{"id":3737,"date":"2015-01-30T15:22:15","date_gmt":"2015-01-30T22:22:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newcoolthang.com\/?p=3737"},"modified":"2020-01-09T04:15:46","modified_gmt":"2020-01-09T11:15:46","slug":"10-years-in-the-bloggernacle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newcoolthang.com\/index.php\/2015\/01\/10-years-in-the-bloggernacle\/3737\/","title":{"rendered":"10 Years in the Bloggernacle"},"content":{"rendered":"

10 years ago, give or take a few days, I started my first Mormon blog: Issues in Mormon Doctrine. \u00a0A week or two prior, I had happened upon Jared’s blog<\/a> (which was also brand new at the time), and realized that I had finally found a forum in which I could discuss the many issues that had been stewing in my head. \u00a0While I shared with Jared an intense curiosity regarding the relationship between science (especially of the Darwinian stripe) and religion (of the Mormon stripe) my blog focused more on the tensions and contradictions that I saw in Mormon doctrine, as I understood it. \u00a0It was a couple months\u00a0later that Jared, Christian<\/a>\u00a0and I started Mormons and Evolution: A Quest for Reconciliation.<\/a>\u00a0 (It was Christian who would eventually accuse me of playing\u00a0Aaron Cox in the Banner of Heaven hoax, a part which he, in fact, played himself.)<\/p>\n

Looking back on my first few years in the bloggernacle I feel a strange mix of embarrassment and\u00a0nostalgia. \u00a0On the one hand, I (thankfully) deleted Issues in Mormon Doctrine and can hardly stomach my posts that remain at Mormons and Evolution (it looks like Christian has since taken down the 2nd iteration of the site). \u00a0My “issues” and “reconciliations” all seem so naive and unpolished in retrospect. \u00a0Of course, I was putting out about 2 posts a day at the time, so I consciously sacrificed form for the sake of content – or so I imagined. \u00a0Perhaps the high water mark at Issues in Mormon Doctrine was a long essay\u00a0dedicated to the distinction between revelation and inspiration and why we as members were only bound to the former. \u00a0This essay was\u00a0later presented to and well received by a mid-sized Sunstone audience that included an approving D. Michael Quinn. \u00a0It was not long after this presentation that I posted another long essay on my blog in which I announced my disbelief in God and the church. \u00a0This was a very, very sad time in my life that I will not dwell much upon it.<\/p>\n

Given my uncompromising stance on the truth of evolution and an equally uncompromising insistence on facing issues in Mormon doctrine and history head on\u00a0(at least that’s how I saw it at the time), I developed quite a few antagonisms throughout the bloggernacle. \u00a0I repeatedly butt heads with J. Max and, to a lesser extent, Geoff B. over at M* to the point that I was banned from the site. \u00a0Keep in mind, this was before the M* rebirth as the explicit and unapologetic conservative phoenix that it is today, which goes to show how uncompromising and unconservative I was at the time. \u00a0Here’s a doozy of a comment<\/a>\u00a0that pretty much summed up my mindset just prior to my rejection of the church:<\/p>\n

“I personally feel that the best path to take is to adopt a[n approach] somewhat critical of authority, keeping it on a leash composed of experience and rationality. Clearly some authoritative claims of religions are totally false.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is THE position that I now argue against. \u00a0Another person that I (obviously) clashed\u00a0with was NDBF Gary<\/a>\u00a0who I frequently labeled and dismissed with the exact same words of contempt\u00a0by which I am labeled and dismissed today. \u00a0I also look back with fondness upon the never-ending free will debates<\/a> that were carried on here at the\u00a0‘Thang between Geoff J., Blake, Jacob, Clark and I, although I am, again, somewhat embarrassed by my naive commitment to naturalism\/scientism.<\/p>\n

Immediately after announcing my departure from the church, the Mormon Archipelago dropped Issues from their feed and it wasn’t long after that that I deleted the blog altogether. \u00a0I never fully left the bloggernacle, although I mostly engaged in non-threatening, philosophical conversations both here at the ‘Thang and over at Clark’s blog<\/a>. \u00a0While I did feel a lot of hurt by what I thought the church had done to me, I never tried to fight the church or undermine anybody’s belief in it. \u00a0I knew full well that despite the ways in which religion can go wrong, it usually goes very right in the believers’ everyday lives.<\/p>\n

While I never fully abandoned the bloggernacle during this time, my attention did tend more toward\u00a0to the philosophical blogosphere. \u00a0I started a new blog,\u00a0Minds, Meaning and Morals<\/a>, in which I posted\u00a0whatever papers I was working on as an undergrad in philosophy\u00a0and I participated in the Philosopher’s Carnival a few times. \u00a0Later on, I created another blog, Stop That Crow!: A Strange Inversion in Mormon Reasoning<\/a>, \u00a0in which I tried to explore the implications that physicalism had for Mormon theology. \u00a0Even though I no longer accepted Mormon doctrine, I was convinced that Mormon doctrine was committed to metaphysical materialism, and that blog was my attempt to bring a faithful Mormonism and an atheistic naturalism closer together. \u00a0During this time I was very much influenced by Dennett, Dawkins and several authors that provided evolutionary explanations of religion. \u00a0It was my abandonment of physicalism in favor of neo-pragmatism that lead me to junk the idea that Mormonism is committed to materialism at all.<\/p>\n

As my posts at Stop That Crow! began to trail off, so too did my checking in at and commenting within the bloggernacle. \u00a0It was during this time that I began to read Hayek, MacIntyre, Rorty and Gouldner and instead of posting my thoughts about these authors online, I wrote them in a moleskin notebook that I kept with me at all times. \u00a0Hayek chipped away at\u00a0my welfare liberal convictions, MacIntyre shook\u00a0my confidence in modernity, Rorty undermined my scientism\u00a0and Gouldner exposed\u00a0the dark side of my intellectualism. \u00a0These all set the stage for a reevaluation of my reasons for leaving the church.<\/p>\n

A little over 3 years ago I published my first post at the ‘Thang under\u00a0the self-explanatory title, “Why I Was Wrong<\/a>.” \u00a0In this post I expressed many of the ideas and doubts that I would refine, distill and eventually weaponize over the next few years. \u00a0My posts moved from “our reasoning is more tentative than we think” to “there are different kinds of reasoning” to “reason undermines priesthood authority and thus revelation”. \u00a0A little over a year ago, I wrote “The Mormon Intellectuals’ Trojan Horses<\/a>“, which was very much intended as a response to and critique of the thinking that underlied\u00a0my Sunstone talk from a few years prior.<\/p>\n

Of course, realizing that you took a wrong turn is not the same thing as actually finding the right path, and I still struggle with the latter to this day. \u00a0Contrary to\u00a0the common perception that I am self-righteously exalting my own priesthood authority and\u00a0imposing upon\u00a0others my own standards of orthodoxy, I am not very\u00a0orthodox, nor am I very\u00a0righteous and for that reason I do not have any priesthood authority to wield. \u00a0Some might call this hypocritical of me. \u00a0I, on the other hand, see my posts as a sort of “scared straight” program wherein somebody who is suffering the consequences of their bad decisions warns others not to follow their path. \u00a0I know from experience that simply telling somebody to follow church authority in spite of their reasoning doesn’t help much, but I do hope\u00a0that using reason to expose the tensions and contradictions between Mormon and intellectual values\u00a0might help some people second-guess their own decisions to leave the church.<\/p>\n

This brings me up to the present day. \u00a0Looking back over the past 10 years, I see so much growth and change in my own life and mindset that I can’t even begin to imagine where I will be, intellectually speaking, 10 years from now. \u00a0I think of the friendships and connections that I have built with people, most of which I have never even spoken with, and am filled with gratitude and admiration. \u00a0Yes, there are hostilities and many things that are corrosive to one’s testimony in the bloggernacle, and I sincerely regret the part that I have played in both of these phenomenon. \u00a0But there are really, really good and interesting people to be found here as well and it is these (you) people that prevent me from feeling much guilt about the pleasure that I’ve had interacting with you all over the past decade.