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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30730 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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I guess I don't know the rate at which that's occurring—how often you pray hard. Or whether there are any hidden things making it a little more likely.

Yeah same. I feel like I've done my due diligence but, given how confident everyone is in their own beliefs, I remain somewhat doubtful that it's possible to totally eliminate the possibility of bias. At this point I think [working to live my ideals well] is much more important, more helpful to people, and more likely to lead me to the truth, than [studying which ideals are optimal]. Of course doing both is best, but the former should receive the bulk of my time and effort at this point after so long studying the latter.

Mormonism teaches, and my intuition/spirit agrees, that as one becomes morally better, God guides them towards the truth. Good philosophies are inherently self-correcting, in the sense that if you live them consistently you will either continue to grow, or eventually run into their contradictions, at which point you know that they're false. Morality is objective, contradictions in it are self-evident (from a practical if not a theoretical point of view, i.e. you'll know contradictions when you see them) and so the best way to determine which philosophy is correct seems to be to live a good philosophy as well as you can. Resident Contrarian has a pretty good piece which mentions this:

I once heard about a thing called “philosophy”, which is a sort of scavenger hunt game combined with literary critic role-play. You read all these books that talk about how humans should live, and how they should think about concepts like “good” and “virtue”. Each book has an at least slightly different take on how you should think about these things, and there’s millions of them to sift through.

Some philosophies are drastically different than others, but there’s absolutely no consensus on which is right or wrong - you can pick one that says that nothing you do matters or one that says that every waking moment should be spent in service to some concept of good, and each choice is exactly as legitimate within the context of philosophy as the other. You get to say you are a philosopher (or that you appreciate their work) in either case.

The most common way to interact with moral philosophy is to collect a bunch of favorite moral positions, then to sit around arguing with people about how correct you are in your opinions about what you theoretically could do with those moral philosophies. Nobody will ever check to see if you actually put them into action, and you will look very smart.

You can look at morality as explore vs. exploit as far as doing the most good. Trying to live a good, virtuous life with a bad philosophy is possible but difficult. I think better moral systems--those closer to the objective truth--make it easier for one to be virtuous and help those around them. So the right strategy seems to be to explore for a while, exploit the best system you've discovered, then maybe once you've learned more about exploiting, continue to explore for a better system. Hope I'm making sense here.

What do you make of non-Mormons having similarly strong anecdotes?

It's important to note that none of my anecdotes are really specific to Mormonism at all. To me they are evidence that God exists and cares about us, and prayer works, but not really much further than that. I also believe that God loves his other children too, not just the ones who happen to have the most correct ideas about his nature, so it's not like he's going to only bestow miracles upon any one religion. My testimony of Mormonism in particular--above other Christian churches--has a lot more to do with spiritual experiences and my love for the doctrine than it does with the physical miracles I've seen.

Besides that though, if you trust all [Christian accounts of miracles] but distrust all [Hindu accounts of miracles] then clearly your belief about which religion is correct was never based on those miracles at all. This is why I mention that my testimony is much more based on spiritual experiences and my own understanding of the doctrine. The physical miracles only "opened the door" so to speak and forced me to stop dismissing such experiences as placebo.

I'm curious—I'm not very familiar with Mormonism. What things do you love about its doctrine?

I could go on... I'll list a few things in no particular order.

  1. Eternal families--I like families and they don't seem like a temporary mortality-specific thing to me.

  2. Faith and justice--I mentioned this a bit earlier, but the idea is that God reveals light and knowledge to his children as they become better people. This goes hand in hand with the idea that justice is related to accountability. Someone with less understanding of a situation is less at fault for making the wrong decision. This is a big part of why people disagree about morality (rather than it being immediately and obviously self-evident to everyone). If morality were extremely obvious, most people would still not be very moral, and so they would be under greater condemnation. Instead we are given about as much knowledge as we can handle, and then once we successfully deal with our current struggles we get more knowledge and guidance on what to work on next.

  3. Physical reality and truth exist, and God did not invent and create everything ex nihilo--I've done my best in this thread to justify why I think it's theoretically possible that God could create evil, but the idea that God created evil is not an LDS belief. If God truly did exist independent of everything--independent of truth itself--then he could surely invent a universe where evil did not exist.

  4. Modern guidance. I think that people, including myself, are often bad critical thinkers. God sends all sorts of prophets, writings, and personal spiritual impressions to send us in the right direction, but personal spiritual impressions can be ignored/misinterpreted. Writings can be corrupted over time. There's quite a lot that goes into a "successful" (effective at promoting moral growth) religion, and not all of it is personal. Institutional design and cultural values matter quite a lot too. It can be helpful to have hard lines in the sand, from both a cultural and a personal perspective, that prevent people from going too far off track. The Word of Wisdom is one example, forbidding members of the LDS church from taking hard drugs (among other things). Of course the higher law matters much more than the lower law, but sometimes the lower law is the one that's harder to justify away, and the one more likely to make a cultural impression, further protecting people.

Of course its most profound benefits have to do with knowing that Christ is our savior. Hard to say more without some understanding of what belief to contrast it with. On a personal level, it has benefitted my life by giving me comfort, purpose, direction, and some good safety rails.

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