Ask a Mormon, Part 4

Why not? There's nothing strange about changing your mind, is there? Haven't you ever changed your mind about anything, ever? Well then, it's just the same, but on a bigger scale.
I do, I have! The gods know I change my mind!

But it's always because I have heard arguments that logically implies that the position I currently hold is wrong! With religion we are talking about adopting an unprovable idea (at least until I die/the rapture/doomsday/repeatable miracles).

In any case, minority religions such as Mormonism almost always grow almost exclusively through social contact. What happens is that somebody has, maybe, one or two friends who are Mormons. Perhaps they met at some non-Mormon society, or perhaps they were already friends with them when they converted. Through them they meet other Mormons. They may find their social centre of gravity shifting: more and more of their friends are Mormons, either because they are converting, or because they are meeting new friends who are already Mormons. Eventually there comes a point where it's just more effort not to be a Mormon than it is to be one.
Emphasis mine.

I still don't see that I would abandon my understanding of, say, a heliocentric world in favor of a geocentric world view, even if I was surrounded by lots of geocentricists. And unless they put me to the stake I doubt I would claim to change my belief.

And even more, if I changed from one religion to another, because not doing so was to much effort, then that wouldn't necessarily mean that I actually believed in what I told others, simply that I would say I did.

No matter how rational people are, and how irrational they may believe a faith to be, it is extremely difficult to resist it when you are surrounded by it. It's a well known phenomenon which anthropologists report when doing fieldwork in other societies. For example, Edward Evans-Pritchard - one of the most prominent social anthropologists of the early twentieth century, and a staunch product of Brideshead-era Oxford - reported that during his fieldwork among remote African tribes he found himself effectively believing in their magical practices, even though from an intellectual point of view he thought them nonsense. Our instinct to conform socially can force us to change our practice, and when our practice changes our beliefs tend to follow. Similarly, when people become immersed in a new religion, for one reason or another, they typically find themselves conforming to it.
Okay, that I suppose is an argument I can follow: Implicit or explicit group pressure, even without any use of threats, can lead a mind to change ideas.

I have to think a bit more about that one.
 
What percentage of the universal "truth" do you think your Church explains?

I am not sure I understand the question. Do you mean, what percentage of all that is true is known to be true through the church? If that is the case, the percentage is actually pretty small; not because it doesn't answer some important questions but because a) some truth does not need to be revealed to be known (admittedly, science can't tell us if something is True with a capital T, but it does tell us a lot about the nature of the universe) and b) there are a lot of questions that won't be answered in this life. But I do think that what the Church explains, is truth.
 
don't you feel that your Church explains or tells a completely distorted history of America? and what are your views on the Church racial policies from yesterday and today?
 
don't you feel that your Church explains or tells a completely distorted history of America?

No, not at all.

and what are your views on the Church racial policies from yesterday and today?

Well, the only "racial policy" we have ever had, as such, was not allowing black men to hold the priesthood; my view is that this was a mistake, and that it was not something that God actually asked of us. Other members have different views on the matter.
 
Well, the only "racial policy" we have ever had, as such, was not allowing black men to hold the priesthood; my view is that this was a mistake, and that it was not something that God actually asked of us. Other members have different views on the matter.

Was this policy alleged passed down to the president through God? That's how it works, right? President hears from God, passes God's word on to the rest of the Mormon community?
 
Was this policy alleged passed down to the president through God? That's how it works, right? President hears from God, passes God's word on to the rest of the Mormon community?

No president of the church ever claimed that this policy was revealed to him by God. Not every single thing we do comes from revelation.
 
No president of the church ever claimed that this policy was revealed to him by God. Not every single thing we do comes from revelation.

Really? Hmm I seem to remember from another 'Ask a Mormon' thread that the role of the president is to act as a conduit between God and the Mormon communit much like the pope. I guess I misremembered that :crazyeye:
 
Really? Hmm I seem to remember from another 'Ask a Mormon' thread that the role of the president is to act as a conduit between God and the Mormon communit much like the pope. I guess I misremembered that :crazyeye:

No, you didn't. But the fact that the president of the church receives revelation from God on some things doesn't mean that every thing he does is the result of revelation.
 
Ahhh okay. Was the racist policy discussed above claimed to be a command from God, at the time?

As I said, no. Actually, it was never really explained at all.

Do presidents usually make it clear which orders came from above and which did not, when they share them with the rest of the community?

There are ways of determining whether something is a commandment from God, yes.
 
This might be a stupid question, but prophet = president?

The president of the church is considered a prophet, and is usually who we mean when we say "the prophet". However, all the members of the First Presidency (the president and his two counselors) and of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles (twelve . . . apostles, pretty self explanatory) are "prophets, seers, and revelators," and in a broader sense, anyone who receives revelation from God is a prophet, so to speak.
 
And why it was never really explained at all? ... maybe because it's yet again an "uncomfortable truth" ?

What do you mean? It was never explained when it was the policy (and presumably would not have been "uncomfortable") and it hasn't been explained since because there is little to explain, we don't know why it was done. But it's not exactly something we hide.
 
I do, I have! The gods know I change my mind!

But it's always because I have heard arguments that logically implies that the position I currently hold is wrong! With religion we are talking about adopting an unprovable idea (at least until I die/the rapture/doomsday/repeatable miracles).

What do you mean by "logically implies", though? You mention heliocentrism as a belief you would be unprepared to give up. Yet there is no "logical" proof of heliocentrism - only arguments to the best explanation of the evidence. Why do you assume that religion is unprovable in that way? Religion isn't a single idea - it is many ideas, and perhaps more importantly, there is more to it than ideas, too.

I don't think that people really believe what they believe because of arguments, logical, evidential, or otherwise. Although people may believe that they believe things because of such arguments, I think that most of the time they believe what they believe because it meshes with their experience. For example, most people believe politicians and lawyers to be inveterate liars not because there is good evidence for this, but because that belief fits in with the narrative that they tell (perhaps subconsciously) about the way the world works. (If evidence supporting this belief emerges, then so much the better, but it's not the reason for the belief in the first place.) Religion is the same. People believe in (for example) God not because there are good arguments for God's existence - although when asked they may cite such arguments - but because the belief and, crucially, the practices associated with that belief, reflect their own experience of life. People come to believe in God because they come into closer contact with the belief and the practices and find that they reflect their experience of life. Conversely, people cease to believe in God because they find that they do not. Arguments for or against are really secondary for most people.

I still don't see that I would abandon my understanding of, say, a heliocentric world in favor of a geocentric world view, even if I was surrounded by lots of geocentricists. And unless they put me to the stake I doubt I would claim to change my belief.

And even more, if I changed from one religion to another, because not doing so was to much effort, then that wouldn't necessarily mean that I actually believed in what I told others, simply that I would say I did.

The problem here is that the geocentrism/heliocentrism example isn't really parallel to religious belief, because religious belief is not the same thing as normal propositional belief.

There are different schools of thought regarding what religious belief is. Some people (mainly atheists) think that religious belief is purely propositional or cognitive, exactly parallel to scientific belief. So when a believer says "God is three persons" she is making exactly the same sort of statement as when the scientist says "The Earth revolves around the Sun", and these statements can be evaluated in precisely the same ways. At the opposite end of the spectrum there are people (mainly theologians) who think that religious belief is wholly non-propositional and non-cognitive. On this view, when the believer says "God is three persons" she is not making any claim about reality at all - she is merely expressing a sort of feeling, or something like that. This view is similar to expressivism (the meta-ethical theory, now much out of vogue, that moral statements such as "Murder is wrong" are not making claims at all but merely expressing the speaker's feelings). So on this view, religious claims can't be evaluated in the same way as scientific ones, because they are completely different kinds of utterances.

I think that as usual the truth is somewhere in the middle and that religious beliefs have both cognitive and non-cognitive elements. To believe in (say) God is partly to believe something to be true in the propositional sense: it is to believe that a certain entity objectively exists and has certain properties. But it is also to place faith in that entity - it is to believe in him in the sense that you believe in your friend. It is to take up a certain existential attitude, one that manifests itself in (but is not reducible to) certain activities such as prayer, participation in liturgy, and perhaps following ethical standards. Robert Audi (among others) has argued for this complex understanding of the nature of religious belief. If that's so, then to believe in a religious claim involves much more than merely to hold that a certain assertion about the universe happens to be true, after the model of a scientific belief; although it does involve that, it also involves the way you live your life. That is why losing a religious belief is typically a traumatic experience, because it requires not merely that you adjust your metaphysics but that you change your life. Conversely, to change your life is, in part, to change your religion, because that is what religion (partly) is.

That is what underlies what I said about people changing religion because it's less effort. I didn't mean that they just say they believe something because it leads to less social hassle. I meant that if they are socialising with people of that religion, perhaps taking part in events associated with it, or even living in a society where that religion and its practices are widespread and highly prominent, then inevitably they are already living their life in a way that reflects the beliefs of that religion (even if they do not believe those beliefs to be true). But the nature of religious belief is such that to hold a religious belief is, in part, to live in a certain way. This means that these people are already doing half of what it is to hold a religious belief! It's like they have one foot in the water already, simply by being there. That leads to cognitive dissonance. If you act in a way that doesn't reflect your inner beliefs, something has to give - you have to stop acting that way, or you have to change your inner beliefs to match. In the case of our hypothetical person surrounded by the religion and partly participating in it, cognitive dissonance may lead them simply to accept the beliefs whole-heartedly rather than in this uncomfortable half-and-half fashion. And I don't mean that they cynically choose to adopt the belief or pretend to, or even that they sit down and consciously decide to believe it (something which I don't think is generally possible). It's a process and one that happens largely subconsciously, until one day they realise that actually, yes, they do believe after all.

That's how I see it anyway. I may be wrong - this isn't the sort of stuff I know much about.
 
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