjoy a particular guitar solo, riff, or section in the song currently playing in the car. However, recent research (the actual study can be found here) demonstrates that

pleasurable music induces dopamine release. The same is the case with food, drug, and sex cues. The study is from The Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital – The Neuro at McGill University...The team at The Neuro measured dopamine release in response to music that elicited “chills,” changes in skin conductance, heart rate, breathing, and temperature that were correlated with pleasurability ratings of the music. “Chills” or “musical frisson” is a well-established marker of peak emotional responses to music. A novel combination of PET and fMRI brain imaging techniques revealed that dopamine release is greater for pleasurable versus neutral music, and that levels of release are correlated with the extent of emotional arousal and pleasurability ratings. Dopamine is known to play a pivotal role in establishing and maintaining behavior that is biologically necessary.

Perhaps this is why I get chills when I hear the note at 3:24 and tend to describe such moments as a "guitar orgasm":

ASTROLOGICAL...I MEAN, PROPHETIC COUNSEL

2011-01-14T12:56:00.000-08:00

Take note: this is meant to be tongue-in-cheek; something I found funny in a moment of recency effect.

In the April 1989 General Conference, Gordon B. Hinckley shared the following:

When I was a boy, we lived on a farm in the summer...We could identify some of the constellations and other stars as they were illustrated in our encyclopedia. Each night we would trace the Big Dipper, the handle and the cup, to find the North Star.

We came to know of the constancy of that star. As the earth turned, the others appeared to move through the night. But the North Star held its position in line with the axis of the earth. And so it had come to be known as the Polar Star, or the Polestar, or the Lodestar.

...Because of those boyhood musings, the Polar Star came to mean something to me. I recognized it as a constant in the midst of change. It was something that could always be counted on, something that was dependable, an anchor in what otherwise appeared to be a moving and unstable firmament.

Love is like the Polar Star. In a changing world, it is a constant. It is of the very essence of the gospel. It is the security of the home. It is the safeguard of community life. It is a beacon of hope in a world of distress [1].

Now, let's see what astronomers have to say about the North Star:

Here's what astronomers know: The Earth is like a wobbly top. As it rotates, its axis swings in a circle, pointing in different directions. As the Earth's position shifts, so does our perspective of the night sky.

For example, Rao said, we take the North Star, Polaris, for granted. It's the star most closely aligned with Earth's North Pole. But back when the pyramids were constructed, the star that aligned with the North Pole wasn't Polaris at all: It was a star in the constellation Draco called Thuban. In 12,000 years, Earth's North Star will be Vega, the brightest star in the constellation Lyra.

The complete rotation takes 26,000 years, Rao said.

"Everything in the sky is in flux," he said [2].

Maybe the North Star isn't the best example of constancy...

1. Gordon B. Hinckley, "Let Love Be the Lodestar of Your Life," Ensign (May 1989).

2. Stephanie Pappas, "Wobbly Earth Means Your Horoscope is Wrong," LiveScience (Jan. 13, 2011).

GOD AND THE MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE

2011-01-13T13:51:00.001-08:00

From a recent article in The Jewish Daily Forward [1]:

First, it is helpful to distinguish what we know from what we don’t. At the very least, since I have experienced what mystics have described, by following their recommendations, that means that if I’m deluded, generations of mystics are as well. It’s not just me, and it’s not new; it’s ancient, widespread and revered. Moreover, the mystics’ testimony is “expert” testimony. Contemplatives are precisely the people who have devoted the most attention to the mind and the spirit. I wonder what my Seder interlocutor, a dentist for 30 years, would’ve said if I had doubted the foundations of modern dentistry. Who are you inclined to believe more — the doubter who has never explored these pathways or millions of experts who spent their lives doing so?

...Now, the sense of certainty that arises within mystical experience is not, itself, enough...Nor is it some vague sense of the sublime or a beloved article of faith. Peak contemplative experience feels truer than anything I’ve ever felt; it is more certain than knowing my name. It feels like “Yes, this is it. This is what you have been looking for your whole life.” So that merits at least agnosticism in one’s subsequent reflection.

A second useful analytical tool is to tease apart experience from interpretation. “I felt a great love” could be interpreted as “I felt the love of Hashem” or “I felt the love of Christ” — or just “I felt a great love.” And that depends not on the phenomenology of the experience but the conceptual frame in which it is understood. So as soon as one moves from experience to concepts, one is no longer entitled to the certainty of one’s spiritual perception.

Of course, these questions are not unique to spirituality; they are Epistemology 101. How do you know you’re not in the Matrix right now, or a brain floating in a laboratory jar? You don’t. All you really can say, right now, is “I am having this experience” — not “it is an experience of X.” So if we’re going to be epistemologically skeptical, let’s be consistent about it and doubt every subjective experience, which is to say, every experience there is.

That being said, mystics should make friends with epistemological humility. The reification of subjective experience is precisely what leads to fundamentalism, error and the willingness to kill someone who has an alternative interpretation. Sure, most New Age spiritual people are gentle, and pluralistic to the point of relativism. But as soon as we assert that our subjective spiritual experience has any objective truth, we are on slippery slope to dogmatism.

Especially when the experience gets attached to the label “God.” Really, the word “God” is an experiential exclamation point: Instead of my having a powerful insight, God told me something! Instead of introspection, I’m asking God! This is an invitation to zealotry.

Declining the invitation to interpret experience is also, ultimately, more nourishing. The most wonderful, rapturous mystical state is just a mind-state. It passes. Letting the experience be — without labeling it as specifically religious or attempting to prove anything — allows an experience to be appreciated for what it is, rather than for what the ego may want it to be. You get less stuck.

And you value more. This mind-state (whether devekut, samadhi, unio mystica) isn’t significant because of a story about what it represents; it’s significant because it engenders more compassion and more wisdom. Conversely, a mind-state that may have felt very “mystical” but that brings about cruelty or unskillful behavior is easily judged by its fruits, rather than by the supposedly mystical feeling that accompanied it. One finds in almost every contemplative tradition, theistic and non-theistic, precisely this metric for evaluating truth. The interpretations cannot be verified, but the effects can.

Staying with the experience itself also lessens the risk of idolatry. Any concept we have of God, even an experiential one, is not God; it is a finite concept, tied to the finite mind, conceptualized in terms of other finite concepts. Thus any idea or concept imposed upon the ineffable mystical experience actually takes us further from the Divine. The less said, the better. Material proof has nothing to do with God. It only has to do with mistaken utterances about the world of appearance.

And, finally, valuing spiritual experience without determining a set interpretive frame diminishes the allure of particularism. If we suppose that spirituality can prove the mythic assertions of the Bible, we are mistaken. Indeed, the universality of mystical experience is why contemplatives tend more to be universalists than do non-contemplatives. Though there may be phenomenological differences in different spiritual experiences, mysticism makes plain that, if religion is like a finger pointing to the moon, you can see the moon with any number of pointers, even those a particular tradition or text wants to suppress.

1. See my earlier posts on this subject: "Personal Testimony," "Moroni's Promise," "'Our Father in Heaven'," "Trusting Feelings," "'Feelings...Nothing More Than Feelings'." Also, see Arthur Henry King, "A Man Who Speaks to Our Time from Eternity," Ensign (March 1989).

LIKE...YA KNOW?

2011-01-12T22:22:00.000-08:00

GUITAR NOSTALGIA

2011-01-11T00:01:00.000-08:00

In my past couple years of blogging, I've hardly posted any music videos or live performances. Guitar playing is another hobby of mine. I started my freshman year of high school. I originally wanted to play pop punk on bass. But it was the following that opened the door to all kinds of possibilities guitar wise. I remember hearing this album for the very first time in the weight room at my high school. I was forever changed. Up to that point, I had never heard anything so complex, so fast, and so incredibly rad:

I actually read Johnny Got His Gun because of this next song:

And I read For Whom the Bell Tolls because of this:

"Hell yeah" and a wah-pedal never sounded so cool (well, maybe in Sweet Child O'Mine):

More nostalgic musical moments are yet to come. My brother-in-law worked me over in classic rock following this revelation.

GOD SAVE THE KING

2011-01-10T23:58:00.001-08:00

As my good friend Sean noted, if there was a time for Jesus to return, this was it:

Maybe He missed His cue...

"YE ARE THE TEMPLE OF GOD"

2011-01-10T11:38:00.000-08:00

Out of curiosity, I was looking ahead at some of the lessons in the Gospel Doctrine manual this year. In Lesson #33, the manual asks, "What did Paul compare our bodies to? (See 1 Corinthians 3:16–17; 6:19–20.) Why do you think this is an appropriate comparison? What things can defile our bodies? What should we do to treat our bodies as temples?"

While the second reference is appropriate, the first is not. I know General Authorities often interpret 1 Cor. 3:16-17 the same way they do 1 Cor. 6:19-20 (see, for example, the talks by Elder Bednar and Elder Packer, both of which are entitled "Ye Are the Temple of God," or Elder Nelson's "Self-Mastery"), but it is nothing short of ripping it from its context to make a point. I have no problem with using scripture or the language of scripture for prophetic counsel. Often, General Authorities engage in Nephi's "likening the scriptures unto us" (e.g. 1 Nephi 19:23). This is an ancient approach to spiritual texts, both in Jewish, Christian, and pagan circles. The original meaning and intent of the text becomes subordinate to situational application. In antiquity, texts were often allegorized to fit a community's sacred history (including their present circumstances) or in light of newly revealed knowledge or wisdom [1]. The literalism that we find in Christian fundamentalist circles (e.g. Young Earth Creationism, worldwide Noachian flood, rejection of Darwinian evolution, etc.) has nothing to do with traditional Christian exegesis, but instead was an early 20th century response to the "new criticism" in biblical studies as well as the Social Gospel born out of the Progressive Era [2]. Even the academic approach to scripture (which attempts to discover original meaning and intent. It is this approach that I adhere to.) must be recognized as a modern invention.

Then again, I might be too lenient with Church authorities. They very well could just have no idea what they are talking about when they reference 1 Cor. 3:16-17: "Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are." This set of verses has absolutely nothing to do with our individual physical bodies. Nothing at all. The first clue is that "ye" in vs. 16 is plural in Greek. This is a reference to the Church as a whole. Paul has been condemning the divisions within the Church. Unity is his message. Paul attempts to unify the divided Corinthians with the message of Christ's atonement. They are God's field (vs. 5-9) [3]. This draws on the metaphor of Israel as God's vineyard (e.g. Isaiah 5:1-7). The imagery of the Corinthians as "God's field" then shifts to "God's building" (vs. 9). Paul fulfills the role as a "master builder," laying the foundation of Jesus Christ. Those who build upon it with "gold, silver, and precious stones" (which were used to build the temple: see 1 Chronicles 22:14, 16; 29:2) will be rewarded. Those whose works do not withstand the fiery cleansing (which is similar to Malachi 4:1-2) will "suffer loss" (or "punishment"), but will be saved "yet so as by fire" (vs. 15) [4].

This brings us to vs. 15-16. Given the fact that the Corinthian Church has been compared to a field and a building, it makes no sense whatsoever to assume that Paul has suddenly shifted from a collective address to one about individuals (let alone the physical bodies of the individuals). Paul is describing the Corinthian Church as the place where God's Spirit dwells. They are the recipients of the Spirit and its gifts. They are to be a spiritual people. Paul in similar fashion compared the Ephesian Church to the "household of God" (Eph. 2:20), "an holy temple in the Lord" (vs. 21), "an habitation of God through the Spirit" (vs. 22). Even Peter declares the saints to be built up unto a "spiritual house" (1 Pet. 2:5).

This understanding, in my view, makes the connection to 1 Cor. 6:19-20 much deeper and more significant by bringing a communal context to our actions:

Previously, Paul had used the "temple" (naos) metaphor of the Corinthians as a body corporate (3:16-17); now he uses it of the Corinthian bodies individually. What is true of the Corinthians together is true of them individually also: their bodies are holy because they have become places where the Holy Spirit is present. But some of the Corinthians act as if this is not so, and in doing so they are polluting and destroying the whole. So, says Paul, [1 Cor. 6:19b-20]. This is the language of slavery...to remind them to who they belong and therefore who they really are...And since God has bought them at the cost of his Son in death, they are under obligation to render God his due: [6:20b]. Here is the basis for a sexual morality (and therefore a social morality) which neither denigrates the body nor exalts the body as the only worthwhile thing but in which bodily relations are ordered toward their true end: the glory of the God who raised Christ bodily and will raise our bodies also "by his power" [5].

So, next time you are told to "stick to the manual," realize that the manuals (and apostles, for that matter) aren't always right.

1. A perfect example can be found at Allen Hansen's blog, which lists a number of interpretations of Amos, ranging from Qumran to the rabbis to medieval commentaries.

2. See Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton University Press, 2003): pgs. 190-191; Ronald J. Pestritto, William J. Atto, "Introduction to American Progressivism," in American Progressivism: A Reader, eds. Pestritto, Atto (Lexington Books, 2008): pgs. 10-12.

3. Slightly off topic: I think it is worth pointing out that Paul describes himself and Apollos as "one" (Greek hen) in vs. 8. The very same description is given by Christ in reference to Him and His Father (see John 10:30).

4. John T. Townsend compares this verse (along with 1 Corinthians 5:5) to Rosh ha-Shanah 16b-17a bar, which followed the Shammaite train of thought. The "in between" (i.e. those who are not "wholly good nor wholly bad") will "go down to Gehinnom, 'chirp' (cf. Isa. 29:4) and arise" (Townsend, "1 Corinthians 3:15 and the School of Shammai," Harvard Theological Review 61:3, July 1968: pg. 501). The biblical support for this interpretation was Zechariah 13:9. Townsend says, "A Shammaitic interpretation of 1 Cor. 3:15 implies a belief on the part of Paul that at the end of the age there would be a final opportunity for some to be saved even from the fires of Gehinnom" (pg. 503). Drawing on this background, Townsend finds that 1 Cor. 15:29 has "usually been understood to refer to some form of vicarious baptismal rite intended to benefit somehow those who have died. Such a rite would be meaningless if a man's fate had been fully determined in his lifetime; and in view of this difficulty some commentators have asserted that, although the Apostle tolerated the rite, he did not approve of it. Such a suggestion, however, appears somewhat forced, and a better explanation is that Paul had no reason to condemn the rite because he believed that the final opportunity for salvation would not precede the end of the age" (pg. 503). This is enlightening, particularly with the doctrine recorded in D&C 76 regarding the terrestrial and telestial inhabitants.

5. Stephen C. Barton, "1 Corinthians," in Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible, eds. James D.G. Dunn, John W. Rogerson (Eerdmans, 2003): pg. 1327. I also used pgs. 1318-1320 for my analysis along with the NET Commentary: pgs. 2230-2233.

MAYBE R.E.M. WAS WRONG

2011-01-10T01:12:00.000-08:00

Matt Ridley has a fairly recent Times article that features this brilliant statement:

My children have seen more snow in Northumberland in the past 11 months than I had before in any year of my life. That’s not a trend. It’s not climate change. It’s weather: just a cold snap.

I have no problem with climate science. I have no problem with admitting the effects that mankind has on its environment. I do have a problem with politicizing climate change in the name of a self-aggrandizing moral crusade.

I also don't like it when opposing views are dismissed in the name of the supposed consensus [1]. A recent Forbes article reads,

Another lie claims that there is a consensus among climate scientists that a known man-made global warming crisis exists. Official statements to the contrary presented by more than 650 international climate-related experts who presented contrary official testimony recorded in a 2008 U.S. Senate minority report suggest otherwise. So do petitions signed by more than 30,000 scientists that have challenged IPCC's 1995 procedures and report representations. Those circumstances prompted Dr. Frederick Seitz, former president of the U.S. Academy of Sciences, the American Physical Society, and Rockefeller University to write in The Wall Street Journal: "I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer review process than events that led to this IPCC report."

MIT climatologist Richard S. Lindzen writes,

One might have thought the revelations [i.e. the "Climategate" emails] would discredit the allegedly settled science underlying currently proposed global warming policy, and, indeed, the revelations may have played some role in the failure of last December's Copenhagen climate conference to agree on new carbon emissions limits. But with the political momentum behind policy proposals and billions in research funding at stake, the impact of the emails appears to have been small...The IPCC's position in its Summary for Policymakers from their Fourth Assessment (2007) is weaker, and simply points out that most warming of the past 50 years or so is due to man's emissions. It is sometimes claimed that the IPCC is 90% confident of this claim, but there is no known statistical basis for this claim -- it's purely subjective. The IPCC also claims that observations of globally averaged temperature anomaly are also consistent with computer model predictions of warming. There are, however, some things left unmentioned about the IPCC claims. For example, the observations are consistent with models only if emissions include arbitrary amounts of reflecting aerosols particles (arising, for example, from industrial sulfates) which are used to cancel much of the warming predicted by the models. The observations themselves, without such adjustments, are consistent with there being sufficiently little warming as to not constitute a problem worth worrying very much about...In France, several distinguished scientists have recently published books criticizing the alarmist focus on carbon emissions. The gist of all the books was the scientific standards for establishing the alarmist concern were low, and the language, in some instances, was intemperate. In response, a letter signed by 489 French climate scientists was addressed to "the highest French scientific bodies: the Ministry of Research, National Center for Scientific Research, and Academy of Sciences" appealing to them to defend climate science against the attacks. There appeared to be no recognition that calling on the funding agencies to take sides in a scientific argument is hardly conducive to free exchange. The controversy was, and continues to be, covered extensively by the French press. In many respects, the French situation is better than in the U.S., insofar as the "highest scientific bodies" have not officially taken public stances -- yet. Despite all this, it does appear that the public at large is becoming increasingly aware that something other than science is going on with regard to climate change, and that the proposed policies are likely to cause severe problems for the world economy. Climategate may thus have had an effect after all.

Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, views the global warming (or "climate change" as it has predominantly been called since the Climategate emails) as an "anti-human ideology":

It is not a new doctrine. It has existed under various headings and in various forms and manifestations for centuries, always based on the idea that the starting point of our thinking should be the Earth, the planet or nature, not man or mankind. It has always been accompanied by the plan that we have to come back to the original state of the Earth, unspoiled by us, humans. The adherents of this doctrine have always considered us, the people, a foreign element. They forget that it doesn’t make sense to speak about the world without people because there would be no one to speak.

I don't engage much in this particular debate. It isn't one that interests me all that much. However, I have to agree with Ridley, who concludes (after laying out many reasons for doing so) [2],

Even if the world warms as much as the consensus expects, the net harm still looks small alongside the real harm now being done by preventable causes; and if it does warm this much, it will be because more people are rich enough to afford to do something about it [3].

Or maybe Tim Minchin is right: we just need to get rid of plastic bags.

1. See "Estimated 40 Percent of Scientists Doubt Manmade Global Warming," National Association of Scholars (Jan. 3, 2011). Also, see the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle.

2. This includes the following: whatever possible warming will be quite mild; the last three decades of slow average temperature changes are more compatible with a low-sensitivity than a high-sensitivity model of greenhouse warming; clouds may slow the warming as much as water vapor may amplify it; the increase in methane has been decelerating for twenty years; the earth was warmer in medieval times and about 6,000 years ago; humanity and nature survived much faster warming lurches during the ice ages. See Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (HarperCollins, 2010): pg. 329-330, notes on pg. 413. For an interesting read, see Ch. 10 "The Two Great Pessimisms of Today: Africa and Climate After 2010" in its entirety.

3. Ibid.: pg. 341. He has a fantastic list of proven wrong environmental predictions in his recent blog post "Punctured Pessimists."

BLOOD AND POLITICS

2011-01-10T00:04:00.000-08:00

Apparently, there are those who are more concerned with their political ideology than the actual victims of Arizona's horrific shooting (Keith Olbermann is just one example). Thankfully, there are those who are sane (and disgusted) enough to call it out:

Shortly after November's electoral defeat for the Democrats, pollster Mark Penn appeared on Chris Matthews's TV show and remarked that what President Obama needed to reconnect with the American people was another Oklahoma City bombing. To judge from the reaction to Saturday's tragic shootings in Arizona, many on the left (and in the press) agree, and for a while hoped that Jared Lee Loughner's killing spree might fill the bill.

With only the barest outline of events available, pundits and reporters seemed to agree that the massacre had to be the fault of the tea party movement in general, and of Sarah Palin in particular. Why? Because they had created, in New York Times columnist Paul Krugman's words, a "climate of hate."

The critics were a bit short on particulars as to what that meant. Mrs. Palin has used some martial metaphors—"lock and load"—and talked about "targeting" opponents. But as media writer Howard Kurtz noted in The Daily Beast, such metaphors are common in politics. Palin critic Markos Moulitsas, on his Daily Kos blog, had even included Rep. Gabrielle Giffords's district on a list of congressional districts "bullseyed" for primary challenges. When Democrats use language like this—or even harsher language like Mr. Obama's famous remark, in Philadelphia during the 2008 campaign, "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun"—it's just evidence of high spirits, apparently. But if Republicans do it, it somehow creates a climate of hate.

There's a climate of hate out there, all right, but it doesn't derive from the innocuous use of political clichés. And former Gov. Palin and the tea party movement are more the targets than the source.

American journalists know how to be exquisitely sensitive when they want to be. As the Washington Examiner's Byron York pointed out on Sunday, after Major Nidal Hasan shot up Fort Hood while shouting "Allahu Akhbar!" the press was full of cautions about not drawing premature conclusions about a connection to Islamist terrorism. "Where," asked Mr. York, "was that caution after the shootings in Arizona?"

Set aside as inconvenient, apparently. There was no waiting for the facts on Saturday. Likewise, last May New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and CBS anchor Katie Couric speculated, without any evidence, that the Times Square bomber might be a tea partier upset with the ObamaCare bill.

So as the usual talking heads begin their "have you no decency?" routine aimed at talk radio and Republican politicians, perhaps we should turn the question around. Where is the decency in blood libel?

To paraphrase Justice Cardozo ("proof of negligence in the air, so to speak, will not do"), there is no such thing as responsibility in the air. Those who try to connect Sarah Palin and other political figures with whom they disagree to the shootings in Arizona use attacks on "rhetoric" and a "climate of hate" to obscure their own dishonesty in trying to imply responsibility where none exists. But the dishonesty remains.

To be clear, if you're using this event to criticize the "rhetoric" of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you're either: (a) asserting a connection between the "rhetoric" and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie; or (b) you're not, in which case you're just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. Which is it?

I understand the desperation that Democrats must feel after taking a historic beating in the midterm elections and seeing the popularity of ObamaCare plummet while voters flee the party in droves. But those who purport to care about the health of our political community demonstrate precious little actual concern for America's political well-being when they seize on any pretext, however flimsy, to call their political opponents accomplices to murder.

Where is the decency in that? [1]

May God bless those who have lost loved ones in this tragedy and may He bless Congresswoman Giffords with a full recovery.

1. Glenn Harland Reynolds, "The Arizona Tragedy and the Politics of Blood Libel," The Wall Street Journal (Jan. 10, 2011). The "climate of hate" phrasing is nothing new to political mudslinging. One needs only to look at the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. Such terminology became "code for heavy right-wing and Republican activity" (Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, Doubleday, 2007: pg. 203. See particularly Ch. 6 "From Kennedy's Myth to Johnson's Dream: Liberal Fascism and the Cult of the State."). Ironically, Oswald was a Communist. George Will's recent Washington Times article illuminates this point. Debra Saunders also has an insightful article, as does Charles Krauthammer. Patrick Jonsson points out that the emerging evidence points away from political rhetoric as the culprit. Michael Shermer and Stephanie Pappas hit the nail on the head, Shermer especially playing up a similar idea found in my Packer post (though I do not share Shermer's agnosticism).

A MAN OF TRUE GRIT

2011-01-06T14:07:00.000-08:00

I just recently saw the Coen Brothers' retelling of True Grit, starring Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and brilliant newcomer Hailee Steinfeld. I'm all for Bridges and Steinfeld getting nominated (and winning), as well as the film itself (though Inception should win).

Nonetheless, the new version of the following scene can't top the original's one-handed cocking of the rifle (Terminator 2 anyone?) or the offended look on John Wayne's face. You just know the only reason he charged them was because of the insult, you know when the Academy voted for Wayne's Best Actor award they were thinking about this scene, and you know I only used my recent viewing of True Grit as an excuse to post it. Bask in the awesomeness:

SPIRIT BABIES & AFTERLIFE WORSHIP?

2011-01-05T13:28:00.000-08:00

Aaron Shafovaloff of Mormonism Research Ministry had a recorded exchange with Bob Vukich a little over a year ago on the subject of Aaron's pet project "Was God Once Perhaps a Sinner?" In it, he defends the "otherliness" of God (and consequently the impossibility of God being a man or man being a god) by appealing to the trishagion (i.e. "Holy, Holy, Holy") found in liturgical prayers and various scripture (at 16:37). To Shafovaloff, the Thrice Holy defines God's unique, unchanging, transcendent nature. In a pristine example of his mature approach to Mormonism, he writes on his YouTube account, "If your spirit-kids try to worship you in the after-life, spank them. May only the Most High be worshiped! [sic]" He has offered criticisms elsewhere on the change in the Gospel Principles book regarding "Exaltation." The prior edition read, "Those who receive exaltation in the celestial kingdom through faith in Jesus Christ will...have their righteous family members with them and will be able to have spirit children also. These spirit children will have the same relationship to them as we do to our Heavenly Father. They will be an eternal family." The new one reads, "They will be united eternally with their righteous family members and will be able to have eternal increase." While I am cautious regarding doctrine of reproduction in the pre-mortal and post-mortal existence [1], I also embrace it for its allusions to the ancient Israelite concept of a fertility goddess [2]. But for the Shaf, being a god and possibly (I stress this for a reason, seeing that I somewhat doubt this to be the case) [3] being worshipped in the afterlife is a big no-no because "Holy, Holy, Holy is the LORD of hosts" (Isaiah 6:3) or "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty, who was and is and is to come" (Revelation 4:8). Unfortunately for him, the rabbis disagree:

Indeed, the rabbinic tradition sometimes went to the extreme of anthropomorphism: Not only did it make the notion of man's likeness to God as physical and detailed as possible (it included circumcision among the distinguishing marks of the Deity), but it took the likeness as proof of the potential perfection of man and taught that Adam before the fall and the righteous in the world to come realized this perfection and were rightly, therefore, to be worshipped by the angels: We read in Baba Batra 75b, "Rabba said R. Johanan, 'The righteous are destined to be called by the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, for it is said, "Everyone who is called by my name, him have I created, formed and made that he should also share my glory.""...R. Elazar said, 'The trishagion [i.e. Holy, Holy, Holy] will be said before the righteous as it is said before the Holy One, blessed be He.' In a later passage in the Tanhuma and in the condensation of Bereshit Rabbati this potential divinity and predicted worship are presented as the direct consequences of man's being in the image of God. So it is in the Latin life of Adam (13ff.), where, after Adam's creation, the angels are ordered to "worship the image of God" [4].

Would worship of another being besides the High God destroy monotheism? Yehezkel Kaufmann doesn't think so:

Even the worship of other supernatural beings...cannot be considered in necessary contradiction to monotheism...The One is not necessarily “jealous” in a cultic sense. There is room in monotheism for the worship of lower divine beings—with the understanding that they belong to the suit of the One. Thus Christianity knows the worship of saints and intercessors, as does Islam...Israelite monotheism tended toward cultic exclusivism and was crystallized in this form in the Bible. But during the pre-exilic period Israel was still moving from the basic monotheistic idea to its extreme cultic consequence [5].

Baruch Halpern provides an excellent hypothetical exchange with an undergrad regarding the definition of monotheism:

"How do we differ from pagans?" "We have only one God." "Do Catholics believe in saints, Jews and Muslims in angels, Protestants in devils?" "That is different," comes the response! "Do angels not live forever, enjoy supernatural powers, exist in a dimension different from that inhabited by mortals?" "Still different!" ...[T]he difference between monotheism and polytheism in the student's mind is the difference between God and god - between two ways of spelling the same word... [6].

In short,

No ancient monotheist was a modern monotheist. Divinity expressed itself along a gradient, and the High God...hardly stood alone. Lesser divinities filled in the gap, cosmic and metaphysical, between humans and God...Antiquity's universe, by comparison, was filled with gods...While not every ancient polytheist was a monotheist, all ancient monotheists were, by our measure, polytheists [7].

UPDATE: Allen Hansen has a must-read blog post touching on this very same subject.

1. For my reasons, see Blake T. Ostler, "The Idea of Pre-Existence in the Development of Mormon Thought," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 15:1 (1982).

2. See William G. Dever, Did God Have a Wife?: Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel (Eerdmans, 2005); Judith M. Hadley, The Cult of Asherah in Ancient Israel and Judah: Evidence for a Hebrew Goddess (Cambridge University Press, 2000); John Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (Sheffield Academic Press, 2000); Kevin L. Barney, "How to Worship Our Mother in Heaven (Without Getting Excommunicated)," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 41:4 (2008).

3. Those who are sealed and faithful "shall pass by the angels, and the gods, which are set there, to their exaltation and glory in all things, as hath been sealed upon their heads, which glory shall be a fulness and a continuation of the seeds forever and ever" (D&C 132:19; emphasis mine). I'm not big on speculating about future reproductive capabilities or the relationship with the children who are produced by it. The point of the post is to demonstrate that Shafovaloff's criticisms fail to take into account more ancient sources.

4. Morton Smith, "The Image of God: Notes on the Hellenization of Judaism, with Especial Reference to Goodenough's Work on Jewish Symbols," in Studies in the Cult of Yahweh, Vol. 1: Studies in Historical Method, Ancient Israel, Ancient Judaism, ed. Shaye J.D. Cohen (Brill, 1996): pgs. 120-121. Smith notes Paul's awareness of deification by means of the divine image and divine name. Paul's focus was on Christ's image and name, something I discuss in the posts "Image and Sonship" and "Taking on the Name: The Creation of Creators." See Daniel Boyarin's discussion of the worship of Metatron (the deified Enoch) and other Logos-like entities in his Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004): pgs. 120-125. For more on the subject of Metatron, see Daniel Abrams, "The Boundaries of Divine Ontology: The Inclusion and Exclusion of Metatron in the Godhead," Harvard Theological Review 87:3 (1994).

5. Quoted in Baruch Halpern, "'Brisker Pipes than Poetry': The Development of Israelite Monotheism," in From Gods to God: The Dynamics of Iron Age Cosmologies (Mohr Siebeck Tubingen, 2006): pg. 19.

6. Ibid.: pg. 16.

7. Paula Fredriksen, "Gods and the One God," Bible Review (Feb. 2003): pg. 49.

THE IRONY OF THE TRINITY

2011-01-05T11:06:00.000-08:00

British philosopher Christopher Stead writes,

Christian writers naturally turned to the Bible for their teaching on the nature of God. But the use of it was often influenced by the philosophical thought of their own day. The Hebrews...pictured the God whom they worshipped as having a body and mind like our own, though trascending humanity in the splendour of his appearance, in his power, his wisdom, and the constancy of his care for his creatures. Such a conception, set out in the earlier books of the Old Testament, retained its authority despite some later changes of emphasis. But this biblical view...was radically modified in the teaching of Philo of Alexandria...[who] presents him as the metaphysical first principal of the universe, without bodily form or human passions, indeed without any sensible qualities: a perfectly simple, unchangeable, unfathomable being...Christian writers developed a broadly similar view, partly because they were influenced by the same philosophical authorities, partly through direct imitation of Philo himself. To this they added their doctrine of the Trinity... [1].

Jewish theologians didn't completely rid themselves of the concept of an anthropomorphic God until the 12th-13th century [2]. Even the anti-anthropomorphism of certain Christian philosophers provide evidence that early Christians believed in an anthropomorphic God [3]. Humans were the literal image of God and therefore partook (or at least had the potential to partake) in His divinity [4]. David Bentley Hart, an Eastern Orthodox philosopher (and, consequently, a Trinitarian), recognizes that the earliest Christians would have understood the cosmos to consist of a hierarchy of divine beings, with the Father being at the top as the Most High. Christ was therefore understood as a subordinate, second god:

[T]his secondary divine principle could be called God's "Son" or "Wisdom" or "Logos." The term "Logos" came to enjoy a special favor among Christians, as it had been adopted by the author of the prologue of John's Gospel to identify the pre-incarnate Christ...As a general rule, the "articular" form ho Theos-literally, "the God"-was a title reserved for God Most High or God the Father, while only the "inarticular" form theos was used to designate this secondary divinity. This distinction, in fact, is preserved in the prologue of John, whose first verse could justly be translated as: "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was a god." It was entirely natural, therefore, for many Christians...to think of Christ as the incarnation of this derivative divine being who, though he functions in all respects as God for us, is still a lesser being than the Father [5].

The Trinity, therefore, was not an original belief of Christianity. He goes on to explain the position of Arius (c. 250-336), who believed Jesus to be a created being, subordinate to the Father. It must be remembered that by this time, Christian philosophy and theology divided ontologically between God and the created order (and by created, they meant creatio ex nihilo or "creation out of nothing" - something that neither Mormonism or the Bible teaches). As Blake Ostler put it,

When we talk about one God in modern Christianity we begin with a basic fundamental assumption in all of Judeo-Christian-Islamic thought: it is that there is God and then there is everything else. I call this the assumption of metaphysical monotheism and this is the very fundamental point from which [other Christians] begin...and it is this assumption: There exists a simple, immaterial substance that is necessarily the sole instance of the kind "divine" and utterly unique in the sense that there are no other members in the class of being occupied by this simple substance; alone has ontologically necessary actuality; (that means God is the only one that can't fail to exist) and everything else that is actual in any way depends upon this simple substance for its actuality. What that means in shorthand term is, God created and everything else is created. It's that simple [6].

Therefore, to Arius, Jesus could not be divine in the same way the Father is. Hart explains why this was opposed, leading to the formulation of the Trinity:

Ultimately, though, the Arian position was untenable simply because it reduced to incoherence the Christian story of redemption as it had been understood, proclaimed, prayed, and lived for generations...For Athanasius, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and many others, it was first and foremost the question of salvation that must determine how the identity of Christ is to be conceived. And they understood salvation, it must be appreciated, not in the rather impoverished way of many modern Christians, as a kind of extrinsic legal transaction between the divine and human by which a debt is canceled and the redeemed soul issued a certificate of entry into the afterlife; rather they saw salvation as nothing less than a real and living union between God and his creatures. To be saved was to be joined to God himself in Christ, to be in fact "divinized"-which is to say, in the words of 2 Peter 1:4, to become "partakers of the divine nature." In a lapidary phrase favored, in one form or another, by a number of the church fathers, "God became man that man might become god." In Christ, the Nicene party believed, the human and divine had been joined together in a perfect and indissoluble unity, by participation in which human beings might be admitted to share in his divinity...Only God can join us to God. And so, if it is Christ who joins us to the Father, then Christ must himself be no less than God, and must be equal to the Father in divinity [7].

Another scholar writes, "A fully divine Saviour was needed to ensure the salvation of mankind, which was understood on both sides as an actual divinization, or exaltation to the level of Deity" [8]. He continues:

To assert that deification is incompatible with the Bible on the basis of the differentiation between the divine and human found therein is to impose an ontological standard on the text which was not there originally. Stauffer asserts that the Semitic concept of God has to do primarily with power, not metaphysical being. Immortality "is simply a presupposition of this lordship," so that "the emphasis is on the dynamic definition rather than the metaphysical." Although the Septuagint had greatly subdued the anthropomorphisms of the Hebrew Scriptures, "the personal nature of God" was very much "a living reality" to the earliest Christians. Matthew 5:48 calls God τελειος "not in the sense of metaphysical speculation, but in terms of moral perfection." God is "faithful," meaning that his goodness is unfailing, but nowhere is he described as "unchangeable" in an ontological sense. The glib assumption that the Bible's "sharp distinction" between God and man precludes deification is ill-conceived; in fact, this is an example of Greek philosophical metaphysics read into the text. The irony is that it was the Church Fathers themselves who worked at reconciling such philosophical principles with the biblical revelation, while at the same time they were expounding a soteriology of deification [9].

The doctrine of theosis can be found in the writings of early Christians such as St. Justin Martyr, St. Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, etc. Granted, it isn't exactly the same as Mormonism, mainly due to the differences between the concept of the Trinity and the concept of the Godhead:

The most profound difference between the doctrines of theosis and exaltation revolves around the way in which humans become divinized, or become gods. In the doctrine of theosis, divinization comes about through participation in the divine energies of the one divine nature, which divine nature is fully possessed by each of the three divine persons who comprise the Trinity—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In the doctrine of exaltation, divinization comes about through growth of a capacity which is innate to the children born of Heavenly Parents—the Father and his eternal companion. This difference—the difference between participation and growth—can be rooted in two very different ontological understandings of divine nature and human nature [10].

In short,

[T]he doctrines of theosis and exaltation are functionally equivalent while being ontologically distinct. In other words, in both cases the results of human divinization are equivalent—humans come to possess divine qualities and attributes, a new manner of life, which they did not possess before and which they could not attain of their own volition. Yet the ways in which human divinization take place—in the case of theosis, through participation, and in the case of exaltation, through growth—are grounded in profoundly different ontological visions of human and divine nature [11].

Nevertheless, as Daniel Peterson said, "Now people have told me, 'Well your doctrine of deification is not exactly like that of the Early Christians.' To which I usually respond, 'Well your non-existent doctrine of deification is utterly unlike that of the Early Christians!'" [12] Vajda lists the following similarities between theosis and LDS exaltation: (1) terminology and attributes, (2) the centrality of Christ, (3) role of human works, (4) role of ritual, and (5) eternal progression. He concludes,

[T]he Mormons are truly "godmakers": as the doctrine of exaltation explains, the fullness of human salvation means "becoming a god." Yet what was meant to be a term of ridicule has turned out to be a term of approbation, for the witness of the Greek Fathers of the Church...is that they also believed that salvation meant "becoming a god." It seems that if one's soteriology cannot accommodate a doctrine of human divinization, then it has at least implicitly, if not explicitly, rejected the heritage of the early Christian church and departed from the faith of first millennium Christianity. However, if that is the case, those who would espouse such a soteriology also believe, in fact, that Christianity, from about the second century on, has apostatized and "gotten it wrong" on this core issue of human salvation. Thus, ironically, those who would excoriate Mormons for believing in the doctrine of exaltation actually agree with them that the early church experienced a "great apostasy" on fundamental doctrinal questions. And the supreme irony is that such persons should probably investigate the claims of the LDS Church, which proclaims that within itself is to be found the "restoration of all things" [13].

It is worth pointing out that Vajda wrote this while a Dominican priest. He has since joined the Church. So, next time you hear "but you believe you can become a god!!", remember that so did the earliest Christians. Ironically, it was this very belief that led to the finalization of the Trinity in the 4th century: the primary orthodoxy that defines supposed "true Christians."

UPDATE: William Hamblin provides this commentary on the Incarnation of the Word: "This is a fundamental concept: that Jesus, the preexistent divine Word, has become flesh (sarx), that is, a human being. The Greek term sarx means literally the meat, or fleshy part of a body, and hence, the body as a whole. It is sometimes used in the New Testament in opposition to spirit (pneuma), especially in Paul. This spirit-flesh duality is occasionally found in John (3:6, 6:63). Jesus' incarnation allows the complete fusion of the two. All of us, like Jesus, are born of the flesh, and all of us, through Jesus, can become born of the spirit (3:6). In a sense, the spirit becomes flesh so the flesh can become spirit." This last part reminds me of the Patristic "God became man that man might become god" as well as 3 Nephi 1:12-14 and Mosiah 15:1-4.

1. Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 1994): pg. 120.

2. See Shamma Friedman, "Anthropomorphism and Its Eradication" in Iconoclasm and Iconoclash: Struggle for Religious Identity, ed. W.J. van Asselt, Paul van Geest, Daniela Muller, Theo Salemink (Brill, 2007).

3. See David L. Paulsen, "Early Christian Belief in a Corporeal Deity: Origen and Augustine as Reluctant Witnesses," Harvard Theological Review 83:2 (1990); Carl W. Griffin and David L. Paulsen, "Augustine and the Corporeality of God," Harvard Theological Review 95:1 (2002); Paulsen, "The Doctrine of Divine Embodiment: Restoration, Judeo-Christian, and Philosophical Perspectives," BYU Studies 35:4 (1995-1996); Paulsen, "Divine Embodiment: The Earliest Christian Understanding of God," in Early Christians in Disarray: Contemporary LDS Perspectives on the Christian Apostasy, ed. Noel B. Reynolds (FARMS, 2005).

4. See David Bokovoy's enduring "'Ye Really Are Gods': A Response to Michael Heiser concerning the LDS Use of Psalm 82 and the Gospel of John," FARMS Review 19:1 (2007).

5. Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (Yale University Press, 2009): pg. 204.

6. Ostler, "The Fallacy of Fundamentalist Assumptions," Transcript of a presentation given at the 2005 FAIR Conference.

7. Hart, 2009: pgs. 205-206.

8. Keith Edward Norman, "Deification: The Context of Athanasian Soteriology," PhD dissertation, Duke University (1980).

9. Ibid. Deification (and thus a lack of metaphysical monotheism) can be found within Judaism as well. For example, after reviewing the "claims of the Hekhalot literature that a man, Enoch, ascended to heaven and was metamorphosed into Metatron, the 'little Yahweh'," Peter Hayman asks, "But how does this material square with the supposed transcendental monotheism of Judaism from the post-exilic period on? Not at all, as far as I can see!" (Hayman, "Monotheism: A Misused Word in Jewish Studies?" Journal of Jewish Studies 42:1, 1991: pg. 5).

10. Jordan Vajda, "'Partakers of the Divine Nature': A Comparative Analysis of Patristic and Mormon Doctrines of Divinization," Master's thesis, Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology (1998).

11. Ibid.

12. Peterson, "Autobiographical Notes on My Testimony," Transcript of a presentation given at the 2004 FAIR Conference.

13. Vajda, 1998.

ABSOLUTES & AMBIGUITY; MODERN & POSTMODERN

2011-01-02T01:55:00.000-08:00

I started this post months ago when I substituted in Gospel Doctrine [1]. It was Lesson #38 "Beside Me There Is No Saviour." Being the opening of Deutero-Isaiah, I took time to briefly explain the concept of multiple Isaianic authors and time periods (with Second Isaiah taking place during the Babylonian captivity following the Josianic reforms and destruction of both Jerusalem and the temple). I explained the divine council setting of Isaiah 40 and Second Isaiah's prophetic call. I brought up Isaiah's festival imagery, particularly in Isa. 40:3. We briefly discussed the significance of the New Testament's quotation of Isa. 40:3 (as well as its proper Hebraic reading i.e. "A voice cries out: In the wilderness prepare the way of the LORD," not "The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness..."). I noted the language of covenant and renewal throughout the chapters. I touched on the mission of God's chosen people (Israel) and His chosen Servant (the Messiah, the royal high priest). In connection to this, I discussed Isaiah's "monotheism" statements and their meaning of God's incomparability (along with their evidence for the possibility of Yahweh and El's conflation). It was about here that I think I began to lose my audience (the participation had been pretty mild already, but had nearly died by that point). The following explanation from Margaret Barker (or the basic concept, to be more accurate) suddenly came to mind:

45:16 and 20-21 are attacks on idol worshipers, those who carry their gods (v. 20), playing on the fact that "carry" and "forgive sin" are the same word in Hebrew. Thus the prophet contrasts the saving forgiveness of the LORD with the inability of wooden idols to save. The defeated and discredited gods and their peoples are not, however, abandoned; they are invited to acknowledge the LORD and be saved (v. 23). A consequence of Deutero-Isaiah's monotheism was that, if there was only one God, that God no longer belonged to exclusively to one nation. "To me every knee shall bow" became an important proof-text for the first Christians...The contrast...is between the gods who are carried and the LORD who carries and forgives his people, that is, carries their sins, the Hebrew idiom [2].

I explained that Isaiah was no longer portraying Yahweh as a national deity, but a universal one whom all gods and peoples owed allegiance. Israel's God was no longer confined to the borders of Israel, though the covenant and mission of the people of Israel remained. This brought about a lively discussion about the "false gods" we find ourselves devoted to in the course of our lives and how purging ourselves of such is necessary for covenant fidelity. This in turn prompted my unplanned allusion to a brilliant First Things article by David Bentley Hart. He explains that the First Commandment ("no other gods before me") for Christians came through and was bound to Christ (Isaiah's Yahweh). This loyalty

was not simply a prohibition of foreign cults, but a call to arms, an assault upon the antique order of the heavens—a declaration of war upon the gods...Life, for the early Church, was spiritual warfare; and no baptized Christian could doubt how great a transformation—of the self and the world—it was to consent to serve no other god than Him whom Christ revealed...We are still at war, of course, but the situation of the Church has materially altered...For, as I say, we moderns believe in nothing: the nothingness of the will miraculously giving itself form by mastering the nothingness of the world. The gods, at least, were real...How, though, to make war on nothingness, on the abyss itself, denuded of its mythic allure? It seems to me much easier to convince a man that he is in thrall to demons and offer him manumission than to convince him that he is a slave to himself and prisoner to his own will [3].

Hart, however, provides the alarming insight that "humanity could not have passed from the devotions of antiquity to those of modernity but for the force of Christianity in history...The gospel shook the ancient world to its foundations, indeed tore down the heavens, and so helped to bring us to the ruin of the present moment." He finds that the "only cult that can truly thrive in the aftermath of Christianity is a sordid service of the self, of the impulses of the will, of the nothingness that is all that the withdrawal of Christianity leaves behind. The only futures open to post-Christian culture are conscious nihilism...[W]e should confess that the failure of Christian culture to live up to its victory over the old gods has allowed the dark power that once hid behind them to step forward in propria persona." Such nihilism breeds restlessness in the soul, "for modern culture is nothing but the wasteland from which the gods have departed, and so this restlessness has become its own deity...[A]s a quite concrete historical condition, the only choice that remains for the children of post-Christian culture is not whom to serve, but whether to serve Him whom Christ has revealed or to serve nothing—the nothing" [4].

I mention all this due to some recent reflection on both modern philosophy and modern Mormonism. Hart's dichotomy between Christ and modern nihilism implies (or at least is interpreted to imply) a dichotomy between absolutism and relativism, as does Isaiah's consistent loyalty to Yahweh as the source of salvation despite the Babylonian captivity [5]. But how are we to understand these two competing -isms? I've expressed a kind of pluralistic, perhaps even postmodernist view of Mormonism elsewhere on my blog [6]. But as I stated in my earlier post, this does not mean all views are true or equal. What sparked this renewed interest was a fairly recent Facebook status by my friend Brad Eggerton:

"There is absolutely no absolute truth!" - guy in my sociology class.

Despite my pluralistic view, the above is simply nonsensical. As philosopher Roger Scruton observes,

If we examine the gurus of the new university establishment, those whose works are most often cited in the endless stream of articles devoted to debunking Western culture, we discover that they are all opponents of objective truth. Nietzsche is a favorite, since he made the point explicitly: "There are no truths," he wrote, "only interpretations." Now, either what Nietzsche said is true—in which case it is not true, since there are no truths—or it is false...It is vain to argue against these gurus. No argument, however rational, can counter the massive will to believe that endears them to their normal readers. After all, a rational argument assumes precisely what they put in question—namely, the possibility of rational argument...The question ceases to be "What are you saying?" and becomes, instead, "Where are you speaking from?" ...[W]e who live in the amorphous and multicultural environment of the postmodern city must open our hearts and minds to all cultures and be wedded to none. The inescapable result of this is relativism: the recognition that no culture has any special claim to our attention, and that no culture can be judged or dismissed from outside [7].

My friend Josh Harris made a compelling point regarding postmodernism: its very name is self-refuting. In an attempt to be more open to a variety of views, it rejects modernism by becoming postmodern. In this sense, it becomes the very thing it wishes to combat:

What is wrong with the Enlightenment project is not the belief that reason can provide a trans-cultural morality. For that belief is true. What is wrong is the assumption that people have some faint interest in reason. The falsehood of this assumption is there for all to see in our academies: in the relativism of their gurus and in the misguided absolutism—absolutism about the wrong things and for the wrong reasons, absolutism that excludes all but the relativists from their doors [8].

However, both Josh and I (if I understood him correctly) embrace certain values of postmodern thought. I think this mainly comes from recognizing postmodernism as an approach, not necessarily a belief. As philosopher James Faulconer put it, "Modernism is a set or constellation of doctrines or beliefs; postmodernism is a set of strategies for questioning modernism" [9]. Unfortunately, this understanding has been warped by some of postmodernism's own advocates (thus rightfully leading to critiques along the lines of Scruton). Faulconer explains, "The outrageous forms of postmodernism turn out to be more modern, though self-contradictory, than those who hold it think...One can believe that modernism is wrong about knowledge but that knowledge is, nevertheless, possible. Those who accept the strong relativist argument are radical only in their posture, not in their position; radical relativism is an unsophisticated, privative variation on modernism" [10]. Ben McGuire finds that Mormonism contains three postmodern elements: 1) continuing/continual revelation and the possibility of overturning previously accepted "truth," 2) the theological hierarchy, which includes personal revelation, self-direction, and individual experience (his example of Lehi/Nephi's vision is perfect), and 3) the pluralistic approach to discovering truth [11]. All of these elements, however, do not have anything to do with the supposed relative nature of truth (to be clear, McGuire does not argue that truth is relative) or that all paths or policies are equal (e.g. struggling with and overcoming the supposed vice of two pairs of earrings is not equal to struggling with and overcoming an addiction to pornography, despite the former's more frequent mentioning in Sunday School classes) [12]. It has to do with the limitations of the human experience, expression, and comprehension. I think William Hamblin sums this up in his introduction to his new Patheos column:

In the nearly forty years I have spent studying ancient history and religion, one of the most important truths I've discovered is this: I know fewer answers today than I "knew" when I started studying four decades ago...But I believe I am at last beginning to understand the right questions...My conviction that in this life we can only know in part does not, however, make me a post-modern relativist. Ontologically, I believe there is absolute truth. But epistemologically, I believe that truth about the human past cannot be absolutely understood by humans, for a wide range of reasons. This is not because of the relative nature of truth, but because of the limited nature of the surviving evidence from the past, and the imperfect nature of human reason, knowledge, and understanding. In the tension between intellectual hubris and humility, I think most of us could use a healthy dose of the latter. Although we may seem to be cursed, as Paul says, to be "ever learning, but never able to come to the knowledge of the truth" (2 Tim. 3:7), I do not take this to mean that we should not be "ever learning." When Paul said, "we know in part," I believe he did not mean that absolute truths cannot be known at all, but rather that our knowledge of absolute truth will always be conditioned and imperfect [13].

I am an advocate for a postmodernism that breeds humility. This comes by realizing (as Thomas Sowell has) that no one person has even 1% of all available knowledge; that the "ignorance, prejudices, and groupthink of an educated elite are still ignorance, prejudices, and groupthink" [14]. I reject, however, that all beliefs or choices are equal, good, or true. Ideas, beliefs, and opinions should be respected in the sense that they are engaged thoughtfully and intelligently. They are to be understood properly and accurately. But respect does not mean acceptance, nor does it mean that Dudesque responses qualify as actual arguments.

1. My study for the lesson largely consisted of the commentary from the New English Translation, Margaret Barker, "Isaiah," in Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible (Eerdmans, 2003), Michael Heiser, "Divine Council," in Dictionary of the Old Testament: Wisdom, Poetry & Writings (InterVarsity Press, 2008), Frank Moore Cross, Jr., "The Council of Yahweh in Second Isaiah," Journal of Near Eastern Studies 12:4 (1953), and David Larsen's blog post at Heavenly Ascents. I also encourage reading David's notes (as well as the post's comments from insightful readers, especially David T) from Lena Sophia Tiemeyer's presentation "What Did the Authors of Isaiah 40-55 Really Know About Babylon?" regarding the original setting of Deutero-Isaiah's writings. To correct one of my own comments on the post, David Bokovoy gives his hypothesis regarding Nephi's use of Second Isaiah in Part 4 of his 2007 FAIR Presentation, not Part 3.

2. Barker, 2003.

3. David Hart, "Christ and Nothing," First Things 136 (Oct. 2003). He also discusses this in his excellent Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (Yale University Press, 2009).

4. Hart, 2003.

5. I'm not stating that God Himself is to be understood as an absolute. See Blake T. Ostler, "Absurdities of Prayer to the Metaphysical Absolute," Inscape (Fall-Winter 1983); Ostler, "The Fallacy of Fundamentalist Assumptions," Transcript of his presentation given at the 2005 FAIR Conference; Jacob T. Baker, "'The Grandest Principle of the Gospel': Christian Nihilism, Sanctified Activism, and Eternal Progression," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 41:3 (Fall 2008).

6. Chris Smith was kind enough to link to a couple presentations on this subject, including Jason Monson's "Mormonism and the Religious Other" at the 2009 SMPT Conference and Jacob Baker's "Joseph Smith's Welding Theology: An Introductory Overview."

7. Roger Scruton, "What Ever Happened to Reason?" City Journal 9:2 (Spring 1999).

8. Scruton, 1999.

9. James E. Faulconer, "The Myth of the Modern; The Anti-myth of the Postmodern," FARMS Review 20:1 (2008).

10. Faulconer, 2008. This is similar to the arguments against William James' pragmatism: "James's pragmatism, viewed outside the context of his notion of our experience of the world, will inevitably result in a distortion of what he means. His ideas of "thoughts verifying themselves" or being true because they "satisfy" some ends are invariably dismissed, on the basis of modern epistemology, as "subjective." For James, truth pertains to mind, but mind can only be understood in terms of its (our) prereflective, pretheoretical experiences of the world. This is the basis of James's rejection not only of traditional rationalism and empiricism, but also of his rejection of traditional realism and idealism—these traditions all understand "mind" as somehow independent of the experienced world, as a means or agency for knowing the world. But for James, "mind" always needs to be spoken of in terms of embodied beings—beings who are in the world and act upon the world. And as a consequence, the world is knowable only to the extent that it falls within our purposeful, ideal, and often spontaneous goals or aims" (M. Gerald Bradford, "William James on Religion and God: An Introduction to The Varieties of Religious Experience," in Revelation, Reason, and Faith: Essays in Honor of Truman G. Madsen, ed. Donald W. Parry, Daniel C. Peterson, Stephen D. Ricks: FARMS, 2002).

11. Ben McGuire, "Is Mormonism a Postmodern Religion?" Patheos (Dec. 29, 2010). An article worth exploring in connection with McGuire's is Terryl L. Givens, "The Book of Mormon and Dialogic Revelation," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 10:2 (2001), which is expanded and expounded on in ch. 8 of his By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion (Oxford University Press, 2002).

12. To be accurate, President Hinckley actually said, "We—the First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve—have taken the position, and I quote, that “the Church discourages tattoos. It also discourages the piercing of the body for other than medical purposes, although it takes no position on the minimal piercing of the ears by women for one pair of earrings”" ("Your Greatest Challenge, Mother," Ensign, Nov. 2000, emphasis mine; he gave similar counsel in "Great Shall Be the Peace of Your Children" of the same Conference). This wasn't the focus of his talk. Elder Ballard isn't even sure whether or not wearing two pairs of earrings will have "eternal consequences." Compare this to President Hinckley's 2004 Conference talk "A Tragic Evil Among Us," Elder Oaks' 2005 Conference Talk "Pornography," and Matthew's record of the Savior's Sermon on the Mount (or Nephi's version at the Temple). Plus, the last time I checked, symposiums weren't being held on the social costs of wearing 2+ pairs of earrings.

13. William J. Hamblin, "An Enigmatic Mirror: An Introduction," Patheos (Dec. 26, 2010).

14. Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society (Basic Books, 2009). In regards to groupthink: "...American naturalist William Beebe came across a strange sight in the jungle of Guyana. A group of army ants was moving in a huge circle. The ants went round and round in the same circle for two days until most of them dropped dead. The reason is that when a group of army ants is separated from its colony, it obeys a simple rule: follow the ant in front of you. The trouble is that if the ant in front of you is lost, so will you be" (Jonathan Sacks, "The Prophets Are Our Unflappable Sat-Nav, Not the Lost Car in Front," The Sunday Times, Feb. 4, 2006).

THE FIRST VISION & FORGIVENESS

2010-12-29T11:07:00.000-08:00

My missionary sister-in-law wrote this to me last week:

I did have a question for you. Something that the Anti guy asked was "How could Joseph Smith have seen God and not been cleansed from his sins?" He said that many of the ancient prophets had been cleansed first and that it would be impossible that Joseph Smith could have seen God without being cleansed. I know that he had to have been transfigured, but thats all I really understand about that. Do you have any info on this particular argument?

That I do. Joseph Smith's first written account of his vision (1832) reads,

...while in the attitude of calling upon the Lord in the 16th year of my age a piller of light above the brightness of the sun at noon day come down from above and rested upon me and I was filled with the spirit of God and the Lord opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord and he spake unto me saying, "Joseph my son thy sins are forgiven thee..." (bold mine; printed in Dean C. Jessee, "The Early Accounts of Joseph Smith's First Vision," BYU Studies 9:3, 1969: pg. 4).

Forgiveness of sins was actually the emphasis of Joseph's first account. This is what D&C 20:5 means when it says, "After it was truly manifested unto this first elder that he had received a remission of his sins..." Compare this portion of D&C 20 to Joseph Smith - History. The "manifestation" regarding the "remission of sins" spoken of in D&C 20 took place before Moroni. It is a reference to the First Vision. It must be recognized that the vision at first was understood as a personal revelation about his personal salvation. The full impact was not realized until the official account:

[Smith] was most impressed with [the vision's] assurance that he was personally forgiven of his sins and the instruction that he was to join none of the existing churches...The 1832 account paints a picture of the boy's concern for his own soul and his sense of forgiveness as the Lord speaks to him. Later there is more specific indication of the background of sectarian controversy, the desire to know which church was true, and the divine instructions that Joseph Smith himself would later be an instrument in restoring the true church to the earth...If the later version was different, this was not a result of inventing an experience out of whole cloth, as an unscrupulous person might readily have done, but rather of reexamining an earlier experience and seeing it in a different light. As a teen-ager Smith had probably seen the experience primarily as a relief from anxiety about his sins and concerns about the jarring claims of different sects. By 1838 Smith was head of a church, his prophetic status challenged both from without and from within (Leonard J. Arrington, Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints, Alfred Knopf, 1979: pg. 6-8)

The First Vision was not heavily circulated and was therefore not central to the Church in the earliest days (see James B. Allen, "The Significance of Joseph Smith's "First Vision" in Mormon Thought," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 1:3, 1966). However, external sources confirm that Smith's First Vision was known early on and remained fairly consistent with and accurate to their earliest tellings (see Richard Lloyd Anderson, "Circumstantial Confirmation of the First Vision through Reminiscences," BYU Studies 9:3, 1969; Milton V. Backman, Jr., "Confirming Witnesses of the First Vision," Ensign, Jan. 1986). Smith's visionary report wasn't entirely unique for its time. Reports of visionary experiences were well known. The pastor (mentioned in Joseph Smith - History) that dismissed Smith's vision as a boy would have been familiar with these experiences. It was most likely because of this visionary culture and its negative reputation that Smith's earliest visions (First Vision, Moroni, etc.) were downplayed originally. The Book of Mormon was the main focus in early missionary efforts, with little to no mention of Smith's visions. If you think about it, we don't even have a detailed account of the angelic restoration of the Melchizedek priesthood. This distancing from the contemporary visionary culture combined with the similiarities it shared probably aided in Mormonism's success and appeal. Ultimately, however, Mormonism transcended and outlasted them all (see Richard L. Bushman, "The Visionary World of Joseph Smith," BYU Studies 37:1, 1997-1998).

The Lord declared Joseph to be forgiven within the context of the vision. Moroni did likewise years later. Compare this to Isaiah 6, in which Isaiah's lips are cleansed by the angel with a coal from the temple altar. In this sense, the prophet becomes a member and messenger (literal translation for Hebrew malak; also translated "angel") of the divine council. Joseph Smith's accounts fit the ancient concept, though their expression more so conform to 19th century visionary literature. The revelations through Joseph Smith also contain these Hebraic notions. For example, the Book of Mormon fits the ancient Hebrew concept perfectly. Notice that 1 Nephi opens with Lehi's vision of, introduction into, and calling by the divine council: "And being thus overcome with the Spirit, he was carried away in a vision, even that he saw the heavens open, and he thought he saw God sitting upon his throne, surrounded with numberless concourses of angels in the attitude of singing and praising their God" (1 Ne. 1:8). This parallels ancient throne theophanies like Ezekiel, Micaiah, Isaiah, and others. It also compares favorably with ancient pseudepigrapha, many of which were unknown to the scholars of Joseph Smith's day (see Blake T. Ostler, "The Throne-Theophany and Prophetic Commission in 1 Nephi: A Form-Critical Analysis," BYU Studies 26:4, Fall 1986). While no throne is mentioned in Smith's First Vision accounts, his 1835 version does say, "I saw many angels in this vision" (Jessee, 1969: pg. 6). Smith recorded, "I had actually seen a light, and in the midst of that light I saw two Personages, and they did in reality speak to me" (JS-H 1:25). David Bokovoy writes,

Ancient Israel witnessed its fair share of false prophets who feigned divine authority in their predictions. Hence Lehi's biblical contemporary, the prophet Jeremiah, specifically identified a true messenger as one who had "perceived and heard [God's] word" (Jeremiah 23:18). In Jeremiah 23:18, "perceived" is the King James translation for the Hebrew verb raʾah, which means, in its most basic sense, "to see." Therefore, according to the stipulations provided by Jeremiah, a true prophet had both seen and heard God's word. In his own account, Nephi demonstrates an evident awareness of this biblical standard. Immediately after describing his father Lehi's experience with a biblical-like pillar of fire, Nephi specifically notes that Lehi "saw and heard much; and because of the things which he saw and heard he did quake and tremble exceedingly" (1 Nephi 1:6). Nephi also informs his readers that Lehi "went forth among the people, and began to prophesy and to declare unto them concerning the things which he had both seen and heard, ...and he testified that the things which he saw and heard...manifested plainly of the coming of a Messiah" (1 Nephi 1:18—19). In this opening chapter of the Book of Mormon, Nephi matches his apparent effort to portray Lehi as a true prophet, who had seen and heard God's word, with a continuous repetition of the biblical designation my father (Bokovoy, "The Bible vs. the Book of Mormon: Still Losing the Battle," FARMS Review 18:1, 2006: pg. 8).

Both the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith's experience meet the standard. There was an article by Old Testament scholar Margaret Barker and Kevin Christensen called "Seeking the Face of the Lord: Joseph Smith and the First Temple Tradition" in Joseph Smith, Jr.: Reappraisals after Two Centuries, ed. Terryl Givens, Reid Neilson (Oxford University Press, 2009). Christensen was kind enough to send me a prepublished version and said that it is more-or-less the final product, with a few edits here and there. In it, Barker reviews the ancient biblical concept of "seeing God" in the temple. Christensen takes her views and applies them to Joseph Smith's own temple theology and visionary experiences. It turns out that Smith's ideas fit very nicely into Israel's First Temple theology. Barker (who is actually a Methodist) drew the same conclusion elsewhere:

[Terryl] Givens spoke of the scandal that Joseph Smith claimed "direct communication with God." We now recognize that King Josiah enabled a particular group to dominate the religious scene in Jerusalem about 620 BCE: the Deuteronomists. Josiah’s purge was driven by their ideals, and their scribes influenced much of the form of the Old Testament we have today, especially the history in 1 and 2 Kings. The Deuteronomists denied that anyone had a vision of the Lord (Deuteronomy 4:12), they denied that anyone had revelations from heaven, and they insisted the Ten Commandments were all that was necessary (Deuteronomy 30:8, 11–14). Nothing more was to be added to them (Deuteronomy 5:22). Prophecies were genuine only if they had already been fulfilled and had no more power (Deuteronomy 18:21–22). The Deuteronomists had no place for angels, and so they did not use the title "Lord of Hosts." These were the minds that eventually led to the closed canon of scripture and the cessation of prophecy. But the prophets did have visions of the Lord and the angels, they did speak in the name of the Lord, and their unfulfilled prophecies were carefully preserved. Not everyone shared the views of the Deuteronomists, but the writings of these other people are often outside the Bible (Barker, "Joseph Smith and the Preexilic Israelite Religion," BYU Studies 44:4, 2005: pg. 71).

As for transfiguration, Orson Pratt's rendition of Smith's First Vision in his An Interesting Account of Several Remarkable Visions and of the Late Discovery of Ancient American Records (1840, pg. 5) states that Smith was "enveloped" in the pillar of light and that it "produced a peculiar sensation throughout his whole system." Joseph himself said that, following the vision, he "found [himself] lying on [his] back" with "no strength" (JS-H 1:20). This is similar to Moses' experience in Moses 1:9-10.

All in all, Joseph Smith's First Vision fits ancient visions quite well. But more importantly, it invites us to seek similar experiences and a remission of our own sins through the Savior.

THE BIRTH OF JESUS

2010-12-28T02:45:00.000-08:00

I recently shared the following information with my missionary sister-in-law. Given the season (including the recent report regarding Talmage and the birth of Christ), I figured I'd share it here as well. I explained that one of the most asinine anti-Mormon arguments is the Book of Mormon's identification of Jesus' birth in Alma 7:10 ("...at Jerusalem which is the land of our forefathers..."). According to the critics, the Book of Mormon contradicts the statements of Matthew and Luke that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and is therefore false. Could Bethlehem be considered part of the "land of Jerusalem"? Modern research certainly thinks so:

The so-called "Amarna letters" (fourteenth century B.C.) likewise use the phrase ["land of Jerusalem"]. Indeed, the Amarna letters also allude to "a town of the land of Jerusalem, Bit-Lahmi by name," which W. F. Albright regarded as "an almost certain reference to the town of Bethlehem." This is interesting evidence, which goes some distance in establishing the plausibility of Alma's prophecy, since it gives us a glimpse of an ancient administrative arrangement in the vicinity of Jerusalem. It shows, from an ancient perspective, that it was possible to conceptualize the regions surrounding a major city, including its dependent villages, as "the land of" that city. And it demonstrates, furthermore, that Bethlehem itself was, at least at one point, anciently regarded as a part of Jerusalem's land, exactly as it is in the Book of Mormon.

A very recently published fragment from the caves at Qumran, known as "Pseudo-Jeremiah" (4Q385)—which is attributed to Lehi's great prophet- contemporary Jeremiah—reflects precisely this situation. It speaks of the Jews as being "taken captive from the land of Jerusalem." Commenting on the text, Professors Robert Eisenman and Michael Wise note this "interesting reference to 'the land of Jerusalem' " and remark that "this greatly enhances the sense of historicity of the whole, since Judah or 'Yehud' (the name of the area on coins from the Persian period) by this time consisted of little more than Jerusalem and its immediate environs."

This newly discovered phrase from the Dead Sea Scrolls significantly transforms the issue. For a century and a half the critics have consistently argued that Alma 7:10 represents a significant blunder which clearly demonstrates that the Book of Mormon was Joseph Smith's nineteenth-century forgery. Now, the precise phrase that has been seen as uncharacteristic of the Bible itself has been found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the ancient documents most closely connected to biblical Hebrew.

The prophecy of Alma 7:10 fits into antiquity very well. If, as Professors Eisenman and Wise observe, an allusion to "the land of Jerusalem" in Pseudo-Jeremiah fragment 4Q385 "greatly enhances [its] sense of historicity," does similar language not "greatly enhance the sense of historicity" of the Book of Mormon? Alma 7:10 is not the sort of thing that Joseph Smith would likely have invented, precisely for the same reason that it bothers enemies of Mormonism. Far from being a serious liability for the Book of Mormon, Alma's prophetic comment about the birth of the Messiah is plausible evidence that the Nephite record is exactly what it claims to be—an authentic ancient historical text with roots in the Near East (Daniel C. Peterson, William J. Hamblin, Matthew Roper, "On Alma 7:10 and the Birthplace of Jesus," Provo, UT: FARMS Preliminary Report, 1995).

My friend David Bokovoy (Ph.D. candidate, Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East, Brandeis) recently provided this insight in an online discussion forum:

As silly as it may seem, some critics of the Book of Mormon have continued to find fault with the book’s reference to Jesus’ birth in Alma 7:10:

“And behold, he shall be born of Mary, at Jerusalem which is the land of our forefathers, she being a virgin, a precious and chosen vessel, who shall be overshadowed and conceive by the power of the Holy Ghost, and bring forth a son, yea, even the Son of God.”

Though several strong apologetic arguments have been made, explaining this issue, I have a few thoughts to add to the discussion. I believe that rather than a case of mistaken identification, the Book of Mormon’s reference to Jerusalem as the Messiah’s birthplace may provide evidence for the book’s connection with ancient tradition.

The Bible’s statement on Jesus’ birth at Bethlehem appears in the Gospel of Luke, which refers to Bethlehem as “the city of David” (2:4). The designation “city of David,” however, never appears linked with Bethlehem in the Old Testament, instead, this expression always functions as a title for “Jerusalem”:

“Nevertheless David took the strong hold of Zion: the same is the city of David” (2 Sam. 5:7; see also v. 9)

“So David would not remove the ark of the LORD unto him into the city of David: but David carried it aside into the house of Obed-edom the Gittite” (2 Sam. 6:10; see also v. 12)

“And his servants carried him [Ahaziah the king of Judah] in a chariot to Jerusalem, and buried him in his sepulchre with his fathers in the city of David” (2 Kings 9:28).

Hence, by referring to Bethlehem as “the city of David,” Luke creates a direct link between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. This technique reflects Jewish tradition which interpreted Psalm 87 from the Old Testament as a Messianic prophecy. The Psalm reads:

"A Psalm or Song for the sons of Korah. His foundation is in the holy mountains. The LORD loveth the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob. Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God. Selah. I will make mention of Rahab and Babylon to them that know me: behold Philistia, and Tyre, with Ethiopia; this man was born there. And of Zion it shall be said, This and that man was born in her: and the highest himself shall establish her. The LORD shall count, when he writeth up the people, that this man was born there. Selah. As well the singers as the players on instruments shall be there: all my springs are in thee."

This biblical Psalm refers to the birth of a "man" in Jerusalem at the time God made up a census of the world. Some biblical scholars have suggested that this tradition may have influenced Luke’s reference to a census of the “whole world” at the time of Christ’s birth. Indeed, Jewish midrash held that the Messiah would be born at the time when God counts up all the people. The Aramaic revision of Psalm 87 reflects this tradition:

“Words of glory are spoken concerning you, O city of God. For ever. The Egyptians and the Babylonians mention your praise to those who know me; behold, the Philistines and the Tyrians, with the Ethiopians—‘This king was anointed there.’ And of Zion it shall be said, ‘King David and Solomon his son were anointed within her’; and God will establish her on high. The Lord has gone into a book in which are written the number of all the peoples; this king was anointed there” (Psalm 87 Targum as translated in The Aramaic Bible: The Targums, pg.155).

So according to Jewish tradition, the Messiah would be born at Jerusalem, the city of David. Drawing upon this perspective in his study of Luke 2, biblical scholar John Derrett observed,

“The text, [Psalm 87] with midrashim to be found in the Targum, the LXX, Midrash on Psalms, and elsewhere has its major fascinations, but the important idea for us is that when God writes down the peoples, i.e. makes a census of the world, this man, or Man will be born there, i.e. in Jerusalem, the ritual limits of which, as Passover practice showed, included Bethlehem” (John Duncan Martin Derrett, “Further Light on the Narratives of the Nativity,” Novum Testamentum, vol. 17, (1975), 86).

So according to ancient thought, Bethlehem was an extension of Jerusalem, the expected birthplace of the Messiah. It would seem, therefore, that rather than a mistake, the Book of Mormon’s reference to Jesus’ birth at Jerusalem reflects a long-standing ancient tradition.

I pointed out that Edwin D. Freed in his The Stories of Jesus' Birth (Sheffield Academic Press, 2001) questions the historical validity of Bethlehem being the location of the Nativity. He states that no Jewish tradition placed the Messiah's birth specifically at Bethlehem. If anything, traditions placed him at Jerusalem (which included Bethlehem). Freed points out that Matthew's proof-text is a conflation of Micah 5:(1)2 and 2 Samuel 5:2. The Hebrew of Micah 5:1 reads, "From you he shall come forth to me that is to be a ruler of Israel." The LXX of Micah 5:2 reads, "From you he shall come forth to me to be a ruler of Israel." The Hebrew of 2 Sam. 5:2 reads, "You shall indeed feed [shepherd] my people Israel, and you shall be for a ruler over Israel." The LXX reads, "You shall shepherd [feed, rule] my people Israel, and you shall be for a leader to my people Israel." Matthew 2:6 reads, "for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd [rule] my people Israel." This was a Christian interpretation and tradition, not Jewish.

It is obvious from scholarship that Bethlehem was anciently considered of the "land of Jerusalem." But based on the information provided by David and his sources, if Matthew and Luke were mistaken about the location of Jesus' birth, the Book of Mormon would still be correct due to the fact that it never mentions Bethlehem. In fact, it would be more accurate and more faithful to ancient tradition than the biblical texts. Either way, the Book of Mormon reflects both ancient terminology and ancient tradition concerning the birth of the Messiah.

ISAIAH ACCORDING TO ABINADI & QUMRAN

2010-12-25T03:09:00.000-08:00

This is the day of [peace about which God] spoke [of old through the words of Isa]iah the prophet, who said: Isa 52:7 "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, of the mess[enger of good who announces salvation], saying to Zion: 'your God [reigns']." Its interpetation: The mountains are the pro[phets ...] And the messenger is [the ano]inted of the spirit [mashiach haruach] about whom Dan[iel] spoke ["...until the time of (the/an) Anointed Prince [mashiach nagid] there will be seven weeks . . . after sixty-two weeks, (the/an) Anointed shall be cut off" Dan 9:25, 26 ]. [... and the messenger of] good who announces salv[ation] is the one about whom it is written that [he will send him Isa 61:2-3 "to comfo[rt the afflicted, to watch over the afflicted ones of Zion"]. "To comfo[rt the afflicted," its interpretation:] to instruct them in all the ages of the worl[d...] in truth. [...][...] it has been turned away from Belial and it [...] [...] in the judgments of God, as is written about him: Isa 52:7 "Saying to Zion: 'your God rules'." ["Zi]on" is [the congregation of all the sons of justice, those] who establish the covenant, those who avoid walking [on the pa]th of the people. "Your God" is [Melchizedek, who will fr]ee [them] from the hand of Belial. And as for what he said: Lev 25:9 "You shall blow the hor[n in every] land."

- 11QMelchizedek

Behold I say unto you, that whosoever has heard the words of the prophets, yea, all the holy prophets who have prophesied concerning the coming of the Lord—I say unto you, that all those who have hearkened unto their words, and believed that the Lord would redeem his people, and have looked forward to that day for a remission of their sins, I say unto you, that these are his seed, or they are the heirs of the kingdom of God. For these are they whose sins he has borne; these are they for whom he has died, to redeem them from their transgressions. And now, are they not his seed? Yea, and are not the prophets, every one that has opened his mouth to prophesy, that has not fallen into transgression, I mean all the holy prophets ever since the world began? I say unto you that they are his seed. And these are they who have published peace, who have brought good tidings of good, who have published salvation; and said unto Zion: Thy God reigneth! And O how beautiful upon the mountains were their feet! And again, how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of those that are still publishing peace! And again, how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of those who shall hereafter publish peace, yea, from this time henceforth and forever! And behold, I say unto you, this is not all. For O how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that is the founder of peace, yea, even the Lord, who has redeemed his people; yea, him who has granted salvation unto his people; For were it not for the redemption which he hath made for his people, which was prepared from the foundation of the world, I say unto you, were it not for this, all mankind must have perished.

- Mosiah 15:11-19

In Abinadi's interpretation of Isaiah 52:7, we have the messenger portrayed as

1. The Messiah/Lord
2. The holy prophets
3. Those who hearken to the prophets and believe (i.e. covenant with) the Lord

In the Qumran version, we have

1. The messenger = The Anointed One/Messiah
2. The mountains = The prophets
3. Zion = Sons of justice; covenant people

All in all, not too shabby. And given the rather exalted status of Melchizedek in LDS scripture [1], I find it intriguing that the Qumran fragments identify him as a god.

1. For example, the Melchizedek Priesthood was named for him due to his greatness according to D&C 107. Alma 13:19 declares that "there were many before him, and also there were many afterwards, but none were greater" than Melchizedek. The most interesting in my view is the fact that "priests of the Most High" are "after the order of Melchizedek, which was after the order of Enoch, which was after the order of the Only Begotten Son" (D&C 76:57). The JST of Genesis 14 reads, "[Melchizedek] was ordained an high priest after the order of the covenant which God made with Enoch." It continues, "And men having this faith, coming up unto this order of God, were translated and taken up into heaven. And now, Melchizedek was a priest of this order; therefore he obtained peace in Salem, and was called the Prince of peace. And his people wrought righteousness, and obtained heaven, and sought for the city of Enoch which God had before taken, separating it from the earth...And this Melchizedek, having thus established righteousness, was called the king of heaven by his people, or, in other words, the King of peace."

THE SPIRIT OF GIVING & THE MORALITY OF MARKETS

2010-12-24T02:33:00.000-08:00

And with that, capitalism and all those who support it (i.e. the heartless, selfish right-wingers...) are summed up in one word: greedy. Of course, this is coming from Oliver Stone: the man who played Hugo Chavez's cheerleader in his documentary South of the Border. However, given the secular nature of our society and economy, I think it is worth clarifying what greed actually is within a market context:

In Friedman's view, greed is better understood as self-interest. There are those who may not see any difference between the two. Naomi Klein is just one example [1]. But is the pursuit of economic self-interest actually greedy in the way the word is commonly understood? Does capitalism run on greed, as many critics (including LDS) seem to think [2]? Social scientist Arthur C. Brooks doesn't think so:

Few would disagree that free enterprise is grounded in one's self-interest. But self-interest is not the same thing as selfishness in the sense of unbounded consumption or disregard for the less fortunate. In fact, the millions of Americans who advocate for private entrepreneurship and limited government—whether they are rich or poor—may be stingy when it comes to giving away other people's money through state redistribution, but they are surprisingly generous when it comes to giving away their own money privately. Americans in general are very charitable, by international standards. Study after study shows that we privately give multiples of what our Social Democratic friends in Europe donate, per capita. But not all Americans are equally generous. One characteristic of givers is especially important in the current debate: the opinion that the government should not redistribute income to achieve greater economic equality...[In 1996], the General Social Survey (GSS) found that those who were against higher levels of government redistribution privately gave four times as much money, on average, as people who were in favor of redistribution...Anti-redistributionists gave more even after correcting for differences in income, age, religion and education...The GSS in 2002 showed that those who said the government was "spending too much money on welfare" were more likely to donate blood than those who said the government was "spending too little money on welfare." The anti-redistributionists were also more likely to give someone directions on the street, return change mistakenly handed them by a cashier, and give food (or money) to a homeless person...Contrary to the liberal stereotype of the hard-hearted right-winger, opposition to income-leveling is not evidence that one does not care about others. Quite the contrary. The millions of Americans who believe in limited government give disproportionately to others. This is in addition to—not instead of—their defense of our free-enterprise system, which gives the most people the most opportunities to earn their own success. [3]

For whatever reason, many are under the impression that the abstract category of "the rich" is one made up of immoral people, therefore justifying governmental wealth redistribution [4]. The above data demonstrates this to be utterly false. In actuality, support of markets appears to breed charity. As economist Deirdre (formerly Donald) McCloskey writes,

The growth of the market promotes virtue, not vice. Most intellectuals since 1848 have thought the opposite: that it erodes virtue...And yet we all take happily what the market gives–polite, accommodating, energetic, enterprising, risk-taking, trustworthy people; not bad people...The way a salesperson in an American store greets customers makes the point: "How can I help you?" The phrase startles foreigners. It is an instance in miniature of the bourgeois virtues. As Eric Hoffer said, "It is futile to judge a kind deed by its motives...We are made kind by being kind." Thank you very kindly...Bourgeois charity, again, if not the "charity," meaning spiritual love, of the King James translation of the Bible, runs contrary to the caricature of greed. More than the peasant or aristocrat, the bourgeois gives to the poor–as in the ghettos of Eastern Europe or in the small towns of America. Acts of charity follow the bourgeois norm of reciprocity. The American Gospel of Wealth–founding hospitals, colleges, and libraries wherever little fortunes were made–is a bourgeois notion, paying back what was taken in profit. Middle-class people in the 19th century habitually gave a biblical tenth of their incomes to charity. The intrusion of the state into charity killed the impulse, remaking charity into a taille imposed on grumbling peasants: I gave at the office. [5]

McCloskey recognizes the four classical "pagan" virtues (i.e. the Aristocrat Patrician) to be prudence, temperance, justice, and courage, with faith, hope, and charity being the Christian virtues (i.e. the Peasant Plebeian). She stresses the virtues of integrity, honesty, trustworthiness, respect, consideration, modesty, thrift, and responsibility that accompany the bourgeois (i.e. the Bourgeois Mercantile) [6]. In short,

We owe our educations and our leisure and our dignities to commerce. We are all bourgeois now. It is perhaps time to reassess the bourgeois virtues. 'How much longer', asked John Stuart Mill in 1869, 'is one form of society and life to content itself with the morality made for another?' An excellent ethical and historical question. [7]

The next time you hear markets described as "running on greed," remember the virtues that are bred from this supposedly greedy, godless system [8].

1. Her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism has been criticized (and, in my opinion, successfully dismantled) in Johan Norberg, "Defaming Milton Friedman," Reason (Oct. 2008); Norberg, "The Klein Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Polemics," Cato Institute Briefing Papers 102 (May 14, 2008); Norberg, "Three Days After Klein's Response, Another Attack," Cato.org (Sept. 4, 2008); Art Carden, Robert A. Lawson, "Human Rights and Economic Liberalization," Business and Politics 12:2 (2010); Steven Horwitz, "Two Questions for Naomi Klein," History News Network (Oct. 3, 2007); Tyler Cowen, "Shock Jock," The New York Sun (Oct. 3, 2007); Art Carden, "Shock and Awe: Institutional Change, Neoliberalism, and Disaster Capitalism," Journal of Lutheran Ethics 9:6 (June 2009).

2. For example, see Richard L. Bushman, "On Being Ill at Ease in the World," SquareTwo 2:2 (Summer 2009) or Dennis Potter, "Liberation Theology in the Book of Mormon," Published Online. The latter has been presented in several forms, including the Sunstone Theological Symposium, the Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology, and the forthcoming Partakers of the Heavenly Gift: A Political Reading of Mormonism.

3. Arthur C. Brooks, "Tea Partiers and the Spirit of Giving," The Wall Street Journal (Dec. 24, 2010). For a book length treatment of this subject, see his Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism - America's Charity Divide: Who Gives, Who Doesn't, and Why It Matters (Basic Books, 2006).

4. See the following articles on "taxing the rich": Alan Reynolds, "Taxes and the Top Percentile Myth," The Wall Street Journal (Dec. 23, 2010) and Charles W. Kadlec, "The 'Tax the Rich' Con, Part 1," Forbes (Dec. 10, 2010; follow links to subsequent parts).

5. Deirdre (Donald) N. McCloskey, "Bourgeois Blues," Reason 25 (May 1993).

6. See McCloskey, "Bourgeois Virtue," The American Scholar 63:2 (Spring 1994).

7. McCloskey, "The Discreet Virtues of the Bourgeoisie," History Today 56:9 (Sept. 2006). Also see her "Avarice, Prudence, and the Bourgeois Virtues," Having: Property and Possession in Religious and Social Life, eds. William Shweiker, Charles Mathewes (Eerdmans, 2004). She is currently writing a six-volume tome on "The Bourgeois Era," the first two being The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 2010).

8. For details on the experiments mentioned by Ridley in the video, see his The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (HarperCollins, 2010): Ch. 3 "The Manufacture of Virtue: Barter, Trust and Rules after 50,000 Years Ago;" Michael Shermer, The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics (Times Books, 2008): Ch. 9 "Trust with Credit Verification." Chapters 9-12 of Shermer's book provides excellent argumentation and scientific evidence for the morality of markets.

THE ICONIC, OVERLY DRAMATIC, BITTERSWEET, FOUR-CHORD POP SONGS THAT TAKE THEMSELVES WAY TOO SERIOUSLY

2010-12-24T00:29:00.000-08:00

The title and video should say it all:

TESTIMONY & THE HISTORICAL RECORD

2010-12-21T12:40:00.000-08:00

Stephen C. Harper, an Associate Professor in the Department of Church History and Doctrine at BYU and a volume editor in the Joseph Smith Papers project, recently provided this excellent testimony at Mormon Scholars Testify:

I have held the first vision accounts in my hands and studied them very much. I know what they say and how they say it. A historian cannot prove or disprove whether the vision they describe was historical. I don’t know that the vision happened because the documents say it did. Rather, I find no reason in the historical record to disbelieve in the vision. I believe that it happened because I find the documents authentic. They speak to me spiritually. I don’t find the same inconsistencies or anachronisms or conspiracy in them that unbelievers have.

...I have examined the Book of Mormon manuscripts and studied the extensive and complex historical record of its translation. The evidence is conclusive that Joseph produced the Book of Mormon between April and June 1829. Moreover, the historical record evidences that those who knew Joseph best in this period believed him most when he declared that he translated by the power of God. But I know that the Book of Mormon is true because I feel the Holy Spirit when I read it and abide by its precepts. The Book of Mormon makes me a better father and husband, a better follower of Jesus Christ. I know that about it.

I am a student of Joseph’s revelation manuscripts. I was one of the editors of his revelation manuscript books. Joseph didn’t assume that his revelation texts were faxed from heaven. I don’t either. I share his sense that God spoke to Joseph in his language, which Joseph described as crooked, broken, scattered, and imperfect. In any communication the encoder sends signals to a decoder, the recipient. In the process there is always “noise” that impedes full and flawless receipt of the message communicated. I understand Joseph’s revelations as messages communicated by a divine encoder but received by a decoder or recipient limited by crooked, broken, scattered, and imperfect mediums. In this way of thinking, Joseph neither received the messages flawlessly nor had the power to re-communicate them perfectly, as he and other revelators have acknowledged. My faith in Joseph’s revelations rests on this understanding, and on the compelling evidence that those who knew Joseph best believed his revelations, that he could not produce them on demand, that he marveled at some of them, and that he sometimes confessed to having intentions and aspirations that differed, sometimes significantly, from what his revelations commanded him and others to do.

I know the early reception history of Joseph’s revelation manuscripts. Those who were best positioned to know—the ones with whom he counseled, the ones who wrote as he dictated, the ones whose convenience and reputations were at stake, testified that they were “given by inspiration of God & are profitable for all men & are verily true” (Book of Commandments and Revelations, page 121). I know that the so-called Kirtland Egyptian Papers are not what critics have claimed them to be, and that critical explanations of the Book of Abraham obfuscate the historical evidence rather than rely on it.

Harper continues, explaining the importance of being able to cope with not knowing:

There is much that I do not know. I do not know how to understand plural marriage. I have studied the complicated historical record of it diligently and there is very much that remains unclear. I don’t know exactly how to understand D&C section 132. I don’t know what to make of the problematic letter purportedly from Joseph Smith to Nancy Rigdon. I recently gave a talk at a leadership meeting. My topic was historical issues with which Saints sometimes struggle. I catalogued the historical problems, briefly describing each. While describing the received wisdom on plural marriage, I had a distinct and undeniable thought that came from outside me. “You do not know what you are talking about,” it said. It was right. I do not know how to think about plural marriage. I continue to thoroughly examine the historical record, seeking light and truth by study and also by faith. I do know, as a result of that process, that Helen Kimball and Lucy Walker both left testimonies that Joseph did not exploit them, and that they both testified that they received their own revelations, as Joseph invited them to do, before being sealed to him. In other words, I know that the historical record created by witnesses and participants does not match the sensational books and online material created by people who know less than I do. And I know that I don’t know.

I'm reminded of the words of literary scholar Arthur Henry King. The following is his description of his personal conversion, which took place late in life:

When I was first brought to read Joseph Smith’s story as recorded in the Pearl of Great Price, I was deeply impressed. I wasn’t inclined to be impressed. As a stylistician, I have spent my life being disinclined to be impressed. So when I read his story, I thought to myself, this is an extraordinary thing. This is an astonishingly matter-of-fact and cool account. This man is not trying to persuade me of anything. He doesn’t feel the need to. He is stating what happened to him, and he is stating it, not enthusiastically, but in quite a matter-of-fact way. He is not trying to make me cry or feel ecstatic. That struck me, and that began to build my testimony, for I could see that this man was telling the truth.

...The whole man is involved in this account, but the whole man isn’t posturing and appealing to you to believe it. He is merely stating it, stating it with the whole of himself. The conviction is behind it. The emotion is there, in perfect control. It is in the rhythm, the superb rhythm of that piece; and we won’t get that unless we read it aloud. There is an extraordinary alternation of short and long sentences. Some of the sentences are long indeed—magnificent sentences—sentences much better than Samuel Johnson would write. So there is this combination of firm, controlled rhythm and matter-of-fact statement drawing on all the resources of early nineteenth-century prose to produce a piece of prose as sound as anything Coleridge ever wrote.

Now, there is no passage in mystical literature or in any other kind of literature concerned with visions that I know of that is like this; therefore I am not prepared to give credence to other “mystical” passages outside the scriptures—I know the difference. I am thinking about St. Bridget, who lived in Sweden in the fourteenth century and whose life I have studied in some detail; she had her ecstatic visions. I am thinking about St. Teresa, that great Spanish saint who wasn’t quite sure whether Christ was her Lord or her husband. They don’t compare with Joseph Smith. They attitudinize; they get into postures, contortions of mind, in expressing themselves. Not so Joseph Smith.

I offer these as examples of the principle of testimony:

It is basic to human knowledge of the world that we believe things are as they seem to be in the absence of positive evidence to the contrary. Someone who seems to have an experience of God should believe that he does, unless evidence can be produced that he is mistaken. And it is another basic principle of rationality, which I call the principle of testimony, that those who do not have an experience of a certain type ought to believe any others when they say that they do-again, in the absence of evidence of deceit or delusion. If we could not in general trust what other people say about their experiences without checking them out in some way, our knowledge of history or geography or science would be almost non-existent. [1]

In case there are those who state that no one could possibly know the history of the Church and remain faithful, the late historian Davis Bitton had a few choice things to say regarding such nonsense:

There is nothing in church history that leads inevitably to the conclusion that the church is false. There is nothing that requires the conclusion that Joseph Smith was a fraud. How can I say this with such confidence? For the simple reason that the Latter-day Saint historians who know the most about our church history have been and are faithful, committed members of the church. More precisely, there are faithful Latter-day Saint historians who know as much about this subject as any anti-Mormon or anyone who writes on the subject from an outside perspective. In fact, with few exceptions, they know much, much more. They have not been blown away. They have not gnashed their teeth and abandoned their faith. To repeat, they have found nothing that forces the extreme conclusion our enemies like to promote.

We need to reject the simpleminded, inaccurate picture that divides people into two classes. On the one hand, according to our enemies, are the sincere seekers of truth, full of goodness and charity. On the other hand, in the critics' view, stand the ignorant Mormons. Even faithful Mormon scholars must be ignorant. Otherwise they are dishonest, playing their part in the conspiracy to deceive their people. This is the anti-Mormon view of the situation.

Can we see how ridiculous this picture is? It is a travesty on both sides. Many Latter-day Saints may not know their history in depth, but some of them know a good deal. As for Latter-day Saint scholars, as a group they compare favorably with any similar group of historians. It will not do to charge them with being dishonest. I happen to know most of them and have no hesitation in rejecting a smear of their character.

On the other hand, your typical anti-Mormon is no disinterested pursuer of the truth. If you are confronted with a "problem," some kind of "non—faith-promoting" take on church history, the chances are that your willing helper can lay no claim to having done any significant research in Mormon history. Oblivious to the primary sources, unread in the journal literature, the critic has picked up the nugget from previous anti-Mormon writers and offers it as though it were a fresh discovery. Most of the time it is anything but new—it is a stock item in a litany of anti-Mormon claims that serves their purpose. It is a broken record.

1. Richard Swinburne, Is There a God? (Oxford University Press, 1996), 116.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

2010-12-19T21:44:00.000-08:00

This is the narration I wrote for our ward's Christmas program. I've included some of the music from the program as well:

The apostle John famously penned, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son” (John 3:16). The power of these words is sometimes lost on 21st century Christians, who often quote them as a kind of religious catch phrase. Contrary to the modern, heavily romanticized emotion that is associated with the word “love,” the ancient readers of the New Testament would have understood the term within the context of the covenant. To these early Christians, covenant-love brought to mind loyalty, kinship, and an obligation to one’s duties and promises. The love of God, in this case, implied His loyalty and promises to His creation as a whole; a creation described by Samuel the Lamanite as being “cut off from the presence of the Lord” and desperately in need of redemption (see Hel. 14:15-19). The Lord promised “new heavens and a new earth” (Isa. 65:17) by means of atonement as well as deliverance from bondage through the chosen Messiah. The Messiah was to be the priestly king “after the order of Melchizedek” (Ps. 110:4), the one of whom God would declare, as the Psalmist did, “Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten you” (Ps. 2:7). This was to be the royal child called “Wonderful-Counselor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace” (Isa. 9:6). It was this child that would ultimately fulfill Isaiah’s dualistic prophecy: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel” (Isa. 7:14).

The 1st century Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria described the temple veil as the boundary between the heavenly and earthly realms, with its colors representing the elements of the material world. The elaborate clothing of the ancient high priest bore these very same colors, being made of the same material (see Ex. 26:31, cf. Ex. 28:6, 8, 15). Before entering the Holy of Holies (i.e. the heavenly realm), the high priest would instead wear only white. By symbolically putting off the things of this world, he was eligible to enter into God’s presence as a purified, divine son. Upon returning, the robes and colors of the earthly realm were donned once more. Descending from his heavenly home, the Great High Priest was thus ritually incarnated. “And [Mary] brought forth her first born son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn” (Luke 1:7). In Luke’s words we find the literal fulfillment of that which Nephi saw centuries prior: “I beheld a virgin, and she was exceedingly fair and white…And [the angel] said unto me: Knowest thou the condescension of God? …And I looked and beheld the virgin again, bearing a child in her arms. And the angel said unto me: Behold the Lamb of God, yea, even the Son of the Everlasting Father!” (1 Ne. 11:13, 16, 20-21). As Mary clothed the Great High Priest in His earthly garments, heavenly messengers were declaring to shepherds in the field that the Lamb of God, the Shepherd-King, was born. It was this which led Matthew to write, “Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us...And [Joseph] knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son: and he called his name JESUS” (Matt. 1:22-23, 25).

After centuries of oppression, Israel was delivered out from under Egyptian rule. The final plague that led to the end of Israel’s slavery and bondage was the death of the firstborn throughout the land of Egypt, with those of the Israelites being protected by the blood of an unblemished lamb. As a token of remembrance, the firstborn of Israel were to be consecrated to the Lord and redeemed (see Ex. 13:2, 13, 15). Thus, Luke records that Mary and Joseph “brought [Jesus] to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord; (As it is written in the law of the Lord, Every male that openeth the womb shall be called holy to the Lord)…And, behold, there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon; and the same man was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel…And it was revealed unto him by the Holy Ghost, that he should not see death, before he had seen the Lord’s Christ…Then took he [Jesus] up in his arms…and said, Lord, now lettest thy servant depart in peace…For mine eyes have seen thy salvation…A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel…And Simeon…said unto Mary his mother, Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel…(Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also)…And there was one Anna, a prophetess…And she coming in that instant gave thanks likewise unto the Lord, and spake of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem” (Luke 2:22-23, 25-26, 28-30, 32, 34-36, 38). The Spirit revealed in the temple that day that the child Jesus was the long awaited Messiah, the Firstborn, the Lamb of God, the Redeemer and Savior of Israel. The piercing sorrow prophesied by Simeon must have weighed heavily on Mary as Joseph’s dream warned them of Herod’s upcoming massacre and commanded them to flee unto Egypt. Following Herod’s death, the family returned, prompting Matthew to recall the words of Hosea regarding Israel: “Out of Egypt have I called my son” (Matt. 2:15; cf. Hos. 11:1). Hosea’s prophecies of the restoration of Israel would carry great significance for the Christ child’s own future and the means by which He would bring salvation to Israel: “For [the Lord] hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up. After two days will he revive us: in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight” (Hos. 6:1-2).

In his famous essay “On Fairy-Stories,” The Lord of the Rings author and Oxford professor J.R.R. Tolkien coined the term “eucatastrophe.” The word was meant to portray the opposite of tragedy and embody the “Consolation of the Happy Ending.” Being a devout Catholic and key figure in C.S. Lewis’ conversion to Christianity, Tolkien concluded his essay by saying, “The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy…There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own merits…[T]his story is supreme, and it is true.” And so it is. The Gospels contain the accounts of eyewitnesses to the Savior’s miraculous conception, birth, and childhood; from Mary and Joseph to Simeon and Anna to the wise men and shepherds to Elizabeth and Zacharias. The Book of Mormon adds its witness to those of the Gospels with numerous prophecies and testimonies regarding the coming of the Savior. As the Primary children sang, Samuel the Lamanite prophesied of signs in the New World that would appear at Christ’s birth. It was the fulfillment of these signs that delivered a remnant of faithful followers from certain death at the hands of the wicked. In this sense, the very birth of Christ had saving power. The restoration and revelations through Joseph Smith and other modern-day prophets continue to testify of the birth, ministry, death, resurrection, and second coming of Jesus Christ. These testimonies, along with the personal conviction given by the Holy Ghost, are what bring us hope. Christ’s mission is not yet over and the work is not yet complete. But we can partake of His Atonement here and now. By so doing, we can gain a beautiful glimpse at what the future holds in store. Christ has been here before. And He is coming back. “Pray always, that ye may not faint, until I come. Behold, and lo, I will come quickly, and receive you unto myself” (D&C 88:126).

Here is an alternative section I wrote. "Hallelujah" was not included. I just like Handel.

Little is known of the Magi, the “wise men from the east” as Matthew calls them (Matt. 2:1). The Persian term refers to respected priests; mageia meaning “the theology of the magicians.” These supposed “three kings of Orient” could very well have been high priests of a more ancient order, the Hebrew qedem (translated “east”) also meaning "ancient" or "antiquity." This order might have anxiously looked forward the restoration of the original temple theology brought about by the coming of the Messiah. Inquiring of King Herod, these wise men asked, “Where is he that is born King of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him” (Matt. 2:2). The answer given in Matthew’s account conflates the words of Micah and 2 Samuel: “In Bethlehem of Judaea: for thus it is written by the prophet, And thou Bethlehem, in the land of Juda, are not the least among the princes of Juda: for out of thee shall come a Governor, that shall rule my people Israel” (Matt. 2:5-6). The Jewish Targums understood the Messiah to be associated with a star based on the prophecy of Balaam: “there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel…” (Num. 24:17). What star was this? Was it a planetary conjunction? An ancient comet? A supernatural phenomenon? Or was it, as some critical historians have written, pious fiction on the part of Matthew along with the birthplace of Bethlehem (interestingly enough, The Book of Mormon never mentions Bethlehem as the birthplace, only “the land of Jerusalem”)? Whatever the case may be, these wise men were led to the young Jesus: “And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, frankincense, and myrrh” (Matt. 2:11). Several extra-biblical Christian and Jewish texts depict Adam as taking or receiving relics from Eden following the Fall. One Christian text depicts Michael bringing gold (the symbol of kingship), Gabriel bringing incense (the offering of priests), and Raphael bringing myrrh (the oil of the anointed). If this tradition was known to the wise men, then they consciously recognized Jesus as “the last Adam” (1 Cor. 15:45). This Adam would reverse the effects of the first and triumphantly return to Eden, allowing those “that overcometh…to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God” (Rev. 2:7).

GRACE AND FAITH IN HISTORY AND WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF MORMON SOTERIOLOGY

2010-12-11T17:10:00.000-08:00

This is the formal, written version of the presentation I gave at the Interfaith Dialogue held at the UNT Institute building on Dec. 10, 2010 from 7-9pm. This was done with Brad Eggerton, a member of Denton Bible and the director of the upcoming Religion & Redemption: A Documentary of Mormonism.

This version differs somewhat from the spoken version (which I will hopefully have the mp3 of soon), but only in phrasing, not in content. I was forced to skip the paragraph about love and covenants due to time constraints.

When Martin Luther nailed his now famous Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church, it was not meant as an act of rebellion. Contrary to popular belief, Luther was merely following the standard method for proposing a theological debate. The door itself was used as a kind of “bulletin board” by the faculty of the University of Wittenberg, of which Luther was a member. While his intent was academic in nature, Luther eventually found himself theologically opposed to the Pope and fleshing out the doctrine known as sola fides – salvation through faith alone: what sociologist Rodney Stark sees as the “slogan” of the Protestant Reformation [1]. It must be remembered that Luther’s reformation technically failed. It did not reform the Catholic Church, but instead created a new one with new (or at least adjusted) interpretations of scripture. Lutheranism’s popularity in large part gave way to Calvinism, but Protestantism was alive and well and remains so today. What also remain are the concept of salvation by grace through faith alone and the rejection of salvific deeds or rituals. This is one of several doctrines that continue to drive a theological wedge between modern evangelicals and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. One particular aspect of Mormonism that receives heated criticism is the belief that works are a necessary factor for salvation, thus denying sola fides and supposedly the sufficiency of Christ’s grace. With absolutely no apologies, we as Latter-day Saints 1) declare the necessity and salvific nature of both deeds and rituals, 2) reject the Protestant doctrine of sola fides as it is commonly understood, yet 3) embrace the complete sufficiency of Christ’s grace (as paradoxical as that may sound at first).

The third of our Articles of Faith reads, “We believe that through the Atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the gospel.” In plain fashion, Joseph Smith laid out a system in which both grace and personal obedience bring about salvation. In response to this position, many critics turn to the words of Paul the Apostle:

For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus...Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? of works? Nay: but by the law of faith. Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law. (Romans 3:23-24, 27-28)*

Put more simply, Paul wrote to the Ephesians,

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9)

These verses as well as others are often used to object to the idea of good works being necessary in fully achieving salvation. Good works are instead hailed as the products of salvation. To be clear, Mormon theology has not, does not, and will not ever claim that eternal life is attainable outside the grace of God. As one of the prophets found in the Book of Mormon, Lehi, says, “Know that there is no flesh that can dwell in the presence of God, save it be through the merits, and mercy, and grace of the Holy Messiah” (2 Nephi 2:8). There is no LDS concept of earning salvation in the sense of obligating God as one would an employer. This is made quite clear by another Book of Mormon prophet, King Benjamin:

I say, if ye should serve [God] with all your whole souls yet ye would be unprofitable servants…And now, in the first place, he hath created you, and granted unto you your lives, for which ye are indebted unto him. And secondly, he doth require that ye should do as he hath commanded you; for which if ye do, he doth immediately bless you; and therefore he hath paid you. And ye are still indebted unto him, and are, and will be, forever and ever; therefore, of what have ye to boast? (Mosiah 2:20-24)

Though commandment keeping is mentioned, it is established beyond doubt that mankind is unable to repay God. It is difficult to obligate one to whom you are “eternally indebted” (vs. 34). Bruce R. McConkie, one of the most well-known leaders of the LDS Church, explained, “God’s grace consists in his love, mercy, and condescension toward his children. All things that exist are manifestations of the grace of God. The creation of the earth, life itself, the atonement of Christ, the plan of salvation, kingdoms of immortal glory hereafter, and the supreme gift of eternal life–all these things come by the grace of him whose we are” [2]. This view expands grace to encompass the entire aspect of existence.

The prophet Lehi’s son Jacob provides us with one of the clearest explanations regarding salvation:

Wherefore, my beloved brethren, reconcile yourselves to the will of God, and not to the will of the devil and the flesh; and remember, after ye are reconciled unto God, that it is only in and through the grace of God that ye are saved. (2 Ne. 10:24)

Here we are told that it is only by God’s grace that we are saved, yet we must reconcile ourselves to God’s will (i.e. repent). Jewish scholar and philosopher Rabbi Byron Sherwin notes, “To effect complete reconciliation, the return must be mutual. Therefore, repentance requires both a human initiative and a divine response. The corollary of human contrition is divine grace (hesed)” [3]. The Book of Mormon prophet Nephi more famously proclaimed, “For we labor diligently to write, to persuade our children, and also our brethren, to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled unto God; for we know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do” (2 Nephi 25:23). This verse has been a controversial element in Mormon/Evangelical discussions. One of the main points that plague the discussion is the emphasis on “after all we can do.” Unfortunately, the plain meaning of “it is by grace that we are saved” is too often ignored. The verse reads more after the fashion of an exhortation rather than a rigorous theological treatise; a call to repentance and a recognition of God’s loving-kindness [4]. It is similar to the aforementioned words of Jacob as well as that of another Book of Mormon figure, Anti-Nephi-Lehi: “And I also thank my God, yea, my great God, that he hath granted unto us that we might repent of these things, and also that he hath forgiven us of those our many sins…and taken away the guilt from our hearts, through the merits of his Son…for it was all we could do to repent sufficiently before God that he would take away our stain” (Alma 24:10-11; emphasis mine).

As revealing as these verses may be to those unfamiliar with our faith, they do not do justice to how faith and grace are understood within the LDS community. In an attempt to paint a clearer picture, I will draw on some of the most recent scholarship regarding these terms. Grace (Greek charis) in New Testament times was not a uniquely religious term, but one of secular usage also. In the Greco-Roman world, reciprocity was a key component to society and operated by means of client-patron systems. When one was unable to access a particular need, individuals who did have access were petitioned. David DeSilva, Professor of New Testament and Greek at Ashland University, provides this overview:

If the patron granted the petition, the petitioner would become the client of the patron and a potentially long-term relationship would begin. This relationship would be marked by the mutual exchange of desired goods and services, the patron being available for assistance in the future, the client doing everything in his or her power to enhance the fame and honor of the patron…, remaining loyal to the patron and providing services whenever the opportunity arose [5].

While God is never directly called the patron of the Christian church, the language of New Testament writers (like Paul) carries “a strong patronal tone” [6]. It is worth noting that the patron and the client did not hold an equal status due to the former’s ability to provide necessary resources that the latter was incapable of acquiring on his own. “It was this state of dependence…that formed one’s identity as a client. In exchange for receiving these needed goods from the patron, the client was expected to give back to the patron.” Since he was unable to provide his own necessities, “a client could hardly give something from himself, and therefore could only give of himself to the patron” [7]. The concept of giving of ourselves resonates with the words delivered by LDS apostle Dallin H. Oaks in a 2000 address to the Church: “[T]he Final Judgment is not just an evaluation of a sum total of good and evil acts—what we have done. It is an acknowledgment of the final effect of our acts and thoughts—what we have become. It is not enough for anyone just to go through the motions. The commandments, ordinances, and covenants of the gospel are not a list of deposits required to be made in some heavenly account. The gospel of Jesus Christ is a plan that shows us how to become what our Heavenly Father desires us to become” [8].

Given this context we can discern that grace in antiquity was not only the initial gift of the giver, but also included the response of the receiver. DeSilva confirms, “Grace thus has very specific meaning for authors and readers of the New Testament, meanings derived primarily from the use of the word in the context of the giving of benefits and the requiting of favors.” This

suggests implicitly what many moralists from the Greek and Roman cultures stated explicitly: Grace must be met with grace; favor must always give birth to favor; gift must always be met with gratitude. An image that captured this for the ancients was the picture of three goddesses, the three “Graces,” dancing hand in hand in a circle…From [many] ancient witnesses, we learn that there is no such thing as an isolated act of grace…Only a gift requited is a gift well and nobly received. To fail to return favor for favor is, in effect, to break off the dance and destroy the beauty of the gracious act [9].

This reciprocal nature of grace fits quite comfortably into LDS scripture:

For if you keep my commandments you shall receive of his fulness, and be glorified in me as I am in the Father; therefore, I say unto you, you shall receive grace for grace (D&C 93:20).

And may God grant, in his great fulness, that men might be brought unto repentance and good works, that they might be restored unto grace for grace, according to their works (Helaman 12:24).

Warren Zev Harvey of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem defines “grace” in Judaism (the native religion of the New Testament authors) as follows:

The Hebrew hesed (plural hasadim) is usually translated as "grace" or "loving-kindness," but sometimes also as "mercy" or "love." An act of hesed is an act of kindness done neither to repay a debt nor for the sake of gain, but freely and purely out of love [10].

Judah Goldin (one of the most prominent Jewish scholars of the 20th century) defines hesed as a “word expressing the phenomenon of “loyalty”, “devotion”,” corresponding “fairly closely to the Latin pietas [piety]…” He further explains that an “act of grace” or gemilut hasadim is an “act by means of which one demonstrates his response to someone, in obedience to him or out of loyalty to him. In short, it really is an act of piety. And strictly speaking, any action...which an individual carried out as a fulfillment of a divine command, was an act of gemilut hasadim” [11].

This review of the historical uses of grace also makes it easier to comprehend Paul’s mentioning of those who have “fallen from grace” in Galatians (Galatians 5:4). Peter’s warning to “beware lest ye also, being led away with the error of the wicked, fall from your own stedfastness” becomes more understandable as does his exhortation to “grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:17-18). The author of Hebrews speaks of those who “fall away” after being “enlightened,” having “tasted of the heavenly gift,” and having been “made partakers of the Holy Ghost” (Hebrews 6:4,6) and thus reminding his readers that “we are made partakers of Christ, if we hold the beginning of our confidence stedfast unto the end” (Hebrews 3:14).

In the book How Wide the Divide?, written with New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg, BYU professor Stephen E. Robinson argues, “Latter-day Saints enthusiastically endorse the validity of salvation through grace by faith…but insist that 'faith' not be totally divorced from its Semitic origin meaning “faithful” (Hebrew aman) and become watered down to mean mere mental assent…To have “faith” in Christ must in some degree imply subsequent “faithfulness” to Christ as Lord...” [12]. A favorite among Mormons is the epistle of James, in which “pure religion” is defined as visiting “the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep [one's self] unspotted from the world” (James 1:27). “Faith,” James states, “if it hath not works, is dead, being alone” (James 2:17). According to James, “by works” faith is “made perfect” (vs. 22) and man is justified by works, “not by faith only” (vs. 24; oddly enough, this is the only place in the New Testament where “faith alone” is mentioned). The prophet Joseph Smith defined faith as a “principle of action,” a “principle of power,” and “the moving cause of all action…” [13]. LDS apostle Richard G. Scott recently summarized this description by noting that “faith and character are intimately related” [14]. Zeba A. Crook of Carleton University has found that the Latin fides and Greek pistis (from which we translate the English word “faith”) functioned “in many aspects of political life in the Roman Empire, such as friendship, love, obedience, power, fellowship, benevolence, patronage and tutelage” [15]. Drawing on a number of ancient sources, he concludes that the terms should be defined as “faithfulness, steadfastness, and trustworthiness, all in the sense of loyalty between parties” [16]. Even Raymond E. Brown, one of the most prestigious scholars on the Gospel of John, defines the Greek as “an active commitment to a person” that “involves much more than trust…The commitment is not emotional but involves a willingness to respond to God’s demands as they are presented in and by Jesus…for to have faith implies that one will abide in the word and commands of Jesus” [17]. Therefore, we can more fully understand why the author of Hebrews describes Christ as “the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him” (Hebrews 5:9).

Returning to Robinson, he further explains, “[T]he LDS concept of being “in Christ” (Paul’s term) or being “perfect in Christ” (Moroni’s term) is one of covenant relationship. While there are no preconditions for entering in the covenant of faith in Christ to be justified by his grace through faith, there are covenant obligations by so entering. Those who have been justified by faith are obliged to serve Christ and to make Him their Lord by imitating him in their behavior and keeping his commandments” [18]. It is here that we begin to understand the LDS perspective more fully. Mormon doctrine is seen through the paradigm of covenants, which were also the centerpiece of the Jewish faith as well as early Christianity. Even the familiar terms “Old and New Testament” are more accurately translated “Old and New Covenant.” In Galatians, Paul exhorts us to have “faith which worketh by love” (Gal. 5:6). The term love was understood to have covenant implications within the ancient Near East as demonstrated by its usage in a variety of ancient treaties. This was not some romanticized emotion, but a declaration of loyalty and brotherhood [19]. Thus Christ declares the two greatest commandments to be “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind” and “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (see Matthew 22:36-40). To the apostles, He says, “As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love. If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love…Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you” (John 15:9-10,14). Even more straightforward, He states, “If ye love me, keep my commandments” (John 14:15). By loving God, we come to intimately know Him. If to “know God” is eternal life (as the Savior says in John 17:3), then it is noteworthy that John writes, “And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments” (1 John 2:3) [20].

But doesn’t Paul state emphatically, “if by grace, then is it no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace” (Romans 11:6)? Did he not say, “Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt” (Romans 4:4)? This is quite true. The subtle, but important distinction between what has been explained and what Paul condemns is that of reciprocal and contractual systems. Contractual relationships differed in that they formally laid out in advance “precise evaluations of favors,” thereby calling for an “even exchange” rather than an “ongoing exchange” [21]. The key is realizing that “we love [God], because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). No one obligated God to act; hence the debt or legal obligation spoken of in Romans 4 would not apply. Rather, God is who initiated the process to begin with [22]. The only reason good works are salvific is because of God’s grace. He could have easily left us to our hell-bound fate, but instead provided a framework in which redemption could take place and salvation could be attained. This was an act purely out of love and in no way earned by us. As E.P. Sanders pointed out decades ago in his groundbreaking book Paul and Palestinian Judaism, according to the Jewish people in Paul’s day, “salvation is by grace but judgment is according to works; works are the condition of remaining ‘in’, but they do not earn salvation…The point is that God saves by grace, but within the framework established by grace he rewards good deeds and punishes transgression” [23]. Thus, the Book of Mormon prophet Samuel the Lamanite was correct when he said that the atonement of Christ “bringeth to pass the condition of repentance” (Helaman 14:18). Paul did not discover some abstract principle of “grace” in contrast to “works.” He instead reinterpreted Israel’s salvation history in light of the resurrection of Christ [24]. Yet, Paul still maintains (as did Jesus and the Psalmist) that “[God] will render to every man according to his deeds: to them who by patient continuance in well doing seek for glory and honour and immortality, eternal life: but unto them that are contentious, and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, indignation and wrath” (Romans 2:6-8). By doing so, Paul continues to hold his Jewish view of judgment and grace. As one scholar put it, “One need but consult the rabbinic morning prayers to recognize that while responding to God’s call to responsibility, Jews also look to God's loving kindness, grace, and forgiveness. The actions undertaken, just as for Christians, are in grateful response to God's kindness and the covenant relationship into which this people have entered” [25].

In conclusion, I will summarize using both modern philosophy and modern scripture. Blake Ostler, one of the greatest contemporary LDS philosophers, explains,

There is no sense of earning the relationship by keeping the commandments. We keep the commandments to maintain our fidelity with God...One is justified when one enters into the relationship, for acceptance into the relationship is justification…Through faithfulness to the covenant conditions, one is thereafter sanctified in the sense that the Holy Ghost makes the person over in the image of God which was lost through the fall…Through grace, persons are made “partakers of the divine nature” by being purified and becoming pure as He is pure...Thus, the Mormon doctrine of divinity entails that divinity is humanity fully mature in the grace of Christ [26].

Finally, from modern revelation revealed by the Lord through the prophet Joseph Smith:

And we know that all men must repent and believe on the name of Jesus Christ, and worship the Father in his name, and endure in faith on his name to the end, or they cannot be saved in the kingdom of God. And we know that justification through the grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is just and true; And we know also, that sanctification through the grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is just and true, to all those who love and serve God with all their mights, minds, and strength. But there is a possibility that man may fall from grace and depart from the living God; Therefore let the church take heed and pray always, lest they fall into temptation; Yea, and even let those who are sanctified take heed also (D&C 20:28-34).

*All Bible references are KJV. Thanks to Tyler Andersen, Allen Hansen, Robert Boylan, David Larsen, Daniel McClellan, and David Bokovoy for their reviews and suggestions.

1. See Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 85. For an excellent treatment of Christian reformations, including that of the 16th century, see Ch. 1 “God’s Truth: Inevitable Sects and Reformations” in its entirety.

2. Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City, UT: Bookcraft, 1966), 338-339.

3. Byron L. Sherwin, In Partnership with God: Contemporary Jewish Law and Ethics (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 125.

4. This view was advocated by political scientist Jason Nelson-Seawright in the blog post “The Problem of 2 Nephi 25:23,” By Common Consent (Jan. 15, 2008).

5. David A. DeSilva, Honor, Patronage, Kinship & Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 97. Also see Jerome H. Neyrey, “God, Benefactor and Patron: The Major Cultural Model for Interpreting the Deity in Greco-Roman Antiquity,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 27:4 (2005) for an informative layout of the patronage system.

6. Mark A. Jennings, “Patronage and Rebuke in Paul’s Persuasion in 2 Corinthians 8-9,” Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism 6 (2009): 113.

7. Ibid.: 114.

8. Dallin H. Oaks, “The Challenge to Become,” Ensign (November 2000).

9. DeSilva, Honor, Patronage, Kinship & Purity, 105-106. For an LDS view, see John Gee, “The Grace of Christ,” FARMS Review 22:1 (2010).

10. Warren Zev Harvey, "Grace in Judaism," Encyclopedia of Love in World Religions, Vol. 1, ed. Yudit Kornberg Greenberg (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2008), 268.

11. Judah Goldin, "The Three Pillars of Simeon the Righteous," Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 27 (1958): 45.

12. Stephen E. Robinson, Craig L. Blomberg, How Wide the Divide?: A Mormon & Evangelical in Conversation (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1997), 145. See Ch. 4 “Salvation” for the full discussion.

13. “Lecture First,” Lectures on Faith, prepared by Joseph Smith, Jr. (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book: 1985 [originally delivered to the School of the Prophets in Kirtland, Ohio: 1834-1835]), 1, 3.

14. Richard G. Scott, “The Transforming Power of Faith and Character,” Ensign (Nov. 2010).

15. Zeba A. Crook, “BTB Readers’ Guide: Loyalty,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 34:4 (Nov. 2004): 167. John Gee came to similar conclusions. See his “The Corruption of Scripture in Early Christianity,” Early Christians in Disarray: Contemporary LDS Perspectives on the Christian Apostasy, ed. Noel B. Reynolds (Provo, Utah: FARMS, 2005). Others have noted that it takes the form of a pledge, covenant, or oath. See David M. Hay, “Pistis as “Ground of Faith” in Hellenized Judaism and Paul,” Journal of Biblical Literature 108:3 (1989).

16. Ibid.: 168.

17. Raymond E. Brown, The Anchor Bible – The Gospel According to John (I-XII) (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 513.

18. Robinson, Blomberg, How Wide the Divide?, 145-146.

19. See Frank Moore Cross, "Kinship and Covenant in Ancient Israel" in his From Epic to Canon: History and Literature in Ancient Israel (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998), 7-11; William L. Moran, “The Ancient Near Eastern Background of the Love of God in Deuteronomy,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 25:1 (1963); J.A. Thompson, "The Significance of the Verb Love in the David-Jonathan Narratives in 1 Samuel," Vetus Testamentum 24:3 (1974).

20. The late biblical scholar John L. McKenzie translates hesed as “covenant-love,” viewing it as a parallel to the “knowledge of God” in the book of Hosea: “[K]nowledge, to the Hebrew, was not a mere intellectual apprehension, but a vital union of possession. Knowledge of Hebrew morality did not mean ethical science, but a vital union with the traditional morality which qualified the whole human life; one knows this morality by having it, by living it.” See his “Knowledge of God in Hosea,” Journal of Biblical Literature 74:1 (March 1955): 27.

21. David A. DeSilva, An Introduction to the New Testament: Contexts, Methods & Ministry Formation (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 130.

22. See Ibid., 618.

23. E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977), 543.

24. For a recent discussion of this subject, see J.R. Daniel Kirk, Unlocking Romans: Resurrection and the Justification of God (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2008).

25. Mark Nanos, "The Myth of the 'Law-Free' Paul Standing Between Christians and Jews," Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 4:1 (2009): 3. Paula Fredriksen’s brand new article “Judaizing the Nations: The Ritual Demands of Paul’s Gospel,” New Testament Studies 56 (2010) has a similar thesis.

26. Blake T. Ostler, “Re-vision-ing the Mormon Concept of Deity,” Element: A Journal of Mormon Philosophy and Theology 1:1 (Spring 2005).

GREENIE BASHING

2010-12-10T10:22:00.000-08:00

My sister-in-law is currently serving a mission and recently left the MTC for the field...and she has already had a bash. I can relate. I had a bash my first day of tracting. Apparently, this Baptist individual she was teaching had a list of anti-Mormon arguments, one of which involved King Zedekiah and Mulek. He also objected to the necessity of baptism and relied on the "different gospel" notion of Galatians 1. Here was my attempt to give my sister-in-law some ammunition for future contacts:

I'm surprised he mentioned King Zedekiah and Mulek. That isn't exactly a normal anti-Mormon argument. But I find it to be completely trivial. I assume his argument was that 2 Kings 25:7 states Zedekiah's sons were killed before him (before his eyes were put out). The contradiction seemingly is that Mulek is identified as a son of Zedekiah who survived in the Book of Mormon, specifically Helaman 8:21. Therefore, the Book of Mormon contradicts the Bible. My question really is, "So?" There are numerous possibilities regarding this single line (note that: he is worried about a historical event that has one line of the Bible dedicated to it. What kind of historical certainty or veracity is he hoping to achieve with one line?). 2 Kings doesn't specify that all the sons were killed, though it certainly implies it. More likely the author of 2 Kings thought all had been slain and was unaware of Mulek's escape. The secrecy of his escape could very well be the reason he was even able to escape. In other words, the author of 2 Kings made a mistake (await the *GASP* that follows for suggesting the Bible is not completely inerrant in its narrative along with the accusation that you don't really believe the Bible). His entire argument rests on the assumption that the Bible is infallible, inerrant, and completely accurate in all its details. I think it is safe to assume that is his position given his question about which book you place authority in.

He might like to know that the Pharisees had in a sense deified the Law of Moses and made it the final authority when Christ came preaching new revelation. The Law by that time had become associated with the Word or Wisdom: the divine mediator and creating agent of God (often associated with "the angel of the Lord" or "the word of the Lord" in the Old Testament). For example, Jewish midrashic writings depict God at the Creation using the Torah (or Law) as the instrument and blueprint of creation. It is this very reason that John identifies Christ as "the Word" (Greek Logos) in the opening of his Gospel and states that "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). He was declaring that Jesus was the Word of God instead of the Law [1]. Paul's arguments are not between "faith & grace" and "works" per se, but instead "works of the law" and "faith in & grace of Christ." In other words, he was arguing for the recognition of and commitment to Christ as the true divine Word. Your Baptist friend is adopting the same Pharisaic attitude about the Bible as they did about the Law. He might also like to know that sola scriptura ("scripture alone") was a Protestant invention and is found nowhere in Christian thought prior to the 16th century (including the Bible). Scripture was most definitely important and sacred, but not the "final authority." Seeing that there is absolutely no way to justify his assumption about scripture (especially to anyone who knows even a little about biblical criticism), you shouldn't feel obligated to play by his Bible-only rules. Force him to defend his assumption without appealing to the Bible, especially since "the Bible" as we know it would have been unknown to those writing the actual manuscripts. It should be obvious to any reasonable person that "the Bible is perfect because the Bible says so" is not a legitimate argument.

The name Mulek is similar to the Hebrew melek, meaning "king" and comes from the root mlk. The fact that the name reflects Semitic origin ironically provides more credibility to the Book of Mormon as an ancient, partially Semitic text. Despite the more plausible explanation of scribal error in 2 Kings regarding Zedekiah's sons, several scholars make this observation:

Mulek is hypocoristic [i.e. intimate nickname] for Hebrew Mlkyh(w) (KJV Melchiah and Malchiah), which is attested both in the Bible (see 1 Chronicles 6:40; Ezra 10:25, 3; Nehemiah 3:14, 31; 8:4; 11:12; Jeremiah 21:1; 38:1, 6) and in numerous ancient inscriptions, most of them from the time of Lehi. Indeed, it has been suggested that one of the men bearing this name is the Mulek of the Book of Mormon. He is called "Malchiah the son of Hammelech," which means "Malchiah, son of the king" (see Jeremiah 38:6). Muloki corresponds to the name Mlky on a bulla found in the City of David (Jerusalem) and dating to the time of Lehi. [2]

Moving on. Baptism is one that I don't even bother much with anymore. Christ Himself was baptized as attested in all the Gospels. He oversaw baptisms (and possibly performed them) according to John 3:22 and 4:1-2. He mentions that birth by water is necessary to enter the kingdom of God in John 3:3-5. He states faith and baptism are necessary for salvation in Mark 16:16. Paul speaks of it in Romans 6 and Galatians 3 as the method by which you "enter into" or "put on" Christ. Peter states that baptism "saves us" in 1 Peter 3:21 and is the most explicit in Acts 2:38. Conversions are always accompanied by water baptisms in the New Testament, particularly in Acts. The Didache, an early Christian treatise written around the same time as some of the New Testament books (and considered scripture by many of the early Christians), gives brief details on how one is supposed to be baptized. The Sherpherd of Hermas, a 2nd century Christian text (also considerd scripture by some at that time), identifies the seal of the Son of God as the waters of baptism. It is likely that this is part of the sealing spoken of in Revelation 7 (especially when one realizes that anointing of the forehead and the dressing in white garments was historically part of the baptismal ritual) [3]. The early Church Fathers of the first few centuries understood water baptism to be salvific, from Justin Martyr to Irenaeus to Clement of Alexandria to Tertullian [4]. The list goes on. Anyone saying baptism was not considered necessary by the early Christians knows next to nothing about Christian history.

As for Galatians 1, I love the fact that Paul states the gospel he preaches "is not after man. For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ" (Gal. 1:11-12). In other words, the true gospel is received and preached via revelation. It should be pointed out that Paul elsewhere states that "by revelation [God] made known unto me the mystery...which in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men, as it is now revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit" (Eph. 3:3,5). These apostles and prophets are described by Paul as the "foundation" of the "household of God" (Eph. 2:19-20). This is quite literal. The term "foundation of the apostles and prophets" is a genitive of apposition in Greek [5]. It should be understood as "the foundation which is the apostles and prophets." Apparently, "mysteries" were received through revelation by foundational apostles and prophets in the New Testament church. I will note that the concept of the Greek mysterion ("mystery") traces its roots to the Hebrew sod [6]. This is the Hebrew word translated "secret" in Amos 3:7 and "counsel" (more properly "council") in Jeremiah 23:18-22. The Old Testament prophets were understood to have been invited into God's divine council to hear His secret decrees and then proclaim them to the world. Revelation is the key component of God's operations, not "the Bible." As historian Richard L. Bushman put it,

The Bible’s cultural influence was based on the belief that God revealed himself to prophets. The reason for embracing the Bible was that its words had come from heaven. Christianity had smothered this self-evident fact by relegating revelation to a bygone age, making the Bible an archive rather than a living reality. The significance of Joseph Smith—and other prophets of his time—was their introduction of revelation into the present, renewing contact with the Bible’s God...[The Bible] was a record of revelations, and the ministry had turned it into a handbook. The Bible had become a text to be interpreted rather than an experience to be lived. In the process, the power of the book was lost...At a time when the origins of Christianity were under assault by the forces of Enlightenment rationality, Joseph Smith returned modern Christianity to its origins in revelation. [7]

Sorry for the length. I hope this was helpful. If you have anymore questions, just ask. Good luck. We love you!

1. Daniel Boyarin, "The Gospel of the Memra: Jewish Binitarianism and the Prologue of John," Harvard Theological Review 94:3 (2001)

2. John Gee, Matthew Roper, John Tvedtnes, "Book of Mormon Names Attested in Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 9:1 (2000)

3. Charles A. Gieschen, "Baptismal Practice and Mystical Experience in the Book of Revelation," Paradise Now: Essays on Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism, ed. April DeConick (SBL, 2006)

4. Examples can be found in A Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs: A Reference Guide to More Than 700 Topics Discussed by the Early Church Fathers, ed. David W. Bercot (Hendrickson Publishers, 1998)

5. Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament (Zondervan, 1996)

6. Raymond E. Brown, “The Pre-Christian Semitic Concept of “Mystery”,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 20 (1958)

7. Bushman, "A Joseph Smith for the Twenty-First Century," BYU Studies 40:3 (2001)

A LOOK INTO THE COMPONENTS OF INNOVATIVE ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

2010-12-05T00:31:00.000-08:00

This was my semester research paper written for my Human Resource Management class. It was written along with Will Dwyer, Stephanie Farris, and Tharika Mounarath:

During the last half of the 20th century, the academic literature in organizational studies gradually recognized the massive impact culture has on an organization’s operations. Organizational culture has been defined as “the pattern of basic assumptions that a given group has invented, discovered, or developed in learning to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration…” Or, put more bluntly, “the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems” within an organization (Schein, 1995: pg. 222). In today’s business world of high-technology and global markets, innovation is critical to an organization’s survival and success. The ability to create value through new knowledge or new uses of existing knowledge (Jamrog, Vickers, and Bear, 2006) often leads to new products and/or services. In order for modern businesses to be innovative, they must create and maintain an innovative culture. Research in the behavioral sciences has given a clearer picture of human beings in regards to what motivates them to quality performance and creative thinking. Using this research as a foundation, businesses can assess both individual and organizational traits that best align with these findings. By so doing, organizations can employ workers, leaders, and structures that sustain an innovative culture.

In the final days of World War II, economist and social scientist Friedrich von Hayek published an article in The American Economic Review (1945) criticizing heavy central planning in government policy. The future Nobel laureate described what he calls the “rational economic order” as being “determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess” (pg. 519). Hayek defines this as “a problem of the utilization of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality” (pg. 520). Due to the Keynesian and socialist influence on intelligentsia, Hayek’s ideas were not welcomed at the time of their publication. However, the decline (though not demise) of positivism across multiple fields has brought about the praise and honor Hayek's work deserves. His 1945 defense of markets illuminated the key problem plaguing overly administrative authorities: no central authority possesses all available knowledge necessary to utilize all available resources in a society. This knowledge is instead widely dispersed among millions of individuals. Taking into consideration the evolving needs and wants of society, “it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them…We need decentralization because only thus can we ensure that the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place will be promptly used” (pg. 524). In short, centralized planning fails not only in practice, but also in principle.

Hayek’s social analysis combated the popular mechanical interpretation of society in favor of one whose nature is organic and evolving. Biological evolutionary progress was achieved by drawing on large, collective gene pools through sexual reproduction. Cultural evolution occurred through trade, exchange, and the emergence of specialization (including the division of labor among genders). Species that had greater interaction (e.g. continental species) fared better than those with less (e.g. island species). Allowing ideas to be exchanged across boundaries creates a collective intelligence and, consequently, innovative ideas (Ridley, 2010). Addressing the topic of evolutionary economics, historian of science Michael Shermer (2008) has pointed to the profound influence of Adam Smith’s economic philosophy on Charles Darwin’s scientific breakthrough. Smith declared that individual competition among persons (i.e. the invisible hand) led to national wealth and social harmony; while Darwin demonstrated individual competition among organisms (i.e. natural selection) led to complex design and ecological balance. In other words, complexity naturally arises from the bottom-up within the proper conditions. Forced complexity by means of paternalistic administration often stifles the motivation and innovation it seeks to create. Intrinsic motivation is the real force that drives the quality of individual work. This type of motivation bears the nickname “the Sawyer Effect” (Pink, 2009: pg. 36), recalling Tom Sawyer’s clever organization of eager fence painters. Research indicates the interest and satisfaction that comes from meeting challenges is diminished by imposed quotas and extrinsic rewards, given the assumption that employees are fairly paid (Pink, 2009). Contingency often forfeits autonomy along with the curiosity that accompanies it. Creativity is also clouded when coerced, as is the ability to think beyond short-term success. Extrinsic rewards tend to narrow focus by shifting the attention from experimentation to technicalities. These carrots-and-sticks type of rewards are very useful in mechanical circumstances in which directions and solutions are clear. However, when such things are not evident, tunnel vision becomes a hindrance. Even in situations where extrinsic rewards are useful, the effect gradually wears off. Like any addiction, it will eventually require bigger and better stimulants (Pink, 2009). Overbearing extrinsic forces also have the tendency of crowding out appropriate behavior and inviting unethical behavior in its place. By attaching awards, quotas, or punishments to particular actions, the altruistic nature becomes tainted in the eyes of individuals. At times, the new proposals are achieved by means of cheating, shortcuts, and other forms of unethical behavior. Overall, the desire to meet the given standards is greatly diminished as evidenced by the lack of voluntary participation in a variety of experiments (Pink, 2009; Shermer, 2008). Individuals universally desire self-direction in their activities, mastery of skills and knowledge, and an ultimate purpose behind their actions: all of which are intrinsic factors (Pink, 2009).

The Hawthorne Studies revolutionized the way in which organizations approach their employees. Whereas Frederick Taylor’s science of management viewed employees as machines, the findings of the Hawthorne Studies emphasized the importance of human relations and emotional satisfaction. Bureaucratic organizations designed employee relations in an impersonal fashion by means of clearly defined authority, formality, and rules (Daft, 2010). These studies demonstrated that the positive treatment of employees improves worker motivation and productivity. Even though the myth of reason vs. emotion still exists, it is known among neurologists that reason is actually incomplete without emotion. Emotions act as “markers” of decisions, determining whether the decision is good, bad, or indifferent. In the absence of emotion, decision-making becomes a near impossible task (Damasio, 1994). Recent psychological research confirms that positive emotions increase creative thinking and attentiveness to one’s environment. Negative emotions produce just the opposite, narrowing attention in a process known as “weapon focus” (Rowe, Hirsh and Anderson, 2007: pg. 383). Since creative solutions are often “outside of the box,” seeking to make employees happy will aid in creating an innovative culture.

Having laid the scientific groundwork, it becomes pertinent to understand what an organization actually is. Despite language that often describes it as such; an organization is not a quasi-personal, transcendent entity that exists above and beyond individuals. Rather, an organization is made up of multiple persons and personalities. Assessing which individual traits and behaviors lead to innovation (and, ultimately, long-term survival) is critical to analyzing the organization’s innovation as a whole. While culture and structure certainly influence individual behavior, the same is true of the individual’s effect on preexisting culture. Current research in a variety of fields has found a number of core personality traits that characterize creative persons. Attraction to complexity is an innovative trait that is seemingly connected to the fact that people respond positively both when challenged and when provided with the opportunity to produce novel ideas and solutions (Ahmed, 1998). Individuals with this trait embrace the internal sense of mastery that is part of the human cognitive make-up. Other traits include curiosity, broad interests, the ability to accommodate opposites, and intellectual honesty (Ahmed, 1998). These traits can lead to experimentation as well as risk-taking and are especially beneficial in team settings. Curiosity can breed an interest in and openness to others’ ideas, while intellectual honesty is essential to making proper judgments about particular views. Accommodation is a necessity for group interaction in order to avoid the narrowing effects of negative emotions. Self-confidence and high energy are also common qualities of innovative individuals. Connecting these two traits is a sense of empowerment: “Empowerment in the presence of strong cultures…produces both energy and enthusiasm for consistent work towards an innovative goal. Employees themselves are able to devise ways that allow them to innovate and accomplish their tasks” (Ahmed, 1998: pg. 39). Innovative attributes cannot be utilized if sufficient resources are not provided for them to act on. “Appropriate resources” (e.g. time and money) has become the top factor for innovation, while “insufficient resources” has been the most widely cited obstacle. Implicit in the research is the need for the individual to know which resources are appropriate for the task as well as how to effectively use them. In short, individuals need to possess the relevant skills, expertise, and talent to perform the tasks (Ahmed, 1998). Clear communication is also vital when it comes to the proper use of provided resources (Jamrog, Vickers, and Bear, 2006). Possessive attitudes must be replaced with the willingness to share information. All these traits point toward individuals who are open-minded, risk-takers, and socially competent. Those who naturally possess these attributes can have a significant impact on the organization’s culture (including its leadership and structure). By so doing, innovative leaders and structures can in turn have an impact on those who may not be naturally creative.

Taking into consideration the scientific research and core personality traits, a key component in building an innovative culture is the organization’s structure and leadership. Ultimately, the structure can either foster innovative behavior or suffocate it. Recalling Hayek’s social analysis, economist Alanson Minkler calls for a decentralized system in which regular employees become “knowledge workers” with “decision-making advantages over superiors higher up the hierarchy” (1993: pg. 569). Minkler takes an egalitarian approach to organizational structures, arguing that dispersed workers with dispersed knowledge must be given the freedom to make decisions based on that knowledge. The structure that fits this view best is the aforementioned organic structure. Within this model, rules are kept at a minimum, with mistakes being viewed as an essential and accepted part of learning (Ahmed, 1998; Martins and Terblanche, 2003). This provides workers the autonomy to experiment and seek out new ideas and solutions without the hindrance of technicalities. It also establishes experimentation as an accepted value within the organization. Organic structures tend to be informal, with a variety of participation and sharing of ideas. This ultimately means the breaking down of departmental barriers as well as hierarchy (Ahmed, 1998). The flow of information should be expected to travel both vertically and horizontally. The strict hierarchal system in which employees of different levels are generally separated from each other betrays the very nature of innovation. The most creative teams feature members of diverse backgrounds. Teams that possess different skills, knowledge, and points of view are more capable of producing creative solutions to problems (Jamrog, Bear, and Vickers, 2006). With this new freedom comes debate and conflict about ideas. This should be expected and accepted, with encouragement given to continued discussion (Ahmed, 1998). This new communication can also give way to flexibility in job programs. Informal job descriptions or job rotations can create a highly cooperative atmosphere (Martins and Terblanche, 2003). Interdepartmental communication, discussion, and participation can increase the exchange of ideas from which innovation emerges. Trust and openness are built upon transparent communication and interaction. The openness between departments within the organization should also take place outside the organization. External ideas should be sought after and welcomed when beneficial to the organization (Ahmed, 1998). Interorganizational relationships (e.g. Sony and Samsung) can be healthy for the organization's growth, with
competition existing in the midst of cooperation and partnerships (Daft, 2010).

These structures must also be coupled with the encouragement of transformational leaders. Avan Jassawalla and Hemant Sashittal of Syracuse University explained (2002: pg. 50),

Cultures in product-innovation settings are the collective creation of all participants. Cultures emerge as much from the bottom-up as they do from top-down decisions of leaders...[C]ultural transformation relies on leadership as well as the willingness and the capacity of participants to manage their anxiety about change, trust others, discard old and adopt new value and belief systems, and learn new behaviors.

Transformational leaders possess four characteristics that have been described as the 4 I’s: idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration (Bass and Avolio, 1993). These leaders act as nurturers to innovation, cultivating and pruning the organization's culture altogether. Accepting change and ambiguity as a constant factor encourages risk-taking and exploration (Ahmed, 1998). However, ambiguity and worker autonomy dissolves into chaos when no clear vision is provided. Some of the top-ranked barriers to innovation have included no formal strategy for innovation, a lack of clear goals and priorities, and a lack of leadership support (Jamrog, Bear, and Vickers, 2006). The organization must have a shared mission and vision of the future which focuses on both product and customer service development (Martins and Terblanche, 2003). It is management's duty to prescribe a set of understandable, strategic goals, while allowing great freedom within those guidelines. These goals act as boundaries that define the purpose of the organization's agenda and the extent of individual responsibility and action. Workers must be made aware of the organization's primary objectives and be expected to prioritize their time and efforts accordingly (Ahmed, 1998). Therefore, leadership is responsible for defining the organization's goals and providing the environmental conditions for their achievement.

"We forget sometimes that "management" does not emanate from nature. It's not like a tree or a river. It's like a television or a bicycle. It's something that humans invented...a technology...[and] it's a technology that has grown creaky" (Pink, 2009: pg. 88). Daniel Pink's slightly humorous observation is insightful to say the least. Research and experience continue to point to a business setting in which employers, employees, and organizations as a whole benefit. Dated attitudes about management continue to plague manager/worker relations and hinder the potential of human capital. Top-down structures continue to commit the fallacy of heavily centralized planning. By providing more freedom, less formality, and more cooperation in the workplace, businesses can continue to thrive in the ever-expanding global economy. Respecting human nature leads to an untapped potential in human capital. In short, innovation comes by putting the human back in human resource management.

Bibliography:

Ahmed, P. (1998). Culture and climate for innovation. European Journal of Innovation Management, 1(1), 30-43.

Bass, B., & Avolio, B. (1993). Transformational leadership and organizational culture. Public Administration Quarterly, 17(1), 112-121.

Daft, R. (2010). Organization theory and design (10th ed.). Mason, OH: Cengage Learning.

Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes' error: emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: Grosset/Putnam.

Hayek, F.A. (1945). The use of knowledge in society. The American Economic Review, 35(4), 519-530.

Jamrog, J., Vickers, M., & Bears, D. (2006). Building and sustaining a culture that supports innovation. Human Resource Planning, 29(3), 9-19.

Jassawalla, A., & Sashittal, H. (2002). Cultures that support product-innovation processes. The Academy of Management Executive (1993-2005), 16(3), 42-54.

Martins, E.C., & Terblanche, F. (2003). Building organisational culture that stimulates creativity and innovation. European Journal of Innovation Management, 6(1), 64-74.

Minkler, A. (1993). The problem with dispersed knowledge: firms in theory and practice. KYKLOS, 46(4), 569-587.

Pink, D. (2009). Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us. New York: Riverhead Books.

Ridley, M. (2010) The rational optimist: how prosperity evolves. New York: HarperCollins.

Rowe, G., Hirsh, J.B., & Anderson, A.K. (2007). Positive affect increases the breadth of attentional selection. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104(1), 383-388. http://www.aclab.ca/pubs/Rowe,%20Hirsch,%20&%20Anderson%20(2007).%20PNAS.%20Positive%20affect%20increases%20the%20breadth.pdf

Schein, E. (1995). The role of the founder in creating organizational culture. Family Business Review, 8(3), 221-238.

Shermer, M. (2008). The mind of the market: compassionate apes, competitive humans, and other tales from evolutionary economics. New York: Times Books.

THE EVOLUTION OF FAITH

2010-11-30T17:36:00.000-08:00

As a kind of teaser for the upcoming interfaith dialogue at the UNT Institute with Brad Eggerton, director of the upcoming documentary Religion & Redemption: A Documentary on Mormonism, here is an excellent summary by former nun and academic Karen Armstrong on the historical development of the concept 'faith':

The word translated as "faith" in the New Testament is the Greek pistis (verbal form: pisteuo), which means "trust; loyalty; engagement; commitment." ...[Jesus] was asking for commitment. He wanted disciples who would engage with his mission, give all they had to the poor, feed the hungry, refuse to be hampered by family ties, abandon their pride, lay aside their self-importance and sense of entitlement, live like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, and trust in the God who was their father...When the New Testament was translated from Greek into Latin by Saint Jerome (c. 342-420), pistis became fides ("loyalty"). Fides has no verbal form, so for pisteuo Jerome used the Latin verb credo, a word that derived from cor do, "I give my heart." He did not think of using opinor ("I hold an opinion"). When the Bible was translated into English, credo and pisteuo became "I believe" in the King James version (1611). But the word "belief" has since changed its meaning. In Middle English, bileven meant "to prize; to value; to hold dear." It was related to the German belieben ("to love"), liebe ("beloved"), and the Latin libido. So "belief" originally meant "loyalty to a person to whom one is bound in promise or duty." When Chaucer's knight begged his patron to "accepte my bileve," he meant "accept my fealty, my loyalty." In Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, which was probably written around 1603, shortly before the publication of the King James Bible, the young nobleman Bertram is urged to "believe not thy disdain": he must not entertain his contempt for lowborn Helena and allow it to take deep root in his heart. During the late seventeenth century, however, as our concept of knowledge became more theoretical, the word "belief" started to be used to describe an intellectual assent to a hypothetical-and often dubious-proposition. Scientists and philosophers were the first to use it in this sense, but in religious contexts the Latin credere and the English "belief" both retained their original connotations well into the nineteenth century.

In other words,

We began [in the 16th-17th centuries] to understand concepts such as faith, revelation, myth, mystery, and dogma in a way that would have been very surprising to our ancestors. In particular, the meaning of the word "belief" changed, so that a credulous acceptance of creedal doctrines became the prerequisite of faith, so much so that today we often speak of religious people as "believers," as though accepting orthodox dogma "on faith" were their most important activity. [1]

1. Karen Armstrong, The Case for God (Knopf, 2009: pgs. 87-88, xv). See Armstrong's article in The Wall Street Journal with Richard Dawkins for her brief views about God.

POST-THANKSGIVING AND THE 21ST CENTURY

2010-11-28T20:46:00.000-08:00

Regardless of our circumstances, each of us has much for which to be grateful if we will but pause and contemplate our blessings.

This is a wonderful time to be on earth. While there is much that is wrong in the world today, there are many things that are right and good. There are marriages that make it, parents who love their children and sacrifice for them, friends who care about us and help us, teachers who teach. Our lives are blessed in countless ways.

We can lift ourselves and others as well when we refuse to remain in the realm of negative thought and cultivate within our hearts an attitude of gratitude. If ingratitude be numbered among the serious sins, then gratitude takes its place among the noblest of virtues. Someone has said that “gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.”

- Thomas S. Monson [1]

We were blessed to hear some excellent talks in sacrament meeting today. Each speaker brought different experiences and provoked a variety of thoughts regarding our current standing in the world. Ultimately, the verdict was that we had much to be grateful for. It all depends on how you look at it.

It is easy to invoke the silly question "Why me?" when trials come our way (And I describe it as "silly" having been the one asking it before. Despite our pain, it is a very silly question.). Yet, how often do we stop to consider what we have? Do we ever think about the creature comforts we enjoy, even in so-called poverty? Do we think about what it means to be "average" today compared to times past? Do we ever stop and think about the miracle of human progress?

Does it make a difference that since the 1800s, despite the population multiplying six times, average life expectancy has more than doubled and real income has risen nine times? Or that in the past 50 years, the average income (adjusted for inflation) has tripled, food production is up by 1/3, child mortality is down 2/3, and life expectancy is up 1/3? Should we rejoice that we are less likely to die as a result of war, murder, childbirth, accidents, tornadoes, flooding, famine, whooping cough, tuberculosis, malaria, diphtheria, typhus, typhoid, measles, smallpox, scurvy or polio? How about that we are more likely to be literate, finish school, own a telephone, a flush toilet, a refrigerator, electricity, or a car? Is it worth noting that absolute poverty (i.e. less than a 1985 dollar a day) worldwide has been cut by half in the past 50 years, with the poor in the developing world growing their consumption twice as fast as the world as a whole between 1980 and 2000? Can we really be considered "poor" when today's poverty is equal to the middle-class of 1955: a very abundant and luxurious timeframe? Should we take into account that the 1955 middle-class didn't have eBay, Amazon, Starbucks, Google, or Blackberry? Or that the average 1955 working man could now qualify for welfare? Or that the majority of today's "poor" have electricity, running water, flush toilets, a refrigerator, a television, a telephone, a car, and air conditioning (only 36% of all Americans had air conditioning in 1970, whereas 79% of poor households had it as of 2005)? Should I be thankful that I only have to work 1/2 a second (less than that, actually) for the hour of reading light each night, rather than the 8 seconds in the 1950s, the 15 minutes in the 1880s, the six hours of the 1800s, or 50 hours in 1750 BC Babylon? [2]

Maybe we need to take a step back and realize that everything is amazing right now. Perhaps we should be happy about it.

1. Thomas S. Monson, "The Divine Gift of Gratitude," Ensign (Nov. 2010)

2. See Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (HarperCollins, 2010)

COUNT YOUR MANY BLESSINGS, NAME THEM ONE BY ONE

2010-11-24T12:58:00.000-08:00

I don't usually do holiday posts. Mainly because I forget, but at times I don't have the chance to before the moment has past. Sometimes I just don't want to because I don't have anything worthwhile to post. This time around, however, I have the opportunity to combine the holiday spirit with my love of the gospel, history, and economics (briefly, at least).

The first American settlers of Jamestown arrived in May 1607. The settlers engaged in a kind of communalism in which the products of labor would be placed into a common pool to sustain the settlement. Despite the plentiful amount of game and fertile soil, only 38 of the original 104 settlers were alive within six months largely due to famine. Another 500 were sent a couple years later, only to have another 440 die in the first six months. Scholars and economists have long recognized the connection between communal ownership and lack of production. The incentive to provide quality labor was sorely missing, which led to free riding and an eventual lack of output. Laziness was the common plague. In 1611, Sir Thomas Dale was sent by the British government as the "high marshal" of the Virginia colony. Dale put into place private ownership, which not only increased individual responsibility and risk, but overall prosperity as well [1].

The Pilgrims at Plymouth ran into similar problems (within six months, almost 1/2 of the population was wiped out). It was not until private ownership was put into effect that the Pilgrims began to prosper, with each family being assigned one to ten acres [2]. William Bradford blamed the collectivist mentality on Platonic philosophy, declaring (mark this) that "God in His wisdom saw another course fitter for them." It was this course that actually led to the economic survival and growth of the American colonies and the eventual establishment of the United States of America [3].

Upon arrival in the Great Basin, Mormon pioneers engaged in similar economic activity known as the United Order. Robert Ellickson of Yale University points out that group ownership among these three historic examples was most likely a risk-spreading device:

All three pioneer settlements were remote outposts, located weeks or months away from civilization...Remoteness precluded risk-spreading through multigenerational kinship networks, insurance markets, or government welfare programs. The settlers could spread risks only among themselves, and one option was to have a collective economy that guaranteed each member some share of total group output...[A]fter a few years, the risk-spreading benefits of group land ownership would no longer outweigh its familiar shortcomings, such as the shirking that notably afflicted Jamestown and Plymouth. [4]

On the Great Basin experience, Nathan Oman of William & Mary Law School notes,

To a greater and lesser extent, all of these [United Order] programs failed economically. Why was this, and is there anything to be gleaned about how we should think about markets from these failures?

Generally speaking, Mormons have offered two explanations for the failure of these arrangements. The first is unrighteousness. The saints were simply too selfish and petty to pull it off. The required levels of self-sacrifice, charity, and unity could not be met. People cheated and held back a portion and the whole thing fell apart. The second dominant explanation is persecution. Things were humming along quite nicely, we claim, until malignant outside forces in the form of either “mobs” (read: state militias) or the federal government intervened to destroy the communal Mormon arcadia. To a greater and lesser extent both of these explanations have value. In the Doctrine and Covenants, the Lord himself rebukes the Missouri Saints for their selfishness in failing to live the Law of Consecration. The Mormons lost a huge amount of property to mobs in Missouri, and the general disruption of the anti-polygamy campaigns in the 1880s was coupled with federal action aimed directly at some of the Mormon co-operatives. For example, the Brigham City United Order issued script that circulated as a medium of exchange within the organization. The federal government decided that these notes constituted a kind of negotiable security subject to federal taxation and slapped a crippling tax assessment on the Brigham City organization. [5]

Oman's response to this is Hayekian in nature, blaming the failure not on sin, but on poor utilization of knowledge. If true, this provides a revealing new insight to the concept of stewardship (i.e. specialized knowledge of property):

If complexity rather than sin or persecution ultimately spelled the end of all-encompassing Mormon communal economics, then the decision of the Church to abandon such efforts takes on new significance, for complexity is not inevitable. It is possible to retreat into simplicity, to limit ones self to keep the information associated with economic activity within manageable limits. Ultimately, this is not the decision that the prophets made. Brigham embraced the railroad, which was the ultimate engine of economic complexity, and his successors — notably Wilford Woodruff and Joseph F. Smith — were inspired to integrate Mormondom into national and ultimately international economies. The decision to embrace economic complexity — and with it the market — ultimately is what has allowed Mormonism to expand. We stand on the threshold of becoming a global religion in large part because Brigham bought stock in the Union Pacific, and Wilford and Joseph F. rejected, if you will, the Amish option. [6]

So, this Thanksgiving, be thankful for what made the growth of the United States and LDS Church possible: property rights [7].

1. See Thomas J. DiLorenzo, How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present (Three Rivers Press, 2004)

2. Robert C. Ellickson, "Property in Land," Yale Law Journal 102:6 (1993)

3. DiLorenzo, 2004

4. Ellickson, 1993. Also, see Nathan B. Oman, "The Law and Economics of Zion," Times & Seasons (Sept. 13, 2006).

5. Nathan B. Oman, "Mormons and Markets, II: Information and the Failure of the United Order," Times & Seasons (May 16, 2005)

6. Ibid. Also, see his "Zion and the Limits of Intellectual Agrarianism," Times & Seasons (June 7, 2010).

7. For a detailed discussion of Mormonism and markets, see Nathan B. Oman, "Property, Contract, and the Market: A Mormon Perspective," Unpublished Paper and "Intelligences and Zion: An Essay in Mormon Political Philosophy," Unpublished Paper.

FROM NORTH KOREA, WITH LOVE

2010-11-23T23:13:00.000-08:00

In response to the recent attack on South Korea by its northern neighbor, the President has pledged to defend our ally. I hope the administration stands by this. The threat of North Korea has been predicted, but largely ignored. What else is new?

I guess that whole "wars and rumors of wars" concept isn't going away anytime soon.

Then again, maybe Kim Jong-il is just lonely. A hug might do the trick:

BLINDED ME WITH SCIENCE

2010-11-07T12:38:00.001-08:00

Taking into account the President's reaction to recent losses, I think it is worth mentioning a 2008 article written in The Huffington Post by behavioral economist Dan Ariely. In it, he writes,

Since the emotions and excitement toward Obama seem to be those usually reserved for romantic attraction, I would like to draw on some lessons from our (Mike Norton, Jeana Frost, and I) research on the ways in which people form impressions about others in romantic settings and the pitfalls of their impressions.

What we found is that although people expect that the more they get to know another person the more they will like this person, in reality familiarity breeds contempt! As it turns out, on average, the more we learn about someone, the less we like them. Why is this the case? When we get partial information about others we tend to fill in the gaps optimistically; we assume that they are wonderful, just like us and that they share our exact values and preferences.

This may sound like a recommendation to not reveal much about ourselves and as a consequence gain more affection. However, this approach also presents a possible trap: As people learn more about us, their over-optimistic interpretation dissolves, the disappointment begins, and from then on the disappointments escalates, leading to lower and lower liking.

For example, imagine that someone writes that they like music. You assume that it is the same music you like (blues) and you immediately like this blues-music-lover. But when you learn more, you discover that in fact they like classical music, and once you encounter this one disappointing fact, everything you learn afterward is colored by that initial disappointment.

So, what does this say about Obama? In my estimation one of the charms of Obama is that we know so little about him (we definitely know less about him than about Clinton), and I assume that this lack of knowledge, coupled with our tendency to fill in the missing information in an over-optimistic way is one of the reasons for the Obama love fest. It also means that we should expect a hard and disappointing awakening as we learn more about Obama and realize that he is not the super-human we now imagine him to be.

Apparently, it wasn't "facts and science and argument" that won Obama the presidency. It was human irrationality. Oh, sweet irony.

UPDATE: As one young voter put it, "It's not the fad anymore." See Matt Ridley's WSJ article on bureaucrats and behavioral economics. Also, just to clarify, Ariely seems to favor Obama's economic policies. In response to this, see Thomas Sowell's comments on income inequality and its implications.

HAYEK AND KEYNES: PART 2

2010-11-06T00:01:00.000-07:00

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

2010-11-05T08:34:00.000-07:00

A certain Mr. Michaelsen wrote the following letter to the editor published in the Denton Record Chronicle on Oct. 28:

Health care markets

Some people argue that the government should stop providing health care and let private markets do the providing. The problem with this argument is price “inelasticity,” that is, no matter how much health care costs, people still need it to survive. They cannot reduce their health care consumption just because prices increase. Free markets work well for discretionary purchases, but not with a necessity like health care, because these markets place an overwhelming burden on poor people.

In the past, this nation has viewed minimal health care as a basic human right, that is, it has provided some care to the poor instead of allowing them to suffer. Unfortunately, much of this care has been provided at excessive cost in emergency rooms.

In my opinion, we have two choices: (1) provide less-costly government care for the poor or (2) let them decline and die. I don’t want to live in a country that chooses the latter.

Finding this to be nothing more than uninformed rhetoric, I responded with my own that was published November 5:

Health planning

“Let them decline and die,” Mr. Michaelsen (letters, Oct. 28)? I must say that I find your dichotomy a bit hyperbolic.

Lacking the space to fully dissect what I consider to be the presuppositions underlying your letter (e.g. health care as a basic right, pricing, etc.), I will instead briefly touch on the problems of government central planning.

Central planning assumes that a single authority possesses all the available and sufficient knowledge necessary to utilize all necessary resources.

This is quite obviously absurd, given the fact that this knowledge is widely dispersed among millions of individuals.

Considering that a variety of circumstances and demands call for a variety of goods and services, it would seem to follow that the decisions must be left in the hands of those who are directly familiar with the particular changes and situations. In order to meet the variety of needs, individuals must be at liberty to provide for them.

No central authority has all available knowledge. Advocating government-run health care is advocating for the most important decisions regarding one’s health to be placed in the hands of a third party, rather than the patient and doctor of choice.

I've made my views on government-run health care known elsewhere, along with follow-ups. Economist Jeffrey A. Miron of Harvard University had similar criticisms of his free-market position. I'll let his response fill in the gaps of my own:

First, my assessment is that even with no government health insurance, hardly anyone would die on the street for lack of health care. The poor would use their income transfers to buy some health care or insurance. The poor would receive private charity. And health care would be far less expensive due to elimination of the distortions caused by government health insurance.

Second, my position is that government provision of health insurance is enormously inefficient: it means worse health care for everyone, and it wastes resources that can be put to other uses. So the negative of having a few people suffer without government health insurance must be balanced against the good of having better medical care for all and against the good that can be accomplished with those saved resources.

That good might be lower taxes for everyone, or more government spending on education, or greater public health spending to combat HIV in poor countries. Whatever the alternate uses turn out to be, one cannot escape the fact that a tradeoff exists between protecting the poor and other goals.

FINAL ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN PAPER

2010-11-04T18:16:00.000-07:00

Robert B. Reich

"Why Business Should Fear the Tea Party"

The Wall Street Journal (Oct. 29, 2010)

Walker Wright

Robert Reich, Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkley and former U.S. Secretary of Labor under Clinton, recognizes that businesses are not fond of the policies put forth by the Obama administration. However, the real threat in Reich's eyes is the ever-growing "tea party": "Even if it's now on the fringe, the tea party won't be for long. By fueling the Republican surge in the midterm elections, the tea party has become the single most powerful force in the GOP. It's backing at least 14 Senate candidates, both challengers and incumbents, and is playing a significant role in scores of House races." Reich explains that the ideology of the "tea party candidates [is] targeting the central institutions of American government." Among these institutions are the Federal Reserve and Internal Revenue Service. Prominent tea party supporters Rand Paul and Jim DeMint have been quite vocal in this respect, with 60% of tea party members favoring the abolishment of the Fed. John Castellani of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America is quoted saying, "This kind of extremism makes it much harder to plan from a business perspective." According to a press release from the National Center for Public Policy Research, "Liberal CEOs are the next target for tea party activism." Reich then releases a host of statistics in order to define the tea party thought-process: "Almost two-thirds of tea partiers in the Bloomberg poll said they'd be willing to reduce research funds for Alzheimer's and other diseases to narrow the deficit; a similar proportion would consider cutting spending on roads and bridges." Seventy percent said they were less likely to vote for someone who supported the bank bailouts. Sixty-one percent feel that free trade will hurt the nation overall. "In a poll earlier this year by the Mellman Group, a majority of tea party supporters favored putting taxes on imports from countries with lower environmental standards than the United States." In short, Reich thinks businesses need to take a closer look at the tea party and what it stands for. In Reich's own words, "Wall Street may be furious with the Obama administration but at least Mr. Obama (and his predecessor) bailed it out."

This last phrase about how Obama "at least" bailed out Wall Street just about sums up Reich's economic and political views. While I think he raises an interesting question about free trade, that isn't his main focus. Reich's main argument is that business owners should be afraid of the tea party (or those who hold similar political or economic views) because they don't approve of bailing out failing businesses. Perhaps Reich should check the same Wall Street Journal issue his article appears in and read "Birth of a Movement," which explains the rise of the tea party from average citizens, including small business owners [1]. Using the term "business" as if it only applies to large businesses or CEOs who received bailouts is quite misleading. Expecting businesses to make strategic decisions based on the market, without the comfort of a government financial net (or should I say tax-payer financial net), is simply expressing the free-market economy that is foundational to the American lifestyle. Illuminating his warped mindset, Reich wrote in The Huffington Post that these economic views were nothing short of social Darwinism i.e. "survival of the fittest" [2]: the same philosophy that brought about the American Eugenics Movement in the early 20th century and blossomed under the Nazi regime. This dispicable hyperbole is not only wrong historically, but also philosophically and economically. The cutthroat interpretation of natural selection was employed by the likes of Thomas Huxley, while "survival of the fittest" were the words of philosopher Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin. Adam Smith's (who influenced Darwin) early writings argued that people were social and cooperative beings [3]. Modern political philosophers such as Larry Arnhart argue that Darwinism establishes what Greek philosophers, Scholastics, and Enlightenment thinkers referred to as natural law; a law that embraces the moral, social and cooperative nature of individuals [4]. While competition is vital, it is not about running others out of business. It is instead about adaptation to one's economic environment by means of trading and exchanging ideas, services, and goods. What Reich fails to realize is that eugenics were about lobbying the government to impose immigration restrictions, compulsory sterilization, and even euthanasia [5]. In other words, "the fittest" were to be selected by the administration for survival, while the others were left to themselves or cut off completely. Ironically, "too big to fail" sounds much closer to this than laissez-faire. The only thing that should worry business owners is that their choices in the market have consequences. And that's how it should be [6].

1. Douglas Blackmon, Jennifer Levitz, Alexandra Berzon, Lauren Etter, "Birth of a Movement," The Wall Street Journal (Oct. 29, 2010). See also Jeffrey R. Cornwall, "Small Business Turns to the Tea Party," The Christian Science Monitor (June 17, 2010); Stephanie Bergman, "Local Small-Business Owners Climb on Tea Party Bandwagon," GazetteNet (April 15, 2010).

2. Robert Reich, "Republican Economics as Social Darwinism," The Huffington Post (Sept. 26, 2010)

3. See Michael Shermer, The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics (Times Books, 2008)

4. See Larry Arnhart, "The New Darwinian Naturalism in Political Theory," American Political Science Review 89:2 (June 1995)

5. See Garland E. Allen, "The Social and Economic Origins of Genetic Determinism: A Case History of the American Eugenics Movement, 1900-1940 and its Lessons for Today," Genetica 99:2-3 (1997).

6. For reading on the effects of the bailouts, see Nicole Gelinas, "To Fix the Economy, Let Bad Banks Die," Los Angeles Times (Oct. 24, 2010); Chris Farrell, "End Bailouts - No Ifs, Ands, or Buts," BusinessWeek (Oct. 25, 2010).

UPDATE: For more on Herbert Spencer's so-called "social Darwinism," see Peter Richards, "Herbert Spencer: Social Darwinist or Libertarian Prophet?" Mises Daily (Nov. 4, 2010); Damon W. Root, "The Unfortunate Case of Herbert Spencer," Reason (July 29, 2008); Thomas C. Leonard, "Origins of the Myth of Social Darwinism: The Ambiguous Legacy of Richard Hofstadter's Social Darwinism in American Thought," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 71 (2009). For more on the Progressive Era and eugenics, see Thomas C. Leonard's "American Economic Reform in the Progressive Era: Its Foundational Beliefs and Their Relationship to Eugenics," History of Political Economy 41:1 (2009); "Mistaking Eugenics for Social Darwinism: Why Eugenics Is Missing from the History of American Economics," History of Political Economy 37 (2005); "Retrospectives: Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era," Journal of Economic Perspectives 19:4 (2005); "'More Merciful and Not Less Effective': Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era," History of Political Economy 35:4 (2003).

IT FINALLY HAPPENED

2010-11-02T19:15:00.000-07:00

I've been waiting for an opportunity to use this picture. What idiocy could deserve such recognition, I wondered. Well, it finally happened:

"Failure so Epic, that even Jesus can't bare to look"

UPDATE: The video has been made private. But it can be found here. As for November, most Americans demonstrated they knew a Keynesian when they saw one. See Michael Goodwin, "Power to the People!" The New York Post (Nov. 3, 2010); Susan Page, "Obama Coalition Frays Amid Voter Angst," USA Today (Nov. 3, 2010); Peter Baker, "In Republican Victories, Tide Turns Starkly," The New York Times (Nov. 2, 2010); Ross Douthat, "Looking at Why the Latest Liberal Era Failed," Dallas Morning News (Nov. 2, 2010); George F. Will, "A Recoil Against Liberalism," The Washington Post (Nov. 4, 2010); Nina Easton, "It's Not Just the Economy, Stupid," Fortune (Nov. 3, 2010).

BECAUSE IT'S AWESOME

2010-10-29T23:04:00.000-07:00

1990s. Saturday mornings. Sheer awesomeness.

YOUR LOVE IS MY DRUG

2010-10-25T23:29:00.000-07:00

Although she says she doesn't like the song "Tik Tok" (I know she secretly does), my wife does admit to liking Kesha's "Your Love Is My Drug" [shudder]. It turns out our desert-dwelling, bathtub-sleeping, white-trash party queen is right (no one saw that coming): love is very much like a drug. A new study by Professor Stephanie Ortigue of Syracuse University reveals that falling in love not only takes 1/5 of a second (apparently, love at first sight isn't all that silly), but brings about the same euphoric feelings as cocaine. Falling in love affects 12 areas of the brain, which release chemicals like dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline and vasopression. Unconditional love is brought about by the middle portion of the brain, while the reward part produces passionate love. Love can also act as an extremely effective pain reliever due to the fact that love activates the same areas of the brain that pain killers do to reduce pain. Love, cocaine, and lottery winning all affect the same areas. These particular areas are also linked to motivation, reward, and addiction. Romantic love is a goal-oriented motivation state. Romantic rejection is more-or-less an addiction.

I was glad to hear that romance can be long-term, especially since eternal marriage is kind of a big thing in Mormon theology. It also turns out that love puts "blinders" on people when it comes to finding others (i.e. non-spouses/partners) physically attractive. This explains why I'm completely oblivious when an attractive female passes by, while my friend's jaw practically falls off.

So, in a nutshell, all you need is love. Once again, the poets precede the science.

"...I'VE A MOTHER THERE"

2010-10-21T10:44:00.000-07:00

I had learned to call thee Father,
Thru thy Spirit from on high,
But, until the key of knowledge
Was restored, I knew not why.
In the heav’ns are parents single?
No, the thought makes reason stare!
Truth is reason; truth eternal
Tells me I’ve a mother there.

When I leave this frail existence,
When I lay this mortal by,
Father, Mother, may I meet you
In your royal courts on high?
Then, at length, when I’ve completed
All you sent me forth to do,
With your mutual approbation
Let me come and dwell with you.

- O My Father by Eliza R. Snow (first published November 1845)

Michael Coogan, Professor of Religious Studies at Stonehill College, recently published God & Sex: What the Bible Really Says (Twelve, 2010). His analysis of Genesis 1 uncovers some gems for Latter-day Saints. Genesis 1:27 reads,

So God [elohim] created humankind in his image, in the image of God [elohim] he created them; male and female he created them. (NRSV)

Coogan notes that human genders are modeled on elohim. Considering God is always portrayed as a male, saying that "male and female" are both in the "image of God" makes little sense. Coogan offers a new reading (compare to Abraham 4:27):

...in the image of gods, God created them, male and female.

The earthly is therefore modeled after the heavenly in a very literal fashion. Not only does the LDS temple implicitly confirm this (i.e. Lucifer speaking of the new world patterned after the old), but the Family Proclamation explicitly does:

We, the First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, solemnly proclaim that marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and that the family is central to the Creator's plan for the eternal destiny of His children. All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.

Coogan asks, "Which male and female deities are the model? Although the entire pantheon is a possibility, the divine couple, Yahweh and his goddess consort, are more likely" [1]. The 1931 version of the temple endowment portrays Jehovah (or Yahweh) answering in the negative Elohim's inquiry as to whether it is good for man to be alone. His reason: "we are not alone" [2]. Marriage among divinity prompts the creation of Eve and her marriage to Adam in this version.

Discussing Adam's role in the Garden of Eden, David Bokovoy writes,

From an ancient Near Eastern perspective, the view of Adam as divine gardener suggests that biblical authors viewed humanity as an earthly extension of the divine council. According to the Eden account, man was immortal (Genesis 2:17); man had received from deity the sacred "breath of life" (Genesis 2:7); man had been commissioned to perform the work of a god—that is, to till and tend the divine garden. [3]

Margaret Barker also notes, "Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden has long been recognized as a description of the high priest being expelled from the first temple; Adam was the original high priest and Eve was Wisdom" [4]. We are meant to identify Adam as the high priest and the Garden of Eden as the prototype temple. Before attending to his duties in the garden, Adam was to first be provided with a wife. John Walton's analysis of the seventh day in Genesis helps shed light on this topic:

In the ancient world, the "rest" of the gods was always in a temple; in fact, temples were built with the purpose of deity resting in them. This rest of the gods often involved their taking control of the cosmos. A god could rest because order had been achieved and everything was now ready to run smoothly. Deities ran the cosmos from their temples. When stability had been assured, the regular daily business could be carried out without interruption. Consequently, when Genesis indicates that God rested on the seventh day, it tells us that in this account of the functional origins of the cosmos, the cosmos is being portrayed as a temple...In the ancient world, the physical temples may have often required long years of construction, but even after the entire construction phase was completed, it was not yet a functioning temple. The temple was made functional in a typically seven-day dedication ceremony. In this dedication ceremony, the functions of the temple were initiated, the functionaries installed, and then, on the seventh day, the symbol that represented the deity was brought in and placed in the central room of the temple. Only then could the temple begin functioning as it was designed to do. We would conclude then that Genesis 1 is composed along the lines of a temple dedication ceremony in which over a seven-day period, the functions of the cosmic temple are initiated and the functionaries installed. The functions center on the royal and priestly roles of people, but the imagery is defined by the presence of God who has taken up his rest in the center of this cosmic temple. Through him, order is maintained, and nonfunctional disorder is held at bay—through him all things cohere. [5]

The Genesis account therefore portrays God as married and taking up His rest in the cosmological temple in order to attend to His duties regarding the creation. Adam and Eve are created in the image of God and His consort and then take up their rest in the prototype temple in order to attend to their duties regarding the creation. It turns out that the highest temple ordinances (i.e. the endowment, celestial marriage, second anointing) just happen to be couple oriented (with men becoming kings and priests, women queens and priestesses).

If that's not LDS theology, I don't know what is [6].

1. Thanks to David Bokovoy for providing the quote and bringing this to my attention.

2. It should be remembered that the names "Elohim" (Father) and "Jehovah" (Son) are mainly used for convenience in contemporary LDS dialogue. Both anciently and in the early days of the Church, the names were not set in stone as they are today.

3. Bokovoy, "'Ye Really Are Gods': A Response to Michael Heiser Concerning the LDS Use of Psalm 82 and the Gospel of John," FARMS Review 19:1 (2007)

4. Barker, The Great High Priest: The Temple Roots of Christian Liturgy (T&T Clark, 2003). For a discussion of the female Wisdom, see David Larsen's excellent blog posts on Proverbs and the Tree of Life.

5. Walton, "Creation in Genesis 1:1-2:3 and the Ancient Near East: Order Out of Disorder after Chaoskampf," Calvin Theological Journal 43:1 (2008).

6. For a historical analysis of the teaching of Heavenly Mother, see David L. Paulsen and Martin Pulido, "'I've a Mother There': A Historiographical Study of Portrayals of Heavenly Mother in Mormon Discourse," Lecture given at the 2010 BYU Studies Symposium, March 12-13.

IN THE WORDS OF ARNOLD...

2010-10-19T10:16:00.000-07:00

The Treasury Department recently confirmed that the National Debt has increased $3 trillion since President Obama took office. Despite the President's consistent Bush fingerpointing, this is over half the increase that Bush pulled in two terms. "The Administration has projected the National Debt will soar in Mr. Obama's fourth year in office to nearly $16.5-trillion in 2012. That's more than 100 percent of the value of the nation's economy and $5.9-trillion above what it was his first day on the job." Now I'm not big on blaming the President alone when it comes to national troubles. I heard enough of that during the Bush years and condemned it. I hear those on the flip-side doing it for Obama and I still condemn it. But the President seems to think everything would be just peachy if Washington (spoken of as if it is some kind of transcendent entity) could get its act together. This rings true in light of the 79% of unsatisfied Americans.

However, Mr. President, I'm afraid you've overlooked a major detail: you and your cronies are Washington. You control the White House, the Senate, and the House. On top of that, you controlled 2/3 of it before you came to office, which makes the "inheritance" you love talking about partially your fault. And finally, Bush didn't pass the second stimulus (which only stimulated the debt) and he didn't pass ObamaCare. Perhaps its the hard-wired sociobiology that makes Americans so "irrational," but the majority of them didn't care for either of those.

So, in response to both your pompous statements and retardation in economics, I'll allow the Governator to speak for me:

UPDATE: Charles Krauthammer's latest article provides a psychiatrist's point of view of Obama's American diagnosis.

ANOTHER ORGANIZATION DESIGN PAPER

2010-10-15T17:28:00.000-07:00

Scott Shane
“How to Make Small Business Owners More Optimistic”
BusinessWeek (October 5, 2010)
Walker Wright

Scott Shane, the A. Malachi Mixon III Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Case Western Reserve University, begins by emphasizing the importance of small business owners in an economy: “[S]mall business owners' outlooks are of particular importance because their businesses account for more than half of nonagricultural private economic production in the U.S., according to the Small Business Administration. Without expansion in this sector, economic growth is anemic at best. Statistical analysis confirms this view, showing that the level of small business optimism is a solid predictor of future growth. ” A September survey of 750 small business owners recorded the confidence index at 73.8, only 0.8 higher than the previous month’s record low. Further research indicates that small business owners have been unusually pessimistic over the past couple years. On top of this, the measured pessimism is much larger than that of the 1981-1982 recession (the confidence index only dropped below 90 one quarter). Shane describes, “While optimism triggers the self-fulfilling prophecy of economic growth, uncertainty kills optimism…To many in the small business sector, America appears to be entering a new era of regulation in which the government increases oversight on many aspects of business. But few, if any, can predict what all these new regulations will cover or how they will affect individual businesses. Unable to form accurate expectations about the future, small business owners can't expect the best possible outcomes.” This lack of certainty leads to a lack of optimism. This lack of optimism leads to a lack of expansion in business. This lack of expansion leads to a lack of economic growth. In conclusion, Shane makes a very simple suggestion to policymakers: “Make a credible commitment to reduce the uncertainty facing small businesses. Promise them that their taxes won't increase and that they won't face new regulations or major changes in how they operate until after the 2012 Presidential election, at the earliest.” In other words, the optimism of small business owners rests largely on the actions of the government.

Being a proponent of free-market capitalism and an admirer of economists Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, and Thomas Sowell, I can’t help but think Shane’s suggestion to be painfully obvious. In the final days of World War II, Hayek published an article in The American Economic Review criticizing socialistic planning in government policy. His 1945 defense of markets illuminated the key problem plaguing heavily centralized governments: no central authority possesses all available knowledge necessary to utilize all available resources in a society. This knowledge is instead widely dispersed among millions of individuals. In short, centralized planning fails not only in practice, but in principle.[1]

Hayek’s social analysis combated the popular mechanical interpretation of society in favor of one whose nature is organic and evolving. Addressing the topic of evolutionary economics, historian of science Michael Shermer has pointed to the profound influence of Adam Smith’s economic philosophy on Charles Darwin’s scientific breakthrough.[2] Smith declared that individual competition among persons (i.e. the invisible hand) led to national wealth and social harmony, while Darwin demonstrated individual competition among organisms (i.e. natural selection) led to complex design and ecological balance. In other words, complexity naturally arises from the bottom up. It is not created from the top down. In fact, paternalistic administration stifles the very innovation and long-term success it seeks to create.

Research indicates the interest and satisfaction that comes from meeting challenges is diminished by imposed quotas and heavy regulations. Contingency forfeits autonomy and the curiosity that accompanies it. Creativity is also clouded when coerced, as is the ability to think beyond short-term success.[3]

Progress and success ultimately occur when ideas are allowed to mingle,[4] as demonstrated by the recent rescue of the Chilean miners.[5] All in all, I’d have to agree with Shane in stressing a “credible commitment” to helping small businesses. And that commitment must start with the government staying out of the way of the private sector's evolutionary progress.

1. See F.A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35:4 (September 1945)

2. See Michael Shermer, The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales from Evolutionary Economics (Times Books, 2008)

3. See Daniel H. Pink, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Riverhead Books, 2009)

4. See Matt Ridley, “Humans: Why They Triumphed,” The Wall Street Journal (May 22, 2010)

5. See Daniel Henninger, “Capitalism Saved the Miners,” The Wall Street Journal (Oct. 14, 2010)

UPDATE: Matt Ridley has another excellent article in WSJ entitled "Why Some Islanders Build Better Crab Traps." For a brief introduction to Dan Pink's work, see his Telegraph articles "Forget Carrots and Sticks, They Don't Always Work" and "Netflix Lets its Staff Take as Much Holiday as They Want - And It Works." As for creating jobs in the private sector, see Robert J. Samuelson, "How to Avoid Japan's Economic Mistakes," The Washington Post (Nov. 15, 2010)

PACKER & THE PROBLEM OF PREDESTINATION

2010-10-09T21:56:00.001-07:00

Apparently, the uproar over President Packer's General Conference talk prompted some tweaking in the published version.

Spoken version:

Some suppose that they were preset and cannot overcome what they feel are in born tendencies towards the impure and the unnatural. Not so. Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone?

Published version:

Some suppose that they were preset and cannot overcome what they feel are inborn temptations toward the impure and unnatural. Not so! Remember, God is our Heavenly Father.

I'm personally happy about the change, though the timing isn't exactly flattering. I think the first one is a bit inaccurate. In President Packer's defense, homosexuality is nowhere mentioned in the talk. Nonetheless, it is beyond obvious that he was alluding to it. Now, there are biological aspects which lean toward homosexual tendencies, though this is not the same as endorsing genetic determinism (i.e. nature over nurture). But the argument that "God wouldn't make you that way" runs into philosophical problems when taken beyond the Primary-age surface level. Packer's original wording seems to imply that God makes every single human being the way they are (hence, no one could be born gay). If God is responsible for making each human being at physical conception (rather than the sperm and egg...), does that mean we can blame God for all infants that die at child birth, those affected with Down syndrome, those who are mentally retarded, prone to alcoholism, etc.? To use Packer's original words, "Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone?" Are we to assume that God magically warps genes or causes individuals to make certain choices that will affect their children's future health? Or could it possibly be that God allows the evolutionary system He put into motion to operate on its own, defects and all?

When one starts speaking of life trials as if they were literally given by God, one starts heading in the direction of Calvinistic predestination. In other words, God is heretically made into the author of evil. I remember this being a problem in my Gospel Doctrine class. Everyone spoke as if God had personally given them their trials in order for them to "learn something." I find this difficult to square with the 5-year-old who is abducted, molested and tortured for weeks, and then chopped into pieces before being scattered in a nearby river. Does God hand individuals trials like that? What exactly is the 5-year-old supposed to learn? Or was he/she just a sacrificial pawn so that his/her parents and family members could "learn something?"[1] And how exactly did God "give" this trial? Did He force the kidnapper to do what He did? How does this line of thinking not conflict with the principle of agency?

What were the thousands killed in 9/11 supposed to learn? Was some great truth supposed to be unveiled as they were burned alive, crushed, or suffocated? Was a revelation supposed to come to those who leaped from the windows as they plummeted to their death? Did God make Islamic terrorists hijack those planes and run them into those buildings? I don't think I have to point out how immoral and problematic this view is. To avoid this unpleasant picture, some will try thanking God for all good things that happen as if He produced them directly, but say "God didn't have anything to do with 9/11" when the going gets tough. This is inconsistent in the most obvious way and ends up right back at the previous heretical ideals.

Now some may turn to the words of Mormon regarding God's involvement in the world:

Wherefore, all things which are good cometh of God; and that which is evil cometh of the devil; for the devil is an enemy unto God, and fighteth against him continually, and inviteth and enticeth to sin, and to do that which is evil continually. But behold, that which is of God inviteth and enticeth to do good continually; wherefore, every thing which inviteth and enticeth to do good, and to love God, and to serve him, is inspired of God. Wherefore, take heed, my beloved brethren, that ye do not judge that which is evil to be of God, or that which is good and of God to be of the evil. (Moroni 7:12-14)

Some may read this as proof that God directly brings about all manner of blessings and goodness. However, that isn't what the text says. It instead notes that "that which is of God inviteth and enticeth to do good continually...every thing which inviteth and enticeth to do good...is inspired of God." As Terryl Givens has pointed out, God (as well as man) inhabits a universe of eternal conditions and laws. "For Smith, God's perfect compliance with eternal realities is what both constitutes his own divine status, and provides the template for the path humans may ascend to become his full heirs and genuine "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Pet. 1:4)." He concludes, "The recognition that what is most holy in God, is what is most holy in us. The will to love in both cases is the manifestation of an independent principal, of a choice to be vulnerable, which choice binds us in mutuality but never equality. For we know the spark is not the flame."[2] Blake Ostler describes divinity as

the immutable set of essential properties necessary to be divine. There is only one Godhood or divine essence in this sense. Each of the distinct divine persons shares this set of great-making properties which are severally necessary and jointly sufficient for their possessor to be divine. Each of the divine persons has this essence though none is simply identical with it...The unity of the divine persons falls short of identity but is much more intimate than merely belonging to the same class of individuals. There are distinct divine persons, but hardly separated or independent divine persons. In the divine life there is no alienation, isolation, insulation, secretiveness or aloneness. The divine persons exist in a unity that includes loving, inter-penetrating awareness of another who is also inone's self. The divine persons somehow spiritually extend their personal presence to dwell in each other and thus become "one" "in" each other.[3]

Good and evil in the world is brought about by the agency of the individuals occupying it. Good comes about when man emulates God. Evil comes when he do not. The problem of evil and suffering has no quick, easy answer. I do not pretend to offer an answer in this short post. My views may change over time. But realizing that sometimes stuff (both good and bad) just happens and God has little to do with it can free us from much confusion and anxiety. As Kathleen Flake said,

For Latter-day Saints, the material world is good, but evil did not originate with creation, much less in human nature. Evil is uncreated and co-eternal with good and God; so are we. Evil, like God and us, simply is, but evil pollutes, like a fly in the ointment, God’s order for the flourishing of human life in God’s image. Thus, in Mormonism, most of the bad experiences in this life are explained in terms of humans choosing the fly over the ointment. But, notwithstanding this interplay of independent agency and existence, evil’s uncreatedness does not place it beyond God’s power; neither is God blind to or unmoved by evil’s effect...For Latter-day Saints, God’s mightiness to save is defined not by his capacity to prevent evil, but to create good when only evil seems possible. He doesn’t turn evil into good, but he overcomes it with the good. In the words of the New Testament, he “returns good for evil” and so can we if, as Jesus commanded, we would be “perfect, even as your Father which is in haven is perfect.” Thus, for Latter-day Saints, God’s perfection is in his capacity to make life in the midst of life’s many deaths and to engender in his children the power to do the same, even calm the seas.[4]

1. For an interesting piece on suffering, see Loyd Ericson, "'Which Thing I Had Never Supposed': The Problem of Evil and the Problem of Man," Sunstone 159 (July 2010).

2. Terryl L. Givens, "Finding the Divine in the Human: Romantic Angst and the Collapse of Transcendence," Lecture given at the annual meeting of the Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology on March 25, 2010.

3. Blake T. Ostler, "Re-vision-ing the Mormon Concept of Deity," Element 1:1 (Spring 2005). He notes that D&C 93 teaches "the Father is the source or fount of divinity of all other divine beings. If the Father is the source of divinity then it certainly seems inconsistent to assert that the Father became divine in dependence on some other divine beings, for then the Father is not the ultimate source of divinity. Thus, the view that the Father became divine in dependence on other divine beings and was not divine from all eternity is not scriptural and it seems to contradict both the uniquely Mormon scriptures and the Bible."

4. Kathleen Flake, "Making Good For, Not From Evil," The Washington Post: On Faith (Sept. 7, 2007).

UPDATE: See Blake T. Ostler, "Mormonism and Determinism," Dialogue 32:4 (Winter 1999).

THAT'S SO DUFF

2010-10-08T13:22:00.000-07:00

I don't remember who it was, but one of my wife's Facebook friends decided that we should start saying, "That's so Duff" instead. I bring this up because Anderson Cooper recently got his panties in a twist over the trailer for the film The Dilemma starring Vince Vaughn. The opening lines of the trailer are as follows:

Ladies and Gentleman, electric cars...are gay. I mean, not homosexual gay, but, you know, my-parents-are-chaperoning-the-dance gay.

According to Cooper, he was "shocked that not only that they put it in the movie, but that they put that in the preview, they thought that it was okay to put that in a preview for the movie to get people to go and see it." Really? You were "shocked" that it made it into the movie? I'd love your opinion, Mr. Cooper, on the dialogue of Pulp Fiction, the racial slurs of Do the Right Thing, the graphic violence of Rambo, the sexist treatment (not to mention murder) of women in American Psycho, the disgusting escapades of the Saw series, or the fact that they even made Basic Instinct 2. And what do you think about the trailers for Kinsey, Sex Drive, or American Pie? Are they appropriate?

Mr. Cooper thinks that "we've got to do something to make those words unacceptable cause those words are hurting kids." Uh huh. So are the words loser, wimp, idiot, dork, nerd, slut, whore, etc. Do you have a problem with that, Mr. Cooper? If so, I'd like to hear your public disgust vocalized more often and not merely when the host of the show you're on happens to be gay. Take a more consistent approach and your ratings may go back up.

REALLY?

2010-10-07T14:15:00.001-07:00

Apparently, a teacher got fired the other day for writing a note on a child's arm. Why did the teacher write the note on the child's arm? I have no idea. Was it a smart thing to do? No (especially if you have 9 years of teaching experience).

But that is beside the point.

The real question is why do I even know about this? Why is this news worthy? Why did the individuals feel the need to be interviewed by the news? Why wasn't this private matter settled, I don't know, privately?

I'm afraid we've become a land of instant gratification and attention whoring.

HOMEWORK & PHILOSOPHY

2010-10-04T14:49:00.000-07:00

After meeting with my group for my Operations Management class, I was reminded why I switched majors: I am not a numbers guy. And given the fact that math is a principle resting on a philosophical and cognitive presupposition, perhaps I should just say the homework is against my religion.

The irony is that the very practice of science itself, which involves the formulation of hypotheses, the weighing of evidence, the invention of technical concepts and vocabularies, the construction of chains of reasoning, and so forth—all mental activities saturated with meaning and purpose—falls on the “subjective,” “manifest image” side of scientism’s divide rather than the “objective,” “scientific image” side. Human thought and action, including the thoughts and actions of scientists, is of its nature irreducible to the meaningless, purposeless motions of particles and the like...There is no such thing as “thinking,” “believing,” “desiring,” “meaning,” etc.; there is only the firing of neurons, the secretion of hormones, the twitching of muscles, and other such physiological events...But as Hayek would have predicted, the very attempt to state the position necessarily, but incoherently, makes use of concepts—“science,” “rationality,” “evidence,” “truth,” and so forth—that presuppose exactly what the position denies, viz. the reality of meaning and mind.[1]

1. Edward Feser, "Blinded by Scientism," Public Discourse: Ethics, Law, and the Common Good (March 9, 2010)

THE QUOTABLE RON HELLINGS

2010-10-01T09:50:00.000-07:00

Given my relatively recent studies and discussions about science and religion, theism and materialism, I thought this was worthwhile:

I am a skeptic. I know many people who are skeptics, but most of them are amateurs. I am a professional. It’s what I do for a living. I am a scientist, and a scientist needs to be skeptical. I don’t know if I am a scientist because I am a skeptic or if I am a skeptic because I am a scientist, but I am clearly both. I would rather risk disbelieving something that is true than believing something that is false. I don’t recommend this attitude, but I can’t help it. I just refuse to believe junk.

My reason for beginning this way is to make it clear that, when I say that I am sure that God exists, that conclusion is based only on the most solid of foundations and evidence. It is based on this: I have spoken to God in prayer, and he has answered me.

...Many people have asked me if my study of the universe has strengthened my faith in God, if seeing the immensity and the orderliness of the universe has helped prove God’s existence. I hope I do not offend anyone when I say that I have no idea what they’re talking about. The nearly perfect spherical shapes of the large heavenly bodies prove nothing except that gravity is a central force. The regularity of the motions of the planets is the simple result of gravity being conservative. And the stars and the galaxies look to me like they have been poured randomly out of a salt shaker. I see no miracles out there. They may be there, but I don’t see them. The miracles I see are in here, inside me and inside others who are led by God to acts of love and sacrifice. Those are amazing. They are the evidence for God.

I have heard people say that science and religion are two paths to truth. I do not believe that. There is only one path to truth, and to me it seems closer to science than it is to what passes for religion in most people. But it is not the scientific method. The only people I know who care about the scientific method are philosophers. Scientists don’t worry about it. What scientists do is what Karl Popper said in his cute definition of science: “Science is doing your damnedest with your mind – no holds barred.” The problem with science is not the process, but the artificial limits that most scientists put on the evidence they will accept. Evidence, they say, must be objective. This is a reasonable limitation, in a way, because the goal of science is not just to find truth, but also to communicate it. And you can only communicate things that others will understand through your common experience. But many scientists use this limitation on what they can communicate to others as the criterion for what they will accept for themselves. They will not seek a revelation because it would be a subjective evidence. So what? What a brain-numbing, truth-avoiding, closed-minded attitude this is! This is not doing your damnedest with your mind, no holds barred; it is setting up artificial rules that exclude a wealth of evidence and knowledge. This is bad science.[1]

As always, it goes back to personal experience.

1. Testimony of Ron Hellings, Mormon Scholars Testify (January 2010). See his "Joseph Smith and Modern Cosmology," Transcript of presentation given at the 2009 FAIR Conference.

IT'S BECAUSE WE AREN'T CHRISTIAN...

2010-09-29T14:11:00.000-07:00

According to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, us Mormons rank higher in religious knowledge than our Protestant and Catholic friends. On average, Mormons correctly answered 63% of the 32 questions, giving us an 8% lead over the subsequent group (white evangelical Protestants). Mormons also scored the highest in questions on the Bible and Christianity. If the Protestants and Catholics each were taken as a whole (instead of white, black, mainline, Hispanic, etc.), their averages would be lower. Ironically, those who had the highest average overall were atheists/agnostics, with Jews coming in second. But due to "the survey's margin of error, Pew did not declare a winner, saying those three groups did about equally well."[1] I can hear it now: "See! This proves Mormons aren't real Christians! If they were, they'd be scoring down here with the rest of us! Mormons reject Christ just like their atheist and Jewish friends!" Either that or something worse like the Mormons and Masons have infiltrated the Pew Forum.

What is even more surprising is that "people in the South – the Bible Belt – tended to score lower on the survey than those in other regions." Yet, "even controlling for education and other key demographic traits, atheists and agnostics, Jews, and Mormons knew more than other groups." Apparently, most American Protestants don't know that Martin Luther began the Reformation, while nearly half of American Catholics are not aware of the doctrine of transubstantiation. As sociologist D. Michael Lindsay is quoted saying, "This study gives convincing proof that Americans may be deeply committed to faith, but that commitment comes most from the heart, not the head."[2]

While I'm happy to see Mormons doing relatively well in this regard, I'm still disturbed that atheists and agnostics are outdoing Christians as a whole. I'm willing to blame this on the increase of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, from which the following guidelines stem:[3]

1. A god exists who created the world
2. God wants people to be nice, like it says in the Bible
3. The purpose of life is to be happy and feel good about oneself
4. God is not involved unless I need him to solve a problem
5. Good people go to heaven when they die

These guiding beliefs are merely a warped view of Christianity and can in no way breed a lasting commitment. Oddly enough, Mormonism is viewed as a sociological model worthy of adoption. In her book Almost Christian, in a chapter entitled "Mormon Envy: Sociological Tools for a Consequential Faith," Kenda Dean of Princeton Theological Seminary sums up the research surrounding Mormon teenagers: LDS kids are less likely to drink, smoke, and engage in risky behavior, while more likely to postpone sex (to age 18 instead of the average 16 1/2; 13% of Mormon teens identify themselves as not being virgins compared to the average 20%). "Mormon teenagers rank ahead of other youth in terms of spiritual vitality, hope for the future, and overall health and well-being." She also finds that Mormon teenagers are more likely than other teenagers to hold religious beliefs similar to their parents, attend weekly religious services, and talk about religious matters in their families. Religious faith is seen as "extremely important" in shaping daily life and is demonstrated by the fact that Mormon youths participate in more religious practices than most teenagers and are more articulate about church teachings. Early morning seminary, family home evening, and two-year missions condition Mormon children into adulthood. All in all, "Mormon teenagers tend to be the "spiritual athletes" of their generation, conditioning for an eternal goal with an intensity that requires sacrifice, discipline, and energy."[4] As NSYR researcher John Bartkowski put it, "The story we tell about Mormon youth is not that all is well, but compared with other teens they're more knowledgeable about their faith, more committed to their faith, and have more positive social outcomes associated with their faith."[5]

With reference to Dean Kelly's Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, sociologist Rodney Stark has noted that "strict" religious groups have increased dramatically, while more liberal sects have declined. He finds that "religions that ask more from their members are thereby enabled to give them more-in worldly as well as spiritual rewards." Basically, "higher-tension faiths offer a far more rewarding experience to members than do permissive, low-cost faiths."[6] One of these higher-tension sects, he points out, is Mormonism: "Over the past 175 years, the Church of Jesus Christ has sustained the most rapid growth of any new religion in U.S. history. Indeed, it stands on the threshold of becoming the first major faith to appear on earth since the prophet Muhammed rode out of the desert (whereas the Latter-day Saints gained strength initially by riding back into the desert)."[7] He continues, "The rapid growth of Mormonism has gone amazingly unremarked on by outsiders. There are many probable reasons for this, including the persistence of considerable prejudice against Latter-day Saints (Stark and Bainbridge 1985) and the seeming inability of the mass media to cover adequately much of anything that happens west of Chicago. A more basic reason may be the inability of people to think in terms of rates rather than in terms of absolute numbers."[8] Understanding that the label "Protestant" is "a purely arbitrary and highly misleading statistical category embracing hundreds of different, competing faiths," Stark uncovers the following numbers: As of 2003, Latter-day Saints had 5.5 million American members and was the fifth largest church in the United States.[9] The Church fell behind the Roman Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, the United Methodist Church, and the Church of God in Christ. Stark observes, "That the Latter-day Saints have overtaken such prominent and "traditional" faiths as the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and even the Lutherans must be one of the most unremarked cultural watersheds in U.S. history." And finally, "Keep in mind that the Church of Jesus Christ is not a Protestant sect...Although Latter-day Saints have retained cultural continuities with Christianity (just as Christianity retained continuities with Judaism and classical paganism), the Latter-day Saints are a new religion. Their rapid growth has occurred in the face of much greater hostility than has been directed toward any Protestant sect and is thereby all the more remarkable."[10]

Why has this happened? Three reasons:

1. The Church is true (my bias)
2. The Church actually expects something of its members (for example, studying)
3. The members actually do the things they are expected to do (as demonstrated in the recent data)

So, the next time you hear Mormons chided by other so-called Christians as "brainwashed" or "biblically illiterate," point them in the direction of this latest research. And then ask them if Mormons are doing this:

Didn't think so.

UPDATE: Daniel C. Peterson has a recent article on Almost Christian worth reading in Mormon Times. Also, it appears that Baby Boomers "are 40 to 50 percent more likely than Gen-Xers to "disaffiliate" from their faith" according to a recent study. Religious pluralism seems to be a contributing factor. The study points out, however, that Gen-Xers are more likely to be raised with no religious affiliation than Boomers. I wonder if this lack of religious affiliation affects the youth's political views in any way. Also, Americans apparently have a tendency to exaggerate their religious attendance.

1. Sam Hodges, "Agnostics, Atheists, Jews, Mormons Score Highest on Pew Religion Quiz," The Dallas Morning News (Sept. 28, 2010).

2. Ibid.

3. Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church (Oxford University Press: 2010). This is found in the part humorously titled "Worshipping at the Church of Benign Whatever-ism."

4. Ibid., pg. 51.

5. Cited in Ibid., pg. 51.

6. Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton University Press, 2003), pg. 20.

7. Stark, "The Rise of a New World Faith," The Rise of Mormonism, ed. Reid Larkin Neilson (Columbia University Press, 2005), pg. 139.

8. Ibid., pg. 140.

9. The Church is now the fourth largest in the United States.

10. Stark, 2005, pg. 141.

THE ARTFUL DODGER

2010-09-23T18:00:00.000-07:00

At a recent press conference, Jake Tapper of ABC asked President Obama "how he reconciled his claim before ObamaCare passed that reform would lower health care costs with the fact that a new government report—plus, I might add, every news story on the topic—says health care costs are rising." In response, the President said, "I said at the time, it wasn’t going to happen tomorrow, it wasn’t going to happen next year." To quote Merrill Matthews, "No, Mr. President, that’s not what you said. You claimed repeatedly that by the end of your first term a family health insurance policy would cost $2,500 less."[1] Matthews goes on to point out that despite the administration's claims, (1) the health insurance mandate is a new tax, (2) most people will lose their current policy, and (3) the $575 billion cut to Medicade over ten years will obviously not strengthen it. Michael Tanner summed it up well:

There's no such thing as a free lunch. If you're going to require insurers to cover more expensive customers and provide more benefits, it's going to cost more — and those costs are going to be passed on to customers in the form of higher premiums. When New York implemented many of these same insurance rules in 1983, premiums rose by nearly $500 per policy — resulting in nearly 500,000 New Yorkers dropping their insurance. Already this fall, we're seeing premiums jump as much as 9 percent nationally next year, especially in the individual and small-group markets. Some customers are seeing hikes of 20 percent or more. And a significant portion of this increase is directly traceable to the new rules...You also won't hear much about the fact that the government's own actuaries have now concluded that the health-care law will actually increase health-care spending, contrary to the president's promises before the bill passed. Nor will you hear that outside experts now predict that ObamaCare will cost as much as $2.7 trillion over its first 10 years of actual operation, adding more than $350 billion to the deficit over that period despite massive new taxes. At least Obama probably won't repeat his old refrain, "If you have insurance today and you like it, you can keep it." That's because it's getting harder and harder to find anyone who can keep their current insurance plan.[2]

Paul Ryan and Arthur Brooks have pointed out that 70% of Americans prefer a free market economy, with 69% in support of smaller government, fewer services, and less taxes. The other 30% want bigger government, higher taxes, more services, and think the country is on the right track. ObamaCare aligns itself with this minority (despite that the latest polls show 61% of likely voters favor repealing it), which is why the Democrats are in such bad shape (the legislative branch in general is). As Ryan and Brooks note,

Individually, these [government programs] might sound fine. Multiply them and add them all up, though, and you have a system that most Americans manifestly oppose—one that creates a crushing burden of debt and teaches our children and grandchildren that government is the solution to all our problems. Seventy percent of us want stronger free enterprise, but the other 30% keep moving us closer toward an unacceptably statist America—one acceptable government program at a time...More and more Americans are catching on to the scam. Every day, more see that the road to serfdom in America does not involve a knock in the night or a jack-booted thug. It starts with smooth-talking politicians offering seemingly innocuous compromises, and an opportunistic leadership that chooses not to stand up for America's enduring principles of freedom and entrepreneurship.[3]

Opportunistic indeed. The historical revision that takes place among politicians (and our current President) is described perfectly by philosopher Edward Feser:[4]

Stage 1: “Oh please. Only a far-right-wing nutjob would make such a paranoid and ridiculous accusation - I suppose next you’ll accuse us of wanting to poison your precious bodily fluids!”

Stage 2: “Well, I wouldn’t go as far as X. All the same, it’s good to be open-minded about these things. I mean, people used to think ending slavery was a crazy idea too…”

Stage 3: “Hey, the Europeans have had X for years and the sky hasn’t fallen. But no, I admit that this backward country probably isn’t ready for X yet.”

Stage 4: “Of course I’m in favor of X - it’s in the Constitution! Only a far-right-wing nutjob could possibly oppose it.”

Stage 5: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law…”

UPDATE: Added a new video that I thought was appropriate for the post. Thanks Dan Ritchie for showing me it. See also "ObamaCare and Voters," The Wall Street Journal (Oct. 30, 2010), Michael F. Cannon, "Six Months Later...," The Washington Times (Sept. 22, 2010), Bruce Horovitz, Laura Petrecca, "Small-Business Owners Unclear on Health Care Impact," USA Today (March 23, 2010), Sarah E. Needleman, "Small Businesses Prepare for Health-Care Changes," The Wall Street Journal (Sept. 23, 2010).

1. Merrill Matthews, "Tough Questions For Obama About ObamaCare," Forbes (Sept. 22, 2010)

2. Michael D. Tanner, "The Pain Begins," The New York Post (Sept. 23, 2010). For more bad news, see Tanner's study "Bad Medicine: A Guide to the Real Costs and Consequences of the New Health Care Law," Cato Institute: White Paper 29 (July 12, 2010).

3. Paul Ryan, Arthur Brooks, "The Size of Government and the Choice This Fall," The Wall Street Journal (Sept. 13, 2010)

4. Yes, I stole the picture from him as well. It was too awesome to pass up. And given the somewhat tasteless photos of a Joker/Socialist Obama, I thought it was fitting.

OPERATION NEW DAWN

2010-09-21T02:12:00.001-07:00

In light of the President's recent announcement, I wish to visit an old subject: the war in Iraq. The war was the subject of one of my earliest posts. I defended it then. I defend it now. The need to do so seems timely given the recent withdrawals, the anniversary of 9/11, and the threat of a nuclear Iran. While the above video of the President is politically driven and a bit misleading (combat is still going on under a new name), the war in Iraq is "officially" over.

With close to eight years of hindsight, what can we say regarding the overthrow of Saddam Hussein? I think Daniel Henninger summed it up well in The Wall Street Journal:

Saddam was centrifugal. He moved outward, into war with Iran in 1980 and into Kuwait 10 years later. Saddam was a player, and from 2002 onward the biggest game in his orbit was acquiring nuclear capability. The definitive account of Saddam's WMD ambitions is the Duelfer Report, issued by the Iraq Survey Group in 2005. Yes, the Duelfer Report concluded that Saddam didn't have active WMD. But at numerous points in the 1,000-page document, it asserted (with quotes from Iraqi politicians and scientists) that Saddam's goal was to free himself of U.N. sanctions and restart his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons and other WMD.[1]

The Duelfer Report, interestingly enough, came out the same week as The Bomb In My Garden: a memoir of Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, Hussein's chief nuclear physicist. "Under the orders of Qusai Hussein, Dr. Obeidi had buried a huge barrel in his back garden. The barrel contained Iraq's crowning achievement in perverted physics: the components of an actual centrifuge for the enrichment of uranium. It also contained all the hard-won printed instructions and expertise on the subject. Dr. Obeidi was "interviewed" by many inspectors in the run-up to last year's war under the same conditions of open blackmail that Saddam had imposed on all his other scientists, and they got no nearer finding out the truth than one would have expected."[2] This, coupled with the fact that Iraq was attempting to "obtain a full production line to manufacture, under an Iraqi flag, the North Korean missile system, which would be capable of hitting American allies and bases around the region," was not encouraging.[3]

While the threat of a nuclear Iraq was a worthy reason (especially when we take into consideration Iran's current activities)[4], it is not the only. Jeffrey Goldberg early on drew attention to Hussein's genocide against the Kurds.[5] Hussein's nuclear pursuits and aggression toward neighboring states were joined by murder within his own borders[6], many of which were women and children. The body count uncovered in mass graves throughout Iraq is up to at least 300,000. Considering we knew Hussein to be murderous and insane both before and after the Gulf War, it is a wonder that he was left in power in the first place.

Christopher Hitchens has been a very vocal supporter of the intervention in Iraq. I must say that I was saddened to hear of his recent diagnose of esophageal cancer. He has provided some of the most useful and well-thought out polemics regarding the war in Iraq and its critics. In conclusion, I will provide a rather lengthy quote from his collection of essays entitled A Long-Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq:

Since this crisis began, I have become used to arguing with people who say that, if menaced, Saddam Hussein will make use of the genocidal weapons that they usually say he does not possess. I have accustomed myself to hearing that the American oil companies, which wanted to lift even the sanctions on Saddam until recently, are now controlling the White House. I have drummed my fingers while waiting for the opposing speaker to say that this is a war for profit that will also cost far more than we can afford, and can't be a war for democracy in Iraq because it would lead to loud disagreement among Iraqis. Some say that this policy is determined by the fact that America is an empire or a superpower, an observation that would be just as true, or just as relevant, if the United States was intervening on Saddam Hussein's side (as it once did). Some slyly imply that if only the Bush administration had signed the Kyoto treaty-which got exactly no votes in the U.S. Senate-it would have a better chance of persuading people that Saddam Hussein was a menace: one of the great non sequiturs of this debate. Some say that because the United States was wrong before, it cannot possibly be right now, or has no right to be right. (The British Empire sent a fleet to Africa and the Caribbean to maintain the slave trade while the very same empire later sent another fleet to enforce abolition. I would not have opposed the second policy because of my objections to the first; rather it seems to me that the second policy was morally necessitated by its predecessor.) Finally, I keep hearing that Saddam has not attacked the United States and therefore should not be attacked, even though-had Iraq openly done such a thing-there would be no need for the administration to have sought the enforcement of violated Security Council resolutions. It could simply have evoked the clause on self-defense in the U.N. Charter, and done so from the first, instaed of trying to restore the vertebrae of international law...My jaw has many times dropped on hearing that Saddam Hussein is a "bad guy" all right, but only one among many...Did the people who said this have any idea what they were saying? How many bad guys could they name who had violated the Genocide Convention on their own territory, invaded two neighboring states, openly financed suicide bombing, sought and nearly acquired nuclear capacity and were within easy reach of 9 percent of the world's energy reserves? People say that Saddam understands deterrence and self-preservation-this of a man who blew up the Kuwaiti oilfields after he had surrendered them, and after he had been threatened with dire consequences if he did so. A man who not only murders his mildest critics but has also murdered members of his own family and members of his own government. (His foreign minister, Naji Sabry, has seen one brother tortured to death and another merely tortured. His suave deputy Tariq Aziz has seen his son imprisoned for twent years as a reminder of who is boss...) The only possible rival here is Kim Jong-Il of North Korea, who can't threaten sea-lanes or commerce very much but who does possess some awesome weapons...The same smart-ass critics used to say that double standards were being employed for Saddam and Kim. Yes indeed. But this facile point obscured the fact that Kim actually has the deterrent power that Saddam lacks. "More time" was a plea to give Saddam the chance to join the North Korean madman-plus-WMD club, in which case a military intervention in Iraq would have been almost impossible to mount to begin with...Saddam has been warned and put on notice and the entire debate on armed enforcement has been exhaustively conducted in full public view. There is no surprise attack being readied here-at least not from the American end...This brings me to my closing point. On my last visit to Kurdistan I made some friends for life, and I have kept up with them. They, and their allies in the Iraqi democratic opposition, could each tell you a story that would harrow up your soul. You'll get an idea, when the mass graves and secret prisons are opened...Only after a long train of blunders and hesitations and betrayals did the United States decide that it was, at long last, in the same trench as the resistance. No matter how it comes out, or how the alliance may fray, I shall never have the least serious doubt that it was the right side to have been on.[7]

All in all, I stand by my conviction. Iraq, the U.S., and the world are better off without Saddam Hussein. In the alleged words of Robert Conquest, "I told you so, you f**king fools."

UPDATE: Recent evidence has surfaced demonstrating Iran's role in backing Iraqi militias. Apparently, the Bush administration was right. See Michael R. Gordon and Andrew W. Lehren, "Leaked Reports Detail Iran's Aid for Iraqi Militias," The New York Times (Oct. 22, 2010); Toby Harnden, "Will Barack Obama Admit Extent of Iran's Role in Iraq, Laid Bare by Wikileaks?" The Telegraph (Oct. 23, 2010). On a smaller note, a good amount of chemical weapons were also uncovered. See Noah Schachtman, "WikiLeaks Show WMD Hunt Continued in Iraq-With Surprising Results," Wired (Oct. 23, 2010). I thought the video of the toppling of the stature was appropriate. The increase of violence in Iraq caused Kazim al Jabouri, the man whose actions led to the symbolic toppling, to regret his actions. However, Bush's 2007 surge was incredibly successful, leading to a drastic drop in violence. The response? "Eventually, the claims that the surge had failed as predicted faded away amid increasingly undeniable evidence that it had succeeded. But, far from causing a re-evaluation of the prevailing vision that had been so strident and so discredited by events, the success of the surge simply led to shrinking coverage of news from Iraq in much of the media" (Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society: Encounter Books, 2009). I think it is worth pointing out that Bush's approval has drastically increased according to the latest polls.

1. Daniel Henninger, "If Saddam Had Stayed," The Wall Street Journal (Sept. 2, 2010)

2. Christopher Hitchens, "The Buried Truth," Slate (Oct. 8, 2004). See also David E. Sanger, "After the War: Weapons Program; Iraqi Says Hussein Planned to Revive the Nuclear Program Dismantled in 1991," The New York Times (June 27, 2003). For a lecture by Obeidi himself, see here.

3. David E. Sanger, Thom Shanker, "A Region Inflamed: Weapons; For the Iraqis, a Missile Deal That Went Sour; File Tells of Talk With North Korea," The New York Times (Dec. 1, 2003)

4. See Jeffrey Goldberg, "The Point of No Return," The Atlantic (Sept. 2010); Christopher Hitchens, "It's Not Just About Israel," Slate (Aug. 16, 2010).

5. See Jeffrey Goldberg, "The Great Terror," The New Yorker (March 25, 2002)

6. See John F. Burns, "Uncovering Iraq's Horrors in Desert Graves," The New York Times (June 6, 2006); "Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves," U.S. Agency for International Development (Jan. 2004).

7. Hitchens, A Long-Short War (Plume: 2003), "Introduction: Twenty-Twenty Foresight."

A HOUSEHOLD NAME

2010-09-16T23:35:00.000-07:00

I attended a career fair at my university the other day. The night before, my wife was offering some suggestions. One of the key pieces of advice was to be excited. She said, "You have to be excited. You have to want to talk to them. Just act as if each one of them is that Daniel Peterson guy." Not a rock star. Not an actor or actress. Not a NFL player. But the BYU Professor of Islamic Studies and Arabic.

Me = 1 1/2 Nerd

MY POINT EXACTLY

2010-09-16T06:07:00.000-07:00

I've written on Genesis being a temple text in past posts. John Walton explains this quite well[1]:

N.T. Wright sums up my views on the Genesis text (and the interpretations of it) perfectly:

1. An excellent article by Walton on this subject is "Creation in Genesis 1:1-2:3 and the Ancient Near East: Order Out of Disorder after Chaoskampf," Calvin Theological Journal 43 (2008).

MORMON PLURALISM & PARADIGM

2010-09-07T14:38:00.000-07:00

We recently went over Section 1 of Doctrine & Covenants in my institute class. One of the main topics discussed was the claim of being "the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth." (D&C 1:30) This has often been an offensive passage to those outside our faith. However, I think the offense largely comes from a misuse by members. One of the prominent reasons I remain Mormon is because Mormonism offers a worldview that can truly embrace all truth, even if some of its members do not. The divine insights revealed through Joseph Smith allow for an intellectually satisfying understanding of the cosmos. While I hesitate to use the word pluralistic, the concept of Mormonism equaling Truth in all spheres seems to require it.[1] A more proper definition would be the one used by Blake Ostler: religious inclusivism.[2] The Church should be a realm where truth (no matter where it is found) is invited, embraced, and digested, while error is purged. Joseph's "mission was to hold out for the reality of divine revelation and establish one small outpost where that principle survived."[3] The Church isn't true because it has all truth available. It is true because it accepts all truth no matter the source (or at least that is the principle established by Joseph Smith).

All in all, I think Terryl Givens got it right:

Mormons can be too quick to see all texts written previous to 1830 as potential proof texts, to see Jesus' ministrations to Mary and Martha as foreshadowing the home teaching program, every sunken Mesoamerican hole in the ground as a baptismal font, and so on. We are too quick, in other words, to see these other systems and phenomena as deriving their value in proportion to their capacity to anticipate a Restoration that we treat as full and complete. It's not, as prophets from Joseph Smith and Brigham Young to President Kimball have reminded us.

...my own appreciation for and understanding of the [gospel] has been enriched, and broadened, by a comparative study of the idea and its myriad appearances in the history of philosophy, theology, and literature. What I have come to appreciate is this cardinal insight: If the restoration is not yet complete, then other traditions have much to teach us. Not by way of confirming, corroborating, or verifying the truths we already have. But by way of actually adding to the body of revealed doctrine we call precious and true. The Restoration is neither full nor complete. Brigham once said, in reference to the keys of resurrection, "This is one of the ordinances we can not receive here, and there are many more." "It will be a great while after you have passed through the veil before you will have learned" all the principles of the gospel, said Joseph. What if, instead of scrambling frantically to find explanations when Joseph appears to have borrowed from the masons, or Ethan Smith, or Tom Dick, we instead see another marvelous possibility of his actually practicing what he preached: As Brigham characterized his position, "If you can find a truth in heaven, earth or hell, it belongs to our doctrine. We believe it; it is ours; we claim it." It takes real humility and generosity of spirit to be taught. Our contemporary condescension in this regard was clearly foreign to a prophet who showed the world he could translate gold plates written in Reformed Egyptian, then hired a Jewish schoolmaster to teach him Hebrew.[4]

1. This is not to suggest that all paths are equal. It does, however, declare that the present-day Church does not have a monopoly on truth. For an interesting discussion on pluralism within Christianity, see Christopher Caroll Smith, "In Defense of a "Christian" Pluralism," Journal for the Renewal of Religion and Theology 5 (Aug. 2009).

2. See Blake Ostler's wonderful "Spiritual Experiences as the Basis for Belief and Commitment," Transcript of presentation given at the 2007 FAIR Conference.

3. Richard L. Bushman, "A Joseph Smith for the Twenty-First Century," BYU Studies 40:3 (2001)

4. Terryl Givens, "When Souls Had Wings: What the Western Tradition Has to Teach Us About Pre-existence," Transcript of presentation given at the 2007 FAIR Conference.

UPDATE: Basically, I have made a distinction between the universal, eternal gospel principles (which encompass all truth) and the modern, temporal Church system (which should provide fertile grounds for all truth in this day and age). For an excellent presentation of this distinction, see Elder Ronald Poelman's original 1984 conference talk here (Part 1) and here (Part 2). The revisions can be seen here. See also Peggy Fletcher, "Poelman Revises Conference Speech," Sunstone 10:1 (Jan. 1985).

BARACK H. OBAMA: THE 'H' IS FOR HENDRIX

2010-09-07T13:27:00.000-07:00

In a recent speech, the President said "they [meaning Republicans] talk about me like a dog."

EVERYDAY IN THE WEEK I'M IN A DIFFERENT CITY
IF I STAY TOO LONG PEOPLE TRY TO PULL ME DOWN
THEY TALK ABOUT ME LIKE A DOG
TALKIN' ABOUT THE CLOTHES I WEAR
BUT THEY DON'T REALIZE THEY'RE THE ONES WHO'S SQUARE

HEY!
AND THAT'S WHY
YOU CAN'T HOLD ME DOWN
I DON'T WANT TO BE DOWN I GOTTA MOVE
HEY

STONE FREE DO WHAT I PLEASE
STONE FREE TO RIDE THE BREEZE
STONE FREE I CAN'T STAY
I GOT TO GOT TO GOT TO GET AWAY

Maybe he isn't as post-boom as some thought.

ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN & CHANGE: ARTICLE #1

2010-09-02T14:20:00.000-07:00

"Welcome to the Recovery"
Timothy Geithner
The New York Times (Aug. 2, 2010)
Walker Wright

Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner lays out his position regarding the stimulus packages and their effect on businesses and the economy as a whole. Going off of recent data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Geithner confirms that "we are on a path back to growth" and that the actions taken to "stimulate the economy helped arrest the freefall, preventing an even deeper collapse and putting the economy on the road to recovery." As evidence that stimulus money contributed to the current growth, Geithner explains that exports are "booming." He offers up a calculation of 136,000 new jobs in the past six months. Businesses, he says, have "repaired their balance sheets." The Big Three in the auto industry are now profitable (implying that the bailouts were also successful). Banks are more competitive, while the government's investment in banks has produced $20 billion in profits. This data, in Geithner's view, is proof that the "economic rescue package that President Obama put in place was essential to turning the economy around." Economists who share Geithner's outlook have concluded that the government intervention helped save 8.5 million jobs and increased GDP by 6.5 percent in comparison to what would have occurred had no action been taken. Despite this, Geithner acknowledges, "Small businesses are still battling a tough climate. State and local governments are still hurting." In response to this, he suggests, "There are urgent tasks to be undertaken to reinforce the recovery, and Congress should move now to help small business, to assist states in keeping teachers in the classroom, to increase investments in public infrastructure, to promote clean energy and to increase exports." It is due to President Obama and his administration that we are doing so well.

I always find the contradicting data regarding the stimulus to be slightly amusing. Everyone plays number games, often cherry-picking those statistics which fit their ideological vision. There is much that has been written to contradict Geithner’s comments on the economy both past and present. About a year ago, for example, economists John Cogan, John Taylor, and Volker Wieland analyzed the first six months of stimulus spending and published an article simply titled “The Stimulus Didn't Work” (one of the most interesting aspects was that over half of the government's impact came from defense spending, which had absolutely nothing to do with the stimulus).[1] Economist Alan Reynolds estimated towards the beginning of the year that the stimulus bill actually added 2 percentage points to the unemployment rate, which is drastically different from the claims of the administration.[2] It was just in April that CNN presented the results of a survey conducted by the National Association for Business Economics as to whether or not the stimulus was effective. Seventy-three percent of the economists polled reported no difference in their companies’ employment.[3] The Commerce Department recently stated that whatever impact the stimulus had is “lessening.” Uncertainty plagues the private sector as does the possibility of dipping back into another recession.[4] In response to the “recovery summer,” economist Michael Boskin wrote, “Almost everything that is supposed to be up—the economic growth rate, the stock market, bond yields—is down,” with “a double-dip recession or a Japanese-style lost decade [being] more plausible than a few months ago.” The recovery growth (3%) of the current recession is half the speed of those under Ford (6.2%) or Reagan (7.7%).[5] The President praised the 67,000 new jobs in August, but failed to mention the net job loss of 54,000 jobs. Nor did he mention that this net job loss was largely due to the laying off of temporary Census workers hired just a few months ago. Nor did he detail back in June that 95% of May’s net job increase was due to the hiring of these temporary Census workers.[6] One of the most damning pieces in direct response to Geithner's claim was an editorial in Business Investor's Daily, which began by quipping, “At first we thought [Geithner's opinion piece] was a joke, maybe even a parody. It wasn't.” It goes on to point out the broken promise of the administration to keep unemployment below 8% (it is currently at 9.6%). By printing nearly $1.2 trillion in new money and holding interest rates at zero, the “hyperactive” government has actually held the economy back. Instead of creating jobs, the stimulus acted as a “government-to-government bailout.” As for Geithner's cited study, what he fails to say is that it “has come under broad criticism for making up numbers. All the estimated jobs saved and GDP created come from a Keynesian model using highly suspect multipliers. That is, the numbers aren't real-world data measuring real jobs; they exist only in a computer model." The editorial addresses the uncertainty among the private sector caused by fear of "high-tax, anti-wealth, anti-business policies emerging from this administration...” To make matters worse, it cites the Congressional Budget Office's warning about the government's out-of-control spending.[7] Reasons like this are why Ur Union of Unemployment is calling for Geithner's firing.[8] Being a fan and student of the Austrian theory of economics, I can’t help but object to the stimulus.[9] The stimulus will lead to more taxation, borrowing, and/or inflation; none of which are preferable. Instead of allowing the market to weed out the malinvestments caused by government credit expansion, it continues to lead the market down an unsustainable path. I recall a New York Times piece (there seems to be a pattern here…) by economist Austan Goolsbee, arguing in favor of expanding housing opportunities to those who couldn’t afford them.[10] We are now living in the rubble of his terrible idea. Lucky for us, he has been appointed to Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors (note sarcasm). It almost goes without saying that bailouts and stimulus money encourage activities that would have otherwise been avoided if the “too big to fail” mentality was dropped. What makes these interventions morally repugnant is that the government is, as Nobel laureate Milton Friedman often said, spending other people’s money on economically-damaging projects. The government (as well as voters) should take a lesson from the depression of 1920, in which Warren Harding cut the federal budget, kept the government out of the private sector, and led us to a quick recovery and the Roaring Twenties.[11]

UPDATE: See "A Tale of Two Recoveries," The Wall Street Journal (Sept. 21, 2010); Jeffrey Miron, "The Case Against the Fiscal Stimulus," Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 33:2 (2010); Michael J. Boskin, "Why the Spending Stimulus Failed," The Wall Street Journal (Dec. 1, 2010).

1. John F. Cogan, John B. Taylor, Volker Wieland, "The Stimulus Didn't Work," The Wall Street Journal (Sept. 17, 2009)

2. Alan Reynolds, "The 'Stimulus' Actually Raised Unemployment," Business Investors Daily (Feb. 19, 2010)

3. Hibah Yousuf, "Economists: The Stimulus Didn't Work," CNN Money (April 26, 2010)

4. "Economy Slows to 1.6 Percent as Trade Gap Widens," Associated Press (Aug. 27, 2010)

5. Michael Boskin, "Summer of Economic Discontent," The Wall Street Journal (Sept. 2, 2010)

6. Jake Tapper, Sunlen Miller, “President Obama Reacts to Jobs Numbers, Doesn’t Mention Net Job Loss of 54K,” ABC News (Sept. 3, 2010)

7. "Tim Geithner's Empty Cheerleading," Business Investor's Daily (Aug. 3, 2010). Bill Bonnor described Geithner as “out-to-lunch” regarding his views on the recovery. See “Welcome to the Recovery? No, Mr. Geithner, the Twilight Zone,” The Christian Science Monitor (Aug. 8, 2010)

8. "UCubed Rejects Geithner Recovery Claims," Business Wire (Aug. 20, 2010)

9. For an overview of the Austrian theory of the business cycle, see Thomas E. Woods, Jr., Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse (Regnery Publishing, Inc.: 2009).

10. Austan Goolsbee, “'Irresponsible' Mortgages Have Opened Doors to Many of the Excluded,” The New York Times (March 29, 2007)

11. For an excellent discussion on this ignored piece of history, see Thomas E. Woods, Jr., “Warren Harding and the Forgotten Depression of 1920,” The Intercollegiate Review 44:2 (Fall 2009).

SARAH: NEITHER PLAIN NOR TALL

2010-09-02T11:49:00.000-07:00

Upon further reflection, I realized that my grouping of Sarah Palin with the likes of Krugman and Keynesian economics is rather unfair and a bit smug. Make no mistake: I have no desire to see Palin in the White House as of now. I didn't want her there in the first place. I didn't want John McCain there either. But what I especially didn't want was Obama in the White House. Unfortunately, I didn't get my last wish.

I want to clarify my position regarding Sarah Palin. I think she is smart, resourceful, honest and energetic. She balances being a mom, a career woman, and (now) a quasi-celebrity. She was more popular than McCain and boosted his race. She has done more to arouse conservative feelings than anyone has in the past decade. She is more of a feminist than most of those who wear the label as a badge of honor and "self-expression." She is an inspiring woman and, from the looks of it, was a pretty damn good Alaskan governor. It doesn't hurt that her social and fiscal conservatism fits rather closely with mine (and Reagan's) and is quite refreshing. While she may be a bit hyperbolic at times ("death panels," anyone?), it doesn't mean that she isn't right. Now, I am put off by her "fundamentalist voodoo" (I am almost certain Christopher Hitchens supported Obama because he couldn't stand Palin's Christian views), yet I can't help but appreciate her sincerity and dedication to religious expression in the public square (even if her arguments suck). And though her animal terminology (i.e. "mama grizzlies") I find to be a bit...odd, at least her use of it is more personal and tasteful than some of her opponents. Finally, it's true: she was more qualified than Barack Obama. In short, Palin

is both beautiful and professionally accomplished, a wife and mother and a natural politician, both religious and secular, both feminine and fearless of tasks — such as hunting — that are usually associated with men. She offers a different model of a woman who has excelled not through intimidation and aggressive demands for reparation, but through her own efforts, charms, and intelligence. What's more, from what we can gather so far, her political outlook has much to recommend it. There is a libertarian impulse here. She has rejected the perks of public life in favor of common sense. She is friendly to business interests but unfriendly to special privileges. She has praised Ron Paul and rejected the party mentality of GOP regulars.[1]

Many assume that I am arguing in favor of Obama when I express my disapproval of Palin being in the White House. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just because I don't want Palin in the White House doesn't mean I want Obama there. I'd take the former anyday (for all I know, I might be pleasantly surprised at how well she would do). While the lack of "experience" claim is pushed a bit too far by some of her harshest critics, it was poignant in the race against Obama. As Charles Krauthammer put it,

Obama was sagging because of missteps that reflected the fundamental weakness of his candidacy. Which suggested McCain's strategy: Make this a referendum on Obama, surely the least experienced, least qualified, least prepared presidential nominee in living memory. Palin fatally undermines this entire line of attack. This is through no fault of her own. It is simply a function of her rookie status. The vice president's only constitutional duty of any significance is to become president at a moment's notice. Palin is not ready. Nor is Obama. But with Palin, the case against Obama evaporates...Obama showed that star power can trump the gravest of biographical liabilities. The sheer elegance, intelligence and power of his public presence have muted the uneasy feeling about his unreadiness. Palin does not reach Obama's mesmeric level. Her appeal is far more earthy, workmanlike and direct. Yet she managed to banish a week's worth of unfriendly media scrutiny and self-inflicted personal liabilities with a single triumphant speech.[2]

Had Palin remained governor instead of jumping from Tea Party rally to Tea Party rally, I think she would have developed into presidential material (certainly VP material). As of now, I think she can do much good in the public square, especially once she moves beyond speaking at rallies and begins to flesh out ideas. I watch her future with interest. I do not wish to suggest that she couldn't ever be White House material. I just don't think she is right now. Given a little more time, she very well could be.

1. Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., "Sarah Palin's Career Ends in Tragedy," Mises Daily (Sept. 2, 2008)

2. Charles Krauthammer, "Palin's Problem," The Washington Post (Sept. 5, 2008)

UPDATE: See Matthew Continetti, "Five Myths About Sarah Palin," The Washington Post (Oct. 17, 2010); Wesley J. Smith, "About Those Death Panels...," The Weekly Standard 16:19 (Jan. 2011); Kay S. Hymowitz, "Sarah Palin and the Battle for Feminism," City Journal 21:1 (Winter 2011).

THE FUNDIE CHRONICLES

2010-08-12T13:52:00.000-07:00

Earlier this summer, I had a group project in a business management class. One of my group members was a Christian fundamentalist who ended up talking with me about history and theology. During the course of our discussion, he showed his contempt for the theory of evolution and walked down the well-traveled road of Kent Hovind pseudoscience. After challenging some of his assumptions, we engaged in a conversation regarding the history of science and religion as well as scriptural interpretation. What floored me was his proposal that Christians never cared much about science, but only relied on faith. After picking my jaw up off the ground, I quickly corrected him. I ended up emailing him a list of books and articles to help him in his studies on the history of science and religion. For example:

Galileo Goes to Jail: And Other Myths About Science and Religion, ed. Ronald L. Numbers (Harvard University Press: 2009)

David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (Yale University Press: 2009)

Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton University Press: 2003)

Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (Random House: 2005)

Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence For Belief (Free Press: 2006)

Daniel C. Peterson, "Editor's Introduction: God and Mr. Hitchens," FARMS Review 19:2 (2007)

Kenneth W. Hermann, "Shrinking From the Brink: Asa Gray and the Challenge of Darwinism, 1853-1868," Ph.D. Dissertation, Kent State University (December 1999)

In response, he sent me an attachment that featured an article arguing for the infallibility and total authority of scripture:

What is our standard of authority in religion? The answer is Jesus Christ! ...Thus, whatever Jesus authorizes in religion is the standard! ...Today, the New Testament is our infallible guide in religion. It is the word and authority of Jesus Christ! It is our standard of authority.

Here was my response:

Thanks for the PDF. I have a few problems with the basic premise.

I have no argument against the statement that Jesus Christ is the authority. I do have a problem with the statement that the Bible is infallible. For whatever reason, the author appears to think that if the former is correct, the latter must be too. It is nothing but a huge, unjustifiable presupposition. In addition, the author seems to think that this supposed infallibility of the New Testament automatically makes the Old Testament infallible as well. While one may consider the biblical manuscripts reliable, this in no way makes them infallible. The story of the woman taken in adultery is missing from the earliest manuscripts of John, the last 12 verses of Mark's gospel are not found in the earliest manuscripts, and the infamous Trinity proof-text the Johannine Comma is also nowhere to be found in the earliest versions (see Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, HarperCollins: 2005). There is nothing infallible about that and one is then left to decide what is correct and what is later fabrication.

Despite this, I am quite convinced that the New Testament writings are reliable for historical information. The three biographies (Matthew, Mark, John) and one historical narrative (Luke-Acts) I believe to be reliable tellings based on eyewitness accounts of the Resurrection. Paul's letters are a testimony and witness to his own experience of the Resurrection. The best book I've read on the subject of the eyewitness gospels is Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Eerdmans: 2006). Other scholars have written some impressive work as well. Here are some articles you can find online:

Gary Habermas, "Experiences of the Risen Jesus: The Foundational Historical Issue in the Early Proclamation of the Resurrection," Dialog: A Journal of Theology 45:3 (Fall 2006)

Habermas is probably the leading expert on the resurrection. His dissertation from years back is killer - "The Resurrection of Jesus: A Rational Inquiry," Ph.D. Dissertation, Michigan State University (1976).

N.T. Wright, "Christian Origins and the Resurrection of Jesus: The Resurrection of Jesus as a Historical Problem," Sewanee Theological Review 41:2 (1998)

William Lane Craig, "The Historicity of the Empty Tomb of Jesus," New Testament Studies 31 (1985)

However, the Old Testament scriptures as well as theology has been considerably altered. There is a tremendous amount of scholarship on the subject, but I'll give you Barker again to lay down some foundational work:

Margaret Barker, "What Did King Josiah Reform?" Glimpses of Lehi's Jerusalem, ed. David Seely, JoAnn Seely, John W. Welch (FARMS: 2004)

My personal favorite regarding the original belief system of the ancient Israelites and its eventual alteration is Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts (Oxford University Press: 2001).

Thanks again. I know I provide you with a lot of sources. I just think you would enjoy them.

Walker

And so it begins. Here was his response:

Are you sure you are not just knit picking? Jesus and the Apostles quoted from the scriptures regularly. I think that the scriptures are marvelously in sync. If we tried to get 40 people together over 1600 years from multiple geographic locations, who speak several different languages, I don’t think you would have anything make sense. The scriptures in my opinion don’t have any problems worth being concerned about. They are very close to being accurate. I still think it is the most reliable literature to teach us about the questions of life and who we ought to be accountable to.

My response:

Are you sure you are not just knit picking?

Perhaps. But explain how pointing out the three examples of later additions in the New Testament is nitpicking. Are you sure you are not just sweeping all this under the rug due to your theological biases?

Jesus and the Apostles quoted from the scriptures regularly.

And? Paul and others reinterpreted and reapplied Old Testament scriptures to fit the new Christological view. For example, the author of the epistle to the Hebrews quotes Ps. 45:6 and applies it to Christ: "But unto the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever: a sceptre of righteousness is the sceptre of thy kingdom." (Heb. 1:8) But the original Psalm was obviously not about Jesus. It was addressed to the anointed Davidic king:

"[T]he rituals which transform the status of the earthly king, removing him from "merely human" status to that of a sacral figure, to be couched in the form of a narrative about a god, carries with it the hint that the king himself is to be seen as transformed into a god...The enthronement of the king is thus his apotheosis." (Nicolas Wyatt, "Degrees of Divinity: Some Mythical and Ritual Aspects of West Semitic Kingship," 'There's Such Divinity Doth Hedge a King': Selected Essays of Nicolas Wyatt on Royal Ideology in Ugaritic and Old Testament Literature, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.: 2005)

The king was seen as divine, the son of Yahweh. This is why you have the people prostrated "before Yahweh and the king" in 1 Ch. 29:20 (notice the king sits on the throne of Yahweh in vs. 23). James Davila of the University of St. Andrews has pointed out that Melchizedek was the prototype of Davidic royalty and was originally understood to be a priest, king, and god (or deified king). This, however, was suppressed by the Deuteronomist reformers. Hence, we only have two mentions of Melchizedek in the Hebrew Bible, yet he is a key parallel figure to Jesus in the epistle to the Hebrews. During Christ's timeframe, Melchizedek was viewed as a god or divine mediator in some circles i.e. Fragment 11Q13 (see Davila, "Melchizedek: Priest, King, and God," The Seductiveness of Jewish Myth: Challenge or Response?, ed. S. Daniel Breslauer, SUNY Press: 1997). Ps. 45:6 describes the Israelite king, who is anointed or a messiah (Heb "anointed one"), a Davidic descendent, a son of God (see Ps. 2:7), and originally a high priest (see Ps. 110:4). All these apply to the Messiah who is Jesus. So, we see a reworking of Old Testament scriptures to fit the revelation of Christ's resurrection (even resurrection had cultic significance. See J. Wijngaards, "Death and Resurrection in Covenantal Context (Hos. VI 2)," Vetus Testamentum 17:2, April 1967).

I'm actually quite baffled that you say the texts are consistent, especially after I gave you some examples in our face-to-face chat of how they are not. Remember Deut. 32:8-9? The MT of vs. 8 reads "sons of Israel," the LXX reads "angels of God," and the Qumran reads "sons of God." Which is correct? The Qumran is the earliest Hebrew version we have and it uses the same exact terminology that we find in Ugaritic literature:

"The members of the assembly at Ugarit are unambiguously classified as 'ilm ("gods"), bn 'il ("sons of El"), and bn 'ilm ("sons of the gods"). Specifically, in the Keret Epic, the Canaanite chief deity El sits at the head of the assembly and four times addresses its members as either 'ilm ("gods") or bny ("my sons")." (Michael Heiser, "Deuteronomy 32:8 and the Sons of God," Bibliotecha Sacra 157, January-March 2001)

In the earliest Hebrew version of Deut. 32:8-9, Yahweh is depicted as the God of Israel and a son of El Elyon (God Most High), not El Elyon himself. The LXX reworks the "sons of God" to mean "angels of God," thus demoting them from the status of deity. The further change to "sons of Israel" would be an attempt to completely move away from the concept of multiple deities (though the MT could have been a scribal error if the original reading was "sons of Bull El." See Jan Joosten, "A Note on the Text of Deuteronomy xxxii 8," Vetus Testamentum 57:4, 2007). Even Deut. 32:43 has similar problems:

MT: "O nations, rejoice His people. For He'll avenge the blood of His servants, and wreak vengeance on His foes, and will cleanse His people's land."

LXX: "O heavens, rejoice with Him. Bow to Him, all angels of God. O nations, rejoice with His people and let all angels of God strengthen themselves in Him. For He'll avenge the blood of His sons, be vengeful and wreak vengeance and recompense justice on His foes, requite those who reject Him, and the Lord will cleanse His people's land."

4QDeutq: "O heavens, rejoice with Him. Bow to him, all you gods. For He'll avenge the blood of His sons, and wreak vengeance on His foes, requite those who reject Him, and will cleanse His people's land."

These are big differences. The author of the epistle to the Hebrews quotes from the LXX in Heb. 1:6. The Qumran version fits more with Ps. 97:7. Which is it? Israelites, angels, or gods? Did the early Israelites believe in other gods? Based on these texts, they believed in a multiplicity of gods, El being the Most High and his son Yahweh being the God of Israel. Yahweh was later conflated with El Elyon, which is evidenced from other texts as well. For example, Gen. 14:18 states that Melchizedek was a priest of the Most High God or El Elyon. In vs. 22, the LORD or Yahweh is identified as the Most High. It becomes Yahweh El Elyon. The addition of Yahweh's name is not found in the LXX, the Peshitta or the Aramaic Genesis Apocryphon. Also, originally it was "El Elyon, begetter [Heb quoneh] of heaven and earth." Later, it became "Yahweh El Elyon, maker [Gk ktizo] of heaven and earth." The procreative and sexual aspects of God were suppressed here also.

And what about human interactions with God? Was God humanlike? Could He be seen? According to passages like Ex. 33:20 ("Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live") or John 1:18 ("No man hath seen God at any time"), no. But in Isaiah 6, not only does Isaiah see the Lord, he sees a very anthropomorphic Lord sitting on a throne. Ezekiel in his first chapter sees "the likeness of a throne" and "the likeness as the appearance of a man above upon it" and all this was "the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD." (vs. 26, 28) Jacob even embraced God (usually translated "wrestled." It is the only place in the Hebrew Bible that the word appears. The Aramaic means "to intertwine" or "to embrace.") and had his name changed to Israel. He named the place Peniel (meaning "Face of God") because "I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved." (Gen. 32:30) The last part indicates a tradition that one did not expect to see God and live. Later targums such as Onqelos state that Jacob saw "an angel of the Lord face to face," changing the interpretation of the text. Even Ex. 33 contradicts itself, seeing that vs. 11 quite plainly says that Yahweh talked with Moses "face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend" (though God is still depicted to have human form: it implies that He has a face and His back parts are seen in vs. 23). Earlier in Ex. 24, it states that "they saw the God of Israel." (vs. 10) Targum Onqelos renders it "they perceived the Glory of the God of Israel." The LXX alters it slightly to read "they saw the place where stood there the God of Israel." In Ex. 17:6, the Lord says, "Behold, I will stand before you there." The LXX, however, changes it to, "Here I stood before you came." There are many, many more. My friend Daniel McClellan was recently awarded for the best dissertation in Oxford’s Master of Studies in Jewish Studies. His thesis is entitled "Anti-Anthropomorphism and the Vorlage of LXX Exodus." It deals specifically with these issues.

Hopefully, you see what I mean. Think about your own interpretations of the Bible and see how they square with this information.

The scriptures in my opinion don’t have any problems worth being concerned about.

This is completely different from stating that the scriptures are infallible or absolute in everything. There aren't any problems in the scriptures that bother me enough to question the divine force behind them. But that doesn't mean I just take what the texts say at face value based on my 21st-century American perspective. I try to understand them in their cultural/social context and timeframe. To do otherwise, I find, leads to erroneous conclusions.

I still think it is the most reliable literature to teach us about the questions of life and who we ought to be accountable to.

I have no problem with this. But this is not the same as saying the scriptures are infallible. And it is not the same as saying the scriptures are scientifically or historically sound in all aspects. And it certainly isn't any justification to accept Kent Hovind, Answers in Genesis, or any other form of fundamentalist pseudo-science as credible. The scriptures are great at pointing us towards the why of life. At times it gets the what, when, who, and how correct, but not always. The former, however, is the most important.

Hope this is insightful.

Walker

Another of my responses:

Jesus and the Apostles quoted from the scriptures regularly.

There is a hint of circular reasoning that is present in this sentence that I failed to address. Jesus and the Apostles quoted from the scriptures regularly in books you consider to be scripture! Based solely on your last email, you have stated that the reason we should take the scriptures at face value is because Jesus and the Apostles did (this is debatable, but I'll let that slide). Yet, we know this because of the New Testament, which is considered by Christianity to be scripture and is part of the canon known as the Bible. Breaking it down to the bare bones of the argument, you say that we should believe the Bible because the Bible says so. That is one big illogical circle.

If I have done injustice to your position, please correct me.

Walker

His response:

The writings of the Bible point to Jesus. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence concerning its inspiration, authenticity, and accuracy. Seems to me that you are doing everything you can to shoot holes through it. Most of what you are basing your argument on is in relation to man’s in ability to translate word for word the original manuscripts. I hold the belief that there are no errors in the original inspired writings and that there are few errors when looking at the overall content of the Bible to make a big stink about. The only difference is that I go to scripture to find out the answers given, and you go to whatever popular modern teaching tells you. Believe me; they have a lot of so-called evidence to back them up. They are so smart they can tell you how something came from nothing. I wish I was that smart. I am speaking of modern philosophy and science.

It seems like this has turned into a lot more than a discussion about creation vs. evolution. From the beginning of our discussion I thought you referred to yourself as a Christian and believing what Jesus said to be true. It seems to me that you have such great contempt for the writings of the Bible that there is little room for a Christian belief or faith in Christ. It seems that you have found your answers elsewhere. I certainly wish you well but I am concerned.

I admire your scholarly approach to our discussion and I will eventually get to read all of the material you presented. I have read this type of information in the past. Amazingly it is taught in most of our classes now days. It is really great persuasive writing. For those who believe in it; modern day humanism.

Def. a variety of ethical theory and practice that emphasizes reason, scientific inquiry, and human fulfillment in the natural world and often rejects the importance of belief in god.

Aside from the topic of discussion, I hope there are no hard feelings. You strike me as a person that I would like to get to know. In addition, you seem to live with good Christian character.

My response:

There is an overwhelming amount of evidence concerning its inspiration, authenticity, and accuracy. Seems to me that you are doing everything you can to shoot holes through it.

I provided several sources that argue for the authenticity of the New Testament gospels as eyewitness accounts, so I would have to disagree with your second sentence. But you use "authenticity" and "accuracy" in such abstract ways that I'm not even sure what you are getting at. Accurate in what sense? Authentic in what sense? The only thing I'm shooting holes in is the claim that the Bible is infallible or doesn't contain contradictions. These claims just simply aren't sustainable. However, the Bible doesn't need to be infallible in everything it says to be divinely inspired. That is what I'm arguing about. I am very much against this form of bibliology, in which the Bible begins to take on the same Pharisaic role as the Torah before. I'm glad to see you say that the scriptures point to Christ. The Bible isn't a handbook. It should be an experience.

And I know you keep throwing out that there is overwhelming evidence and there may very well be. What you have failed to do, though, is provide any. When leading archaeologists like William Dever are saying that there is no direct evidence for the Exodus (one of the key stories of the Jewish and Christian faith), I yearn to know what exactly you are referring to.

I hold the belief that there are no errors in the original inspired writings and that there are few errors when looking at the overall content of the Bible to make a big stink about.

That's fine. I don't have a problem with this to an extent. But do realize that we don't have the original manuscripts and are thus left to determine whether or not the copies we have today are completely accurate.

The only difference is that I go to scripture to find out the answers given, and you go to whatever popular modern teaching tells you.

Nonsense. The difference is that I'm not a presuppositionalist.

They are so smart they can tell you how something came from nothing.

I don't believe something came from nothing. I don't believe science teaches something came from absolutely nothing (given quantum physics and the multiverse theory), nor do I believe the scriptures teach creatio ex nihilo.

It seems like this has turned into a lot more than a discussion about creation vs. evolution.

True. Mainly because I found your disdain for evolutionary biologists unwarranted and largely based on a fundamentalist approach to the scriptures. The fact that you were unfamiliar with Christian evolutionists such as Kenneth Miller and Francis Collins increased that suspicion. But the clincher was your erroneous claim that "Christians don't care about science. They go by faith." This claim was nothing more than sheer ignorance as to the history of Christianity and its effects on Western civilization. It feeds the dichotomy and attacks used by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and other atheists. There shouldn't be any creation vs. evolution debate. There should be no religion vs. science debate. There should be no faith vs. reason debate. All there is is a theism vs. naturalism debate. There is no reason that theism should denounce science or reason. But pretending that it is opposed to these things gives the naturalists the upper hand.

For the record, I find the philosophy of naturalism utterly incoherent.

From the beginning of our discussion I thought you referred to yourself as a Christian and believing what Jesus said to be true. It seems to me that you have such great contempt for the writings of the Bible that there is little room for a Christian belief or faith in Christ. It seems that you have found your answers elsewhere. I certainly wish you well but I am concerned.

You can't be serious. I disagree with your literalist approach to the Bible and suddenly I have "contempt" for it? Your "concern" is noted, but it is rather irrelevant to our discussion. I'd prefer that you actually engage what I've given you instead of attempting to shame me into submitting to your dogma.

I admire your scholarly approach to our discussion and I will eventually get to read all of the material you presented. I have read this type of information in the past.

I have a large incentive to doubt this. You appear to be completely unaware that this kind of material exists. Notice that the majority of my sources are pro-Christian. David Bentley Hart is an Eastern Orthodox philosopher. Rodney Stark is a sociologist at Baylor University. Margaret Barker is a Methodist Old Testament scholar. What exactly is so repugnant about the material I've presented?

Speaking of Stark, perhaps you would be interested in his article ["Fact or Fable?: Digging Up the Truth in the Evolution Debate," The American Enterprise 15:6 (Sept. 2004)].* Notice his critique largely rests with the materialistic ideology put forth by many Darwinian proponents, not necessarily with the theory itself (though I find his few critiques of the scientific theory to be oversimplistic and a bit off, but that's what happens when a sociologist takes on biology). I am all for rejecting the naturalistic chance that many Darwin supporters trump up. I, however, am not against God allowing His creation to run its natural course to produce mankind. The fact that scientists are recognizing the evolution of the human brain as a special event invites purpose in the universe and consequently the hand of God.

Amazingly it is taught in most of our classes now days.

And this is bad why? I have several friends involved in this kind of education. One is finishing up his Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible at Brandeis, one recently finished his MSt in Jewish Studies at Oxford, and another finishing his Ph.D. in Biblical Studies at St. Andrews. All have profound faith in Christ. Doesn't mean they just ignore evidence and scholarship just because it may not fit with their paradigm.

It is really great persuasive writing. For those who believe in it; modern day humanism.

So instead of defending your position, you have chosen to implicitly paint me as a non-Christian humanist who hates the Bible. Great.

Aside from the topic of discussion, I hope there are no hard feelings. You strike me as a person that I would like to get to know. In addition, you seem to live with good Christian character.

No hard feelings, though I'm a bit baffled with (though not entirely surprised by) your approach. You assert much, but provide no argumentation or evidence to support it. You have dismissed much without providing a coherent reason as to why. Your entire email lacks substance. It was by-and-large a subtle attack on a straw-man position.

The entire reason I oppose your position is because I think it helps undermine the credibility of religion. It, in my mind, betrays the history and progress of Christianity. I would love to say that the version of religion critics attack was nothing more than a caricature, but, sadly, it is not. It exists and exists mainly because of people who hold the kind of views you do. I oppose your view because I respect religion too much. I oppose your view because I accept the reality of God and the resurrection and think that it must be presented in a coherent fashion. If we choose to bury our heads in the sand when it comes to uncomfortable evidence, we hurt ourselves. Condemning people for their unbelief or opposite opinions does nothing to advance your cause.

I'm happy to continue our discussion, but I'd actually like some feedback besides the equivalent of "you don't believe the Bible as well as I do." Ignoring the evidence doesn't make it go away.

Walker

I haven't heard back from him. I offer this as an insight to the fundamentalist mind.

*I provided him with a link to the article, but I am unable to find a working one now.

UPDATE: A consistent caricature made by critics of a more fundamentalist nature is that Mormons don't believe the Bible to be reliable. Misreadings of Book of Mormon passages and the eighth Article of Faith often lead to this erroneous conclusion. For an interesting article about the Church and biblical criticism, see Clyde D. Ford, "Modernism and Mormonism: James E. Talmage's Jesus the Christ and Early Twentieth-Century Mormon Responses to Biblical Criticism," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 41:4 (Winter 2008).

WHY PALIN, KRUGMAN, AND KEYNES SHOULD JUST GO AWAY

2010-08-09T15:09:00.000-07:00

I'm taking a liking to Republican Paul Ryan. As of now he seems to be one of the only politicians who is actually interested in engaging our current economic woes. Democrats are more worried about maintaining their majority hold as well as cramming as much legislation as possible that will increase government power prior to November elections. And I can't figure out what in the hell Republicans are doing. They seem to just be coasting on the shoulders of the Tea Party movement and Sarah Palin's you-betchaing. I commented recently on a friend's Facebook wall regarding this:

The problem I have with things like the Tea Party movement is that (based on what I've seen and read) it is just as idealistic as socialists or progressives. Words like "freedom," "liberty," and the like are thrown out and are rhetorically powerful, but the substance is not there. While I am grateful that the Tea Party is making noise (sometimes noise is needed), I'm afraid that is all it will do and may not influence in the best way possible. If the Tea Party truly wants to make an impact, then practical applications from libertarian theorists like Friedman, Hayek, Sowell, and others would be beneficial. Sarah Palin just needs to go away.

While I would never go so far to say there is no real difference between Democrats and Republicans, I would say that the latter's label as the Party of 'No' with no ideas is partially true. And it isn't good enough, especially since Ryan has a pretty good one in the form of the Roadmap. Fred Barnes praised Ryan's plan in The Weekly Standard, stating that Republicans need to get over their political squeamishes. He compares it to the risk Reagan took when he slashed taxes in the 1980s. Barnes says that "Republican candidates need to put some daylight between themselves and their [currently conservative-leaning] Democratic opponents. The Road Map will do that. Democrats can’t endorse it for fear of alienating their liberal base, which loathes anything that reduces the size of government. The Road Map stamps Republican candidates as the real conservatives, which is what voters happen to be looking for in 2010." Barnes addresses the very problem I have with current Republicans by pointing out that "a slogan is not a message. The Road Map is a message. The country is falling apart, we’re going broke, government is on a takeover binge, the economy is wobbling. The Road Map is the solution. That’s a pretty good message."

Of course, not everyone is convinced. Paul Krugman actually decided to write about economics for a change (you'd think he would do it more often considering he has a Ph.D. in economics from MIT) and critiqued Ryan's Roadmap. Ryan is apparently the "audacity of dopes" and "isn’t offering fresh food for thought; he’s serving up leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce." He claims that, according to the "nonpartisan Tax Policy Center," Ryan's plan would leave us with a $1.3 trillion deficit in 2020: "about the same as the budget office’s estimate of the 2020 deficit under the Obama administration’s plans." And in true liberal fashion, Krugman calls down fire upon the plan's supposed tax cuts for the rich and only the rich, leaving everyone else "out in the cold." To top it all off, he concludes, "The Ryan plan is a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future." I always chuckle a little when so much angst is directed at the wealthy. I'm not wealthy (so that claim to bias won't stick), but I have the sense to realize that most of the wealthy people are the reason I have the computer I'm typing on and the Internet on which I do my research and blogging. As Ludwig von Mises explained,

The history of capitalism as it has operated in the last two hundred years in the realm of Western civilization is the record of a steady rise in the wage earners' standard of living. The inherent mark of capitalism is that it is mass production for mass consumption directed by the most energetic and far-sighted individuals, unflaggingly aiming at improvement. Its driving force is the profit motive, the instrumentality of which forces the businessman constantly to provide the consumers with more, better, and cheaper amenities. An excess of profits over losses can appear only in a progressing economy and only to the extent to which the masses' standard of living improves. Thus capitalism is the system under which the keenest and most agile minds are driven to promote to the best of their abilities the welfare of the laggard many.

Nonetheless, what I find more amusing is that the Tax Policy Center came out with an article defending Congressman Ryan. It reads,

Krugman alleges fraud because CBO did not score the revenue side of the Congressman’s plan. (This is correct as the Joint Committee on Taxation is responsible for providing the official revenue score of tax legislation.) Instead, CBO assumed that total federal tax revenues will be equal to “those under CBO’s alternative fiscal scenario…until they reach 19 percent of gross domestic product in 2030, and to remain at that share of GDP thereafter.” Contrary to Krugman’s claims, this assumption is not unjustified. Ryan has explicitly stated that he is willing to work with the Treasury department to adjust the rates on his tax reform plan to “maintain approximately our historic levels of revenue as a share of GDP.” Since 1980 the federal tax revenue has been about 18 percent of GDP. TPC did analyze Ryan’s tax-specific proposals and found they would fall short of this revenue goal...But that doesn’t mean that Ryan’s plan is a fraud. Instead, it shows that Ryan’s vision of broad-based tax reform, which essentially would shift us toward a consumption tax, needs to be adjusted in order to meet his stated goal of matching historical levels of revenue as a proportion of GDP. This indeed poses a challenge to Congressman Ryan to make specific changes to his tax reform plan in order to meet his revenue goal. Reasonable people can disagree about whether we should close our long-term fiscal gap primarily through spending reductions or tax increases, but Congressman Ryan’s proposal makes a useful contribution to this debate.

Megan McArdle of The Atlantic also defended Ryan, pointing out that Krugman appears to be unaware that "scoring tax bills is still the job of the Joint Committee on Taxation, not the CBO." In an update, she writes, "I emailed Ryan's people around noon to ask whether my recollection was correct that he was unable to get staff time from the JCT. Within 30 minutes on a Saturday morning, I had emails from two staffers, one of whom was on vacation. They affirmed that he asked the JCT for an analysis, and was turned down. Which tells us a few things: first, that Paul Ryan's people are exceptionally hard-working and responsive. Second, that Paul Ryan did his best to get the revenue side as well as the spending side scored. And third, that Paul Krugman could easily have gotten answers to his questions if he had wanted them."

Ryan, however, apparently doesn't need others defending him. He can clearly take care of himself. In a response to Krugman, Ryan labeled the criticisms as misleading as well as puzzling in light of the collapse of European welfare states (I'll add to that Britain's ironic proposal to decentralize their own health care system). Ryan explains,

I asked the CBO to analyze the long-term revenue impact of the "Roadmap," but officials declined to do so because revenue estimates are the jurisdiction of the Joint Tax Committee. The Joint Tax Committee does not produce revenue estimates beyond the 10-year window, and so I worked with Treasury Department tax officials in setting the tax reform rates to keep revenues consistent with their historical average. What critics such as Krugman fail to understand is that our looming debt crisis is driven by the explosive growth of government spending - not from a lack of tax revenue. Krugman also recycles the disingenuous claim that the "Roadmap" - the only proposal certified to make our entitlement programs solvent - would "end Medicare as we know it." Ironically, doing nothing, as Democrats would prefer, is certain to end entitlement programs as we know them, and in the process, beneficiaries would face painful cuts to these programs. Conversely, the "Roadmap" would pre-empt these cuts in a way that prevents unnecessary disruptions for current beneficiaries. It reforms Medicare and Social Security so those in and near retirement (55 and older) will see no change in their benefits while preserving these programs for future generations of Americans. We do not have a choice on whether Medicare and Social Security will change from their current structure - the true debate is if and how these programs will be made solvent. Far from the "radical" label that critics have tried to pin on it, the Medicare reforms in the "Roadmap" are based on suggestions made by the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare, chaired by Sen. John Breaux (D-La.). That commission recommended in 1999 "modeling a system on the one members of Congress use to obtain health care coverage for themselves and their families." With respect to Medicare and Social Security, the "Roadmap" puts in place systems similar to those members of Congress have. There has been support across the political spectrum for these types of reforms.

He correctly points out, "By dismissing credible proposals as "flimflam," critics such as Krugman contribute nothing to the debate. Standing on the sidelines shouting "boo" amounts to condemning our people to a future of managed decline."

Krugman is an example of what happens when one becomes a fundamentalist, which is a term that expands far beyond the Bible literalists that began in the early 20th century. Ideology overturns reality, agenda replaces facts, and ego stifles learning. Krugman worships at the altar of Keynes and the myth that the poor can't possibly help themselves. Tell that to Adam Shepard, who built a steady life out of $25 in ten months. Or perhaps the practically unknown black entrepreneur S.B. Fuller. Fuller was born into poverty in Louisiana, obtained a sixth-grade education, and turned $25 into a successful cosmetic company in the middle of the Great Depression. He proposed that the disadvantages seen among the blacks of his day rested largely on the lack of entrepreneurial vision among them; a philosophy that brought on the scorn of the civil rights organizations. Considering the prosperity of the politically-active Irish lagged behind less political ethnic groups such as Chinese Americans, Fuller appears to have had the right philosophy.[1] Maybe someone should tell Krugman about Fuller before he starts labeling capitalism and its supporters as overtly racist. Then he could read up on Thomas Sowell's research showing the detrimental effect the welfare system has had on the family, particularly the black family.[2] But maybe this is just more racist fearmongering from a Harlem-raised black economist. Individuals like Krugman assume that the government is not only capable of taking care of poor, but that it is its duty. The greatness of the state can somehow create a utopian-like living for society. What it really creates are environments similar to that of Indian reservations.

Krugman joined the ranks of other well-deserving Nobel Prize winners such as Al Gore (for his propaganda piece An Inconvenient Truth) and Barack Obama (for what exactly we still aren't sure), an experience he described as weird, "but weird in a positive way." What is weird is that the man now holds the same award as geniuses Milton Friedman[3] and F.A. Hayek[4]: two thinkers who not only demolished the Keynesian thought process time and time again, but did it a long time ago. Economist William L. Anderson, a self-described Krugman junkie, offers this criticism:

...since my own writings have been extremely critical of the Bush Administration and both political parties, it does not bother me to read Krugman's anti-Republican rants. What does bother me is that the man pretends to be something he clearly is not: an economist.What does bother me is that the man pretends to be something he clearly is not: an economist. That is correct. Let me say it again. Paul Krugman is not an economist. His colleagues in the economics profession and the editorial board of the Times may call him an economist, but that does not make him one. This is harsh criticism, I realize, so I must explain my views in full. Yes, Krugman has a Ph.D. from MIT in economics, but his writings, both popular and academic, demonstrate that he does not believe in laws of economics. Instead, like most folks with socialist leanings, he believes that the state is both omniscient and omnipotent and simply by fiat can eliminate those pesky little problems caused by scarcity.

Elsewhere, Anderson has explained the gulf between Austrian and Keynesian paradigms:

To an Austrian, spending is a purposeful activity done by consumers and producers in order to enable them to reach certain individual (or maybe organizational) goals. It is part of the means-ends framework under which people operate; we consume because we believe the goods we are consuming meet our needs. However, to Keynesians, spending is part of a "circular flow" in which people "spend" in order to clear the shelves of inventory so that people can have jobs filling those shelves once again. It is spending for its own sake, as though we had a "public duty" to "spend patriotically." Furthermore, since governments can print money, Keynesians believe that such an act is economically meaningful because he believes governments have the power to keep the economy going; all that is needed is a printing press.

The difference between the two is that the former is grounded in everyday interaction and reality, while the other is, well, BS. I just recently cracked open Michael Shermer's book The Mind of the Market: Compassionate Apes, Competitive Humans, and Other Tales From Evolutionary Economics, which explains the Darwinian aspect of markets. While some attempt to justify their paternalistic policies (I wish they would just admit it is socialistic and move on) by pointing to the "general welfare" in the Constitution's preamble or the "pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration, Shermer demonstrates that markets are not only moral, but hardwired into human nature. If one truly wants to promote the general welfare or pursuit of happiness, then they should give an ear to Shermer's analysis:

Scientific research shows that economic self-reliance makes people happier than economic dependency, and studies show that people are happier, healthier, and more generous when they voluntarily donate their money to causes they deem worthy instead of having their money confiscated from them and given to causes that they would not otherwise have chosen to support.

He goes on to explain that statistics show Conservatives donate 30% more money than liberals, give more blood, and volunteer more hours. The working poor give higher percentages of their income to charity than any other income group. Religious individuals as well as organizations are more generous and charitable than the non-religious. To sum it all up, charitable givers are 43% more likely to say they are "very happy" compared to non-givers, with 25% saying their health is "excellent."[5] Sounds like the antidote to Krugman's poison.

One of Krugman's critics has made the excellent observation, "His Keynesian-induced distaste for savings is completely misguided. The contractors who borrowed and spent, spent, spent (corporately and personally) are going out of business at an accelerating pace. Not a single contractor spent his way into prosperity. Those contractors who worked hard, spent wisely, and built up personal and corporate cash war chests are going to survive this depression. They will continue to provide good jobs for themselves and for those fortunate enough to work for such financially conservative business owners. Saving, not spending, is the key to financial survival let alone success. If Paul Krugman was a businessman and adhered to his own academic beliefs, be assured his business would go broke." Considering the current administration is wanting to run the country Krugman's way, we can be assured that we too will go broke. If only historians and economists paid attention to the depression under Harding as much as they do to the one under Hoover and FDR:

The economic situation in 1920 was grim. By that year unemployment had jumped from 4 percent to nearly 12 percent, and GNP declined 17 percent. No wonder, then, that Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover—falsely characterized as a supporter of laissez-faire economics—urged President Harding to consider an array of interventions to turn the economy around. Hoover was ignored. Instead of “fiscal stimulus,” Harding cut the government’s budget nearly in half between 1920 and 1922. The rest of Harding’s approach was equally laissez-faire. Tax rates were slashed for all income groups. The national debt was reduced by one-third. The Federal Reserve’s activity, moreover, was hardly noticeable...By the late summer of 1921, signs of recovery were already visible. The following year, unemployment was back down to 6.7 percent and was only 2.4 percent by 1923.[6]

Krugman isn't a moron (if only that were the case). But he is misguided, arrogant, and frankly a bit dishonest. And he needs to go away.

UPDATE: A brand new article by Stephen Spruiell just appeared in the National Review detailing Krugman's career. Worth the read. Also, Robert Murphy has challenged Krugman to debate the Austrian business cycle, while Jeremy Warner across the pond has asked Krugman to just shut up.

1. See Thomas E. Woods, Jr., 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed to Ask (Random House: 2005), "Question 32: Who Was S.B. Fuller?".

2. In 1960, 51% of black females between 15-44 years of age were married, 20% were divorced/widowed/separated, and 28% had never been married. In 1980, the first group had dropped 20%, while the last group increased by 20%. Finally, by 1994, 56% were never married and only 25% were married. 70% of black children were born out of wedlock by 1994, compared to 22% in 1960. See Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals (Encounter Books: 2005), "Black Rednecks and White Liberals."

3. See Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (University of Chicago Press: 2002 [1962]).

4. See F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 50th Anniversary Edition (University of Chicago Press: 1994 [1944])

5. Shermer, The Mind of the Market (Times Books: 2008), Ch. 12: "Free to Choose."

6. Thomas E. Woods, Jr., "Warren Harding and the Forgotten Depression of 1920," The Intercollegiate Review 44:2 (Fall 2009). Woods concludes, "The experience of 1920–21 reinforces the contention of genuine free-market economists that government intervention is a hindrance to economic recovery. It is not in spite of the absence of fiscal and monetary stimulus that the economy recovered from the 1920–21 depression. It is because those things were avoided that recovery came. The next time we are solemnly warned to recall the lessons of history lest our economy deteriorate still further, we ought to refer to this episode—and observe how hastily our interrogators try to change the subject."