Mitt Romney on Evolution

August 31, 2012    By: Matt W. @ 8:16 pm   Category: Life

One popular website running around on Favebook is Isidewith.com. It’s a website which asks you a few questions, then tells you how the candidates answered the same questions. One question is whether you believe in evolution. After you take the survey, you get to see how you align with the candidates. Just to make R. Gary’s head explode, here is Mitt’s response.

20120831-221129.jpg

Question #1- What does that even mean?
Question #2- Should I be offended that it tells me I should vote Green Party?

This Mormon Life 2012- iPhone edition

July 29, 2012    By: Matt W. @ 12:09 pm   Category: Life

I don’t know if it is because I am the father of three little girls or what, but I was just looking at my phone and thinking about all the church apps I have for being at church on Sunday.

Feel free to judge me by my apps:

20120729-133226.jpg

20120729-133245.jpg

I wonder if this is just because church is 3 hours long and it is easier to pocket a phone than haul scriptures, coloring books, crayons, quiet books, friends, toys, etc.

Most used are:

Most used by me: LDS tools- always using it to visit other members, call other members, etc. Close second, Gospel Library.

Most used by the family- read the scriptures. Helps keep us on track to read as a family, BUT the app breaks a lot, save your money and just use the website.

Most used by the 2 year old- Primary sing along. She is hooked on “I Am A Child Of God”

Most used by the 5 year old- Coloring games are a big hit here.

Most used by the 8 year old- Where’s the water trumps church games generally, but she’ll play Lamanite or Jonah.

What church apps do you have/use?

If you asked me what I thought about the FARMS debacle.

June 27, 2012    By: Matt W. @ 8:48 pm   Category: Life

I’d respond “That’s a Clown Question, Bro.”

George Smith’s First Prayer

May 7, 2012    By: Matt W. @ 8:45 pm   Category: Life

This week, I will be teaching Chapter 9 from the George Albert Smith Manual. It is a lesson on prayer.

The lesson begins with a story about Smith’s Mother teaching him to pray. You can hear Smith himself give the original address back in 1946 here.

One thing that was interesting to me was that first prayer that Smith hadn’t forgotten.

It was:

“As I lay me down to sleep, I pray the lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, I pray the lord my soul to take.”

In my (almost) 14 years as a saint, I have always been warned of vain repetition. Now am I wondering, was Smith’s rote prayer an anomaly, or is this idea of being completely against any sort of normative prayer something that evolved within our faith over time?

The Need For More Correlation

March 1, 2012    By: Matt W. @ 9:35 pm   Category: Life

In going through N.T. Wright’s Simply Jesus, I was quite interested in his discussion of the two currently competing myths of Jesus. Wright defines myth as a story which we hold to be true or historical which defines our beliefs, values, decisions and character. The stories he noted which were currently in competition were the one from the atheist view that Jesus was not the son of God, and therefore the stories about him are not true, but fiction, and possibly no person named Jesus ever existed, and the one from the theist perspective, where Jesus existed and was the son of God, and so on. Both stories, of course, can be broken up into multiple different versions of the story themselves, with Wright noting the two versions in contention today, that of the “liberal atheist” and the “conservative fundamentalist” have one striking thing in common, which is that they have little to do with the man represented by the current scriptural/historical record. (more…)

Fallible prophets, Mormonism, and John the Baptist

February 29, 2012    By: Matt W. @ 8:11 pm   Category: Mormon Culture/Practices

Blair Hodges recommended recently the writings of N.T. Wright, and so I recently picked up his latest book, Simply Jesus, from audible.com. While I have a whole list of topics I could discuss from it, today while on my commute home, I listened to a bit about John the Baptist that got me thinking.

In Matthew 11:4, John the Baptist sends his people to ask Jesus. “Are you he who comes, or should we be looking for another?” Wright suggests some interesting context to this. The cultural expectation, as we all knew, was for the Messiah to be the King of the Jews, sent from heaven to free the oppressed and to save the Jewish people. John had been thrown in jail basically for calling out that Herod did not have the right to claim he was the king of the Jews. He was unfit for the role. Now John was being oppressed and called to Jesus to step up and fill the cultural expectation of liberating savior. In response, Jesus calls for these messengers to tell John what he’s been about, blessing, healing, and raising the dead. He states this as evidence that he is the Messiah, and then asks the John not be offended by who he is in actuality. He was not the Messiah that was culturally expected. He was and is the true Messiah.

While I could talk here about what it means to be the true Messiah, and how awesome that is, that isn’t my point. My point is that John the Baptist was a Prophet of God, and he didn’t understand what the true Messiah was. He was bound by his cultural understanding.

So here are a few thoughts:

1. Evangelicals claim Mormons are not saved because we worship a different Jesus. John the Baptist worshipped a different Jesus, it could be argued. Is John the Baptist not saved?

2. Many Mormons become disaffected when the see that someone like Brigham Young could believe something as odd as Adam being God. Why would we have higher expectations for Brigham knowing who God was than we do for John the Baptist knowing who Jesus was?

3. Many Faithful Mormons cling to statements by prophets and church leaders which now sound racist or sexist or homophobic. Can we call these things out as cultural understandings of the time? How do we gain clarity on what was cultural understanding and what was truth that is just now currently out of popularity?

Truly, we see through a glass darkly.

How I intend to teach George Albert’s Smith’s mental illness.

January 6, 2012    By: Matt W. @ 11:34 am   Category: PH/RS Lessons

If it’s in italics, George said it. If it’s in bold, it’s from the Manual. If it’s underlined, it’s from Mary Woodger’s JMH article. Otherwise, it’s annotated or my own notes…

In preparing for this lesson, I have thought long and hard about the material within, and today I would like to focus not just on what President Smith said about living what we believe, but also on how he lived what he believed.

[An] observer wrote of George Albert Smith: “His religion is not doctrine in cold storage. It is not theory. It means more to him than a beautiful plan to be admired. It is more than a philosophy of life. To one of his practical turn of mind, religion is the spirit in which a man lives, in which he does things, if it be only to say a kind word or give a cup of cold water. His religion must find expression in deeds. It must carry over into the details of daily life.”

George Albert Smith is well known throughout the church for his religious conviction and for his compassion and careful shepherding of the world after WW1 as an apostle and after WW2 as President of the Church. But did you know he was nearly blind?

When he was 18, he found work with a railway surveying party. While working this job, the glare from the sun on the desert sands damaged his eyes. This left George Albert’s vision permanently impaired, making it difficult for him to read and causing him discomfort throughout his life.

George’s eyesight, for most of his life was so bad that he needed to have others write for him and read to him, because it gave him terrible headaches to try and focus and read. This in a time and place where there was limited technology, and so his responsibilities perpetually required reading and writing. None would have blamed Smith if he had given up. Yet Smith’s own conviction which he preached was that: (more…)

The Problem of Evil and Evolutionary Biology

November 30, 2011    By: Matt W. @ 10:30 pm   Category: Evolutionary psychology

I have discussed the problem of evil in the past[1], and what I feel is the Church’s unique position on how the atonement itself acts as a theodicy, God responding with everything he can to our suffering. I still stand by the general premise of that post, that the universe is governed by eternal laws independent of God [2] and that man has free agency and thus God is not accountable for him. [3] I also still hold that through the Atonement of Christ, God is doing all he can to alleviate our suffering.

I’d like to speculate a little bit more about why God isn’t doing more to alleviate suffering. Here is where some theories associated with evolution come in. [4] (more…)

Did Joseph actually say that?

November 13, 2011    By: Matt W. @ 4:20 pm   Category: Life

Recently, I have come across 2 or 3 sites which attribute the following statement to Joseph Smith: “stay close to the trunk of the tree and don’t get out into the branches”. Today it was also quoted in Sunday School.

However, I can’t find any such statement from Smith, or on any other authority (though I’ve found quite a few sites attributing it to Smith and some attributing it to Harold B. Lee, I can’t find any direct quotes.)

So, all ye mighty church folk, where did this come from?

What would comfort you?

November 1, 2011    By: Matt W. @ 7:53 am   Category: Life

All of us have burdens we carry. Most of us have burdens we carry which we wish our faith would address in some specific way. Some have burdens which have lead them into inactivity, others, into the foyer with tears in their eyes, and others into shouting expletives on the internet.

So today I am curious, what would comfort you?

What could I do to comfort you as just a lay member?
What could that speaker do in Sacrament?
That teacher in Sunday School?
The General Authorities in conference?

Today my burden is that you are not comforted, and the only solace I see is to wear out my life seeking balm for your wounds.

But I don’t know how. So I am sincerely asking, what would comfort you?

Failing Falling

October 19, 2011    By: Matt W. @ 1:59 pm   Category: Atonement & Soteriology,Plan of Salvation,Theology

“We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam’s transgression.”

-2nd Article of Faith

“All mankind, by the fall of Adam being cut off from the presence of the Lord, are considered as dead, both as to things temporal and to things spiritual”

-Helaman 14:16

It is a common claim (see for example Bhodge’s latest excellent post at BCC) the LDS church rejects “original sin”, and rightly so, due to our second article of faith, the belief that Adam and Eve took the fall as a progressive step, and due to our belief that small children are considered not accountable, and thus innocent.

However, one claim I am uncomfortable with, from Blair’s latest post (and I should add the claim is not his, but that of Peter J. Thuesen, is that this somehow allows our faith to escape the situation of an “inherently damnable humanity”, as Hodges quotes. It is, after all, our inherent damnability which is central to the Gospel.

The Atonement of Jesus Christ occurs to reconcile our sinful nature. We sin because we have free will and are weak creatures. The very plan of salvation (come to earth via birth, get a body, be apart from God, have faith, learn to repent, progress towards being heavenly creatures) is set up so that we can progress, and we would not be able to progress without God, we were selected by him to be his children, and he made it his “work and glory” to bring us up to a higher level of existence.

So if Mormonism does not teach the fall causing inherent damnability, it is only because we have removed it as our starting point, and thus moved our personal damnation back to our eternal selves. Our “original sin” truly becomes original to us, with the sin being our inability to achieve the loving nature required of us to live with God.

This does create for us a unique solution, in that our damnation is defined as our inability to attain a certain nature through our own ability, and God’s salvation is his giving us characteristics which we can use to attain to that nature. (A body, the light of Christ, the gift of the Holy Ghost, the power of faith, covenants, the atoning help of Christ).

It also raises questions. If we are eternal, and unable to change, how does it become possible for God to make this change? I don’t really know, but I do believe.

« Previous PageNext Page »