I think I’m getting pretty close to wrapping up what I want to say in this blog, but I just want to include, here, some things that I shared in 2007 with a friend and in 2015 with an acquaintance from a Facebook group. As I write this, I am an active member of the LDS church. In fact, I am presently putting together thoughts and materials for a lesson I was asked to give on Dec. 4 in our high priests group. I’ve selected the following to talk about: (1) President Packer’s April 2005 General Conference talk, “The Book of Mormon:Another Testament of Jesus Christ—Plain and Precious Things” and (2) Chapter 7 of Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Spencer W. Kimball, (2006), “Personal Testimony”
In this and the next post, I want to share excerpts from the email correspondence I had in 2007 and 2015. In the case of my friend, in 2007 he was in the early stages of seriously reevaluating his beliefs and his membership in the LDS church. Eventually, perhaps around 2010, he decided on a path outside of the church. We became very close friends during this period and we remain close friends. In the case of my FB acquaintance, he had just recently decided to step away from the church.
In both cases, I initiated my correspondence in hopes of inspiring faith in God, Jesus Christ, the Book of Mormon (and the other standard works of scripture believed by the LDS church) and the divine calling of and restoration of the Gospel through Joseph Smith. I want it to be clear from what position I am writing this blog. While my opinion of the present church program and our current leaders is different from the mainstream of the church, I believe wholly in these other aspects of the LDS church or Mormonism.
So, with that, here’s a portion of what I shared with my friend on April 8, 2007 (this is the same friend mentioned in 2016-10-17: A Parable and 2016-10-18: Vacuum of Understanding):
…I usually try not to pry too much into people’s lives, but I know that you are pretty open about things. I have meant to talk to you about things you’ve mentioned about doubts and such, but I always end up blabbing about something else.
If you don’t mind me asking, I was wondering what, specifically, are the things that you agonize most over. Does it come down to specific things about our church, more generally about Christianity, or even more generally about God and religion? I wouldn’t say that I personally have serious doubts about stuff, but I have become rather preoccupied with such questions of belief and knowledge because of current science religion debates going on right now. I have actually delved rather deeply into philosophical, religious and so-called “scientific” issues and questions. It has caused me very serious reflection, not necessarily doubts, but just questions about the way that we come to knowledge….
…in the words of President Kimball that we heard today, I already see a lot of those “golden threads”. I see very, very many. But I don’t know exactly how all of them fit together. But I feel very strongly that they are going to come together to form a very perfect picture. And it will probably look a fair amount different from the picture I see right now…
…if you ever feel the need to talk, you have someone here who has probably asked similar questions as you might be asking. You can even email whenever you want.
In the meantime (and I won’t claim that this is necessarily the thing that will help you the most), you might gain something from Alma 32. Of any chapter in the Book of Mormon, this could be the one that has had the greatest impact on my life and my pursuit of truth and understanding. Those things that enlighten your understanding, that draw together and explain and cast light on things that were formerly dim to our understanding, these, I think, are those “golden threads” that President Kimball was talking about. These are those isolated things in which our understanding or knowledge might be considered sure or even “perfect”. These isolated threads of truth are what I look for in everything that I read or study or ponder. What we extrapolate or infer from these isolated truths might not be exactly right, or could actually be absolutely wrong. I think this is what the Pharisees did when they wrested the scriptures. What we extrapolate from those golden threads might be considered “hypotheses” or tentative truths. Sometimes we need to keep them strictly as tentative truths until more evidence is in. So according to Alma 32, we continue in our way, we continue to nurture those ideas. If they are good, then we will eventually come to find (with continued study) that they only continue to grow in our minds and they expand our comprehension, suddenly other things start to make more sense. I think this is what it is talking about when it says that it starts to enlarge our understanding. It also become delicious to us because it opens our eyes to such a great extent, it begins to give us hope and to make us happy.
This, I think, is what it means to “experiment” upon the word. But the experiment can be done with everything that we read or learn. Everything can become an experiment. Any new thing that we hear may be treated as tentative. We should feel no shame or fear in doing this even with scripture. In fact, one of the big criticisms that scientists have with religion is that things are accepted without rigorous observation, testing and objective consideration. They are absolutely right about that. The Bible has come down through centuries of filtering and distortions. Even the Book of Mormon we need to be careful about, not because of the writings themselves, but because of our interpretation of them. The Jews had a hard time accepting Jesus (among other reasons) because the “King” they had envisioned was after the manner of the world. They just could not understand the concept of a king after the manner of spiritual things.
Reading this now, it seems I never really completed this last thought. I can’t say for sure what I was thinking at the time I wrote it. But it does remind me of something I wanted to talk about. On January 28, 2008, I copied down the following from a book called “Water and the Cell” (Pollack, Cameron and Wheatley):
…the study of cell physiology broke up into smaller and smaller fragments or specialties. In time each specialty spawned its own lingo, its own methodology and its own subspecialties…. The cumulative result is as Durant described: “We suffocated with uncoordinated facts, our minds are overwhelmed with science breeding and multiplying into speculative chaos for want of synthesis and a unifying philosophy.” … Durant’s complaint addressed the lack of a correct unifying philosophy or theory, which alone can bind together and make sense out of the senseless fragments….
On the same page of my notebook where I copied this, I rewrote the following in red: “A correct unifying philosophy or theory which ‘can bind together and make sense out of the senseless fragments.’” This is what I was looking for as a graduate student in the life sciences. It is also what I’ve been looking for in my religion. The correlation process that came into full swing in the church during the 60s and 70s has resulted in a sort of catechism for Mormonism. The smattering of scripture fragments found in our manuals and our assurance that the contents have been reviewed and signed off on by the brethren essentially guarantees our teachings will remain largely unexamined and untested rigorously against the standard works (i.e. Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price). What we have is a semblance of a unified, established body of truth to inform and guide our lives. And questions posed in Gospel doctrine class with the aim of stimulating thought are often met either with predictable answers or, ironically, with silence, because everyone is reluctant to simply state the obvious answer.
But with many of these topics, if we scratch down just under the surface and search even a little bit further into the scriptures than we’re accustomed to doing, we quickly find that for every one very neat and tidy answer we have to a specific Gospel question, there are at least a dozen more questions for which the catechism of the church is completely inadequate to answer. Good examples of this, in my opinion, are two lessons we just recently had in Gospel doctrine class on 3 Nephi chapters 16, 20 and 21 (Lesson 40: Then Will I Gather Them In) and 3 Nephi chapters 22-26 (Lesson 41: He Did Expound All Things unto Them).
In the same book I quoted from above, the authors write: “Fundamentally speaking, cell physiological research is like solving a gigantic crossword puzzle. Like the crossword puzzle, cell physiology also has just one unique solution….” I have exactly the same view as it concerns what’s contained in the scriptures. Collectively, I believe, they are telling ONE consistent story. But we don’t know what that story is. We have our various interpretations of it based on the relatively small portions of the scriptures we focus on in our lessons and personal study. To make matters worse, the scriptures themselves have their imperfections (e.g. in translation, in the preservation of what was originally written and even in the extent to which the original author was able to convey in words the impressions that came to his spirit). Once we venture even a little bit outside what’s covered in our catechism, we are “...suffocated with uncoordinated facts, our minds are overwhelmed...” with varied ideas and opinions “...breeding and multiplying into speculative chaos for want of synthesis and a unifying philosophy.” That is, if we even allow ourselves to search into what appear to us as strange “mysteries”.
This is the vacuum that I discussed in 2016-10-18: Vacuum of Understanding. We are as little children without someone to teach us.
...it is upon the rock of our Redeemer, who is Christ...that ye must build your foundation... 