What I’m saying is that we follow a LIVING God and the rules are subject to change at times. Therefore, we shouldn’t get too wed to those rules.

For what it is worth, I suspect that at the end of God’s day there might be nothing other than local practical necessity. One of the implications of Mormonism’s move to make God contextual rather than acontextual, is that ultimately the divine becomes local, or — to use a scriptural phrase — “Nigh unto Kolob.”

Why am I not surprised. (Just good natured ribbing here, I don’t mean to sound heated today!)

Well, it’s fair enough, since I implied in #44 that God is a physicist. (At least I didn’t claim that God’s an impersonal, indifferent sociobiologist with a penchant for literary criticism. That would be, what, maybe Spinoza’s God.)

Your point is well taken, I’ll take a stab at a quick answer too. Charity is defined by interaction with others: a community. To the extent rules (and perhaps closely related, ritual) enable a community to get along comfortably, they may be an outward manifestation of charity.

But they can inappropriately take strength unto themselves (hence the need for tort reform?) The thing to remember is that what makes a community “get along comfortably” is to some extent a local and relativistic thing. It’s part inherited biology and part inherited culture. Is there an unchanging divine culture God lives in that includes white shirts and ties, while excluding long hair, tattoos, multiple earrings, and wine with dinner? Seems unlikely. Maybe he doesn’t like tattoos and multiple earrings, but he does seem to like long hair, comfortable open-necked clothing, and an absence of shoes (that’s for you, Jim). And I wouldn’t be surprised if he likes a glass of wine with dinner, too.

So I might grudgingly grant that among other things, God is a lawyer, if only out of local practical necessity. But he damn sure ain’t a strict constructionist.

Seth, I like the sentiment a lot, and think it fits well with keeping one’s eye on the prize: charity. But as practiced today, our faith does satisfy those who think tattoos, a second pair of earrings (or a first on a male), or a glass of wine with dinner are Bad Ideas, and that white shirts are expected to administer or pass the sacrament (mentioned by Elder Holland in a conference talk in the past few years).

I do think this would be the key purpose (I’m not sure I see a big distinction between the two sentences separated by ellipses; is there one?). The development of charity would seem to be the thing that would qualify us for godlike endeavors (well, together with technical mastery of the relevant physics, etc., but maybe that’s the easy part, as no special emphasis is placed upon acquiring here all the knowledge necessary to participate in creation). Are the covenants anything other than a means to this end of becoming someone with charity?

What surprises me is the parenthetical statement that charity is best learned in separation from God. Could you help me understand this? I would have thought just the opposite.

I think part of where we get into trouble on these sticky ethical issues is that we want to tie God down to legalistic and absolutist applications of prior commandments.

God may be an absolutist in principle: “Thou shalt not kill.”

But He appears to be relativist in application: “Go down and slaughter the Ammonites and leave not the women, children, or livestock ….” (yes, I know I butchered the quote).

Nephi was commanded to murder a helpless drunk.

Christ gave the law to keep the Sabbath Day holy (as Jehovah), but then rejected the legal interpretations of Jewish legal scholars that frowned on his disciples picking fresh vegetables from a nearby field.

Christ also got a guilty adultress off on a technicality (not enough witnesses) even though He gave the law to stone adulterers Himself.

The problem with the Christian Right is that they’re obssessing with legal absolutist interpretations of God’s laws. God gives absolute principles and doctrines. But the application of those laws varies from generation to generation. What they want is an equation that goes like this:

Thou shalt not kill. Therefore if we can define life as “at conception,” that means that abortions cannot be performed unless the life of the mother would be endangered.

Good legalistic thinking. But unfortunately, God does not appear to engage in legalistic application of His laws. In fact, he often appears to throw out the book when circumstances demand (“it is better that one man should perish than a nation should dwindle in unbelief”).

Perhaps “Christian Fundamentalists” would be better served to focus on the Living God instead of lifeless legal constructs. The obsession with which some Christians adhere to their opposition to abortion borders on idolatry.

In contrast, the Mormon faith provides guidlines for righteous living, but it does not provide much to satisfy the legalists in the congregation. Often such matters are simply relegated to prayerful inquiry and the guidance of the Holy Ghost (and usually counsel with your bishop).

Our faith does not worship dusty legal formulas derived from the Ten Commandments. It worships a true and living God who instructs us on how to apply generalized principles to our present situation. From time to time, we may be called upon to “slaughter the Ammonites” (metaphorically speaking of course).

First, on some views (see, e.g., Blake Ostler), God cannot know what free individuals will decide, so he is also laboring in (some) ignorance with respect to the future. In those views, ignorance is this life is good preparation.

Second, in my view, which is pretty common to Mormons, most of us are not ready for total knowledge yet. Any knowledge that isn’t given piecemeal would condemn us and our ignorance is therefore a mercy.

Finally, ignorance does much more than prepare us to handle ignorance. It forces us to sharpen our intellect through reasoning or else learn through experience (which learning tends to be less superficial and more integral to one’s being than other kinds of learning). It also forces us to sharpen our desires: by withholding the knowledge we learn to truly appreciate the knowledge when it comes. We learn to want it more.

These are hard questions you’re asking, Christian Cardall. As I’ve argued, they’re subsets of the Problem of Evil, which is pretty gutwrenching. Ignorance is clearly an evil. It’s hard, when experiencing the reality of the evil, to accept these long term ‘just so’ stories about why God doesn’t stop it, when he can. I am nonetheless persuaded that God cares deeply for my well-being and thus accept these stories for now, until something better comes along or until they are fulfilled.

In spite of that possibility, I don’t think it is easy to decide how to fill in the sentence “Earth life is for . . . .” It is for being tested in some sense, but it isn’t easy to figure out the relevant sense. It is for making covenants, though why those covenants have to be made here is not obvious–perhaps it has to do with embodiment. It is for getting a body, but there are lots of ways that could have been done. It is for bringing together families into a great whole, though I don’t know why we have to do that here rather than some place else. It is for learning charity. (It is easier for me to see why that one cannot be done except in separation from God.)

Human existence, I think, has lots of purposes. If I think about any one of them, it seems there might have been another way to accomplish that purpose. But perhaps they could not be accomplished as a whole except in this way. (That’s my version of Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds” argument).