I might get a few folks riled up here by not toeing the line, but that’s ok. I’ve been called a nonchalant Catholic – except by the Episcopol ministers who call me sacrilegious. I strive to live without too much concern for society’s expectations and will always question authority until I am certain that it IS authority over me and my life. If I may, I’ll borrow your format and make a little list:
God the Father
Jesus, Son of God
Created in His likeness
Be ye as little children
Ask, and ye shall recieve

“So, Abba Daddy, I’m your confused little boy. Can you please have Brother Jesus clarify a few things for me so that I may grow up to be like you?”
I truly believe, Mike, that our Heavenly Father wants us to know Him on a very personal level and love and respect him just as we would the very best of earthly fathers – and go crying to Him when we fall of the bike and skin our knee. And also to approach Him with extreme love, gratitude, and much pride when we can show Him: “Look, Daddy, I did like you wanted and studied real hard and sure enough, here’s my Diploma!” “Please can we sit under the mango tree and discuss what I should do next because I now know enough to know I don’t know enough. Please help me.” So, He wants us to study hard and learn. But He won’t do the lessons for us – He’ll always be there for us when we need help understanding the big words, and He’ll correct our homework for us, but He won’t take the test for us. He already had Brother Jesus do that once to show us how and now we have to strive to always follow His lead and at every fork in the road, stop and ask “What would Jesus do here?” Just as not studying and just follow the leaders is not the best way, I think the intellectual has a tendency to pull everything apart until he has a handful of atoms to study. Seek balance.

Lyle: How does one celebrate literal faith? That is a good question. I think it is a deeper question than I realize the more I think about it. I don’t think I did a very good job of it when I was young and overzealous and trying to do many good works. The fireballs among my friends at church are not either. I am like Ed and consider myself more and more a seeker than a having found it finder.

Maybe I am the only person who has gone through this cycle. Here it is for me.
1. Ignorance
2. Comprehension of concepts
3. Simple Faith
4. Increasing assurance from spiritual experiences or life experiences, or logic
5. More comprehension, but of paradox and inconsistances and dissonance
6. Personal tragedies that don’t make sense
7. Faith/Doubt -Two sides of the same coin
8. Senility, (just setting in) which brings apathy and peace

What I seem to find at church is many people stuck in the first 3-4 stages, who are often loud and demanding of others, who are into lots of rules and easily impressed by church positions, who see the world in black and white without many colors and who can not distingush the maturation of religious experiences into directions they are not aware of.

As far as missionary work goes, it goes both ways. You can drive people out. When I study the ward roster, I find many many more people who have quit coming, than the expected total number of new baptisms for the next decade. We have 20 people who get up to the pulpit the first Sunday and declare many things are literally true, with perhaps a 100 in the audience who seem to mostly agree, (who knows what they really think) and close to 1000 who are not there. Sour grapes are fruits also.

With our current retention problem one would think we might stop and consider if there is anything out of order with the way we are doing things instead of blaming collectively all those who left. Just a thought.

What seems like a paradox is that we are told to study and gain knowledge and wisdom. But then we are told to have the faith of a child. I haven’t figured this one out yet. I think it was Voltaire who said that the end result of reason was chaos. It seems that those who don’t study much have fewer issues come up and it is easier to just follow the leaders along blindly. They soon find themselves cursed with leading.

I have found that when most Mormon people move beyond literal faith they leave. I would like to figure out how to keep the Mormon faith alive for them even if they have really serious doubts of a literal nature. I do not see the church as a country club for those in the fast lane to their celestial glory. I see it as a hospital, and faith problems are parallel to heart problems in the medical world. Central. Those with literal faith may not have these kind of “heart” problems, but they have others. Where is the CCU (coronary care unit) in this church?

I can only come back to genuine empathy. If you care enough about some one to leave them alone and not inflict your opinion on them, when they really don’t want to hear about it. And this makes most provocative and stimulating questions hypocritical, including this one. Appologies now to the non-Islam portion of this thread.

Peace brothers and sisters, peace. (John 20:19)

As a seeker, I have throughly enjyed the open and thought provoking give and take here among (apparently) a group of staunch Mormons. My first exposure to the LDS faith was very negative – I’ll go no further than to be fair and say that my experiences of living as a Catholic in the Salt Lake Valley were probably no different than any “non-believer” living in the hot bed of any major religion. One of my guiding truths is “Ye shall know them by their deeds.” and that, coming from working for a truely beautuful person who (happens?) to be Mormon, is what has led me recently to start attending the Sacrament meetings at a local stake. Several times each Sunday I hear “And I bear my testamony that …”. I always want to scream out: “Can’t you sound more convincing? DON’T tell me what you believe, TELL ME WHY! And use your own words!” If everybody expects me to be a parrot, I am afraid I will never be admitted to the LDS faith even though I see many wonderful aspects of living the Mormon life and as I read through the Book of Mormon, the D&C, and Ensign magazine, I often find myself saying, “Yeah, they nailed that one right on the head.” So, you see, you intellectuals have reinforced the fundamentals for a seeker.

Off to chase some more links …

God Bless ya’ll,
Ed

So it appears that the thrust of earlier posts crediting the sword,
not suasion, for the astonishing spread of Islam, is perhaps narrow.
But clearing up these details does not refute the posters’ ulterior
premise: Islam’s threshold questions [ (1) Allah's existence, and (2)
Muhammad as his messenger] were not central to its rapid spread. This
is so because the suasion by which the masses were converted wasn’t
the meek ‘let me bear you my testimony’ kind of suasion. Consider the
following enticements that awaited sensible converts to Islam in the
7th and 8th centuries:
1) for non-Muslim bureaucrats, an increase in power and security under
their Muslim superiors,
2) for businessmen, advantages in trade as the privileges in terms and
concessions enjoyed by Muslims within their global trade network were
extended to converts,
3) for intellectuals, legitimacy for their ideas, and, of course,
5) for those willing to take up the sword, the promise of a
comfortable living through plunder.

(As you already mentioned, the burden of the poll tax was offset by
the fact that non-Muslims were not required to fight in the Islamic
army, so let’s leave that one out.) Could the above incentives have
led those unpersuaded of Muhammad’s divine calling to recite the
one-line profession of faith, the shahada, and thereby gain admittance
into the Islamic brotherhood? Sure. So Islam, during its first few
hundred years, could be relatively unconcerned with truth-claims about
its origins? Yup. Has this been a critical factor in Islam’s rich
literary corpus, and one reason they got off first base and treated
subjects beyond the threshold? I think so.

Mormons, on the other hand, offer a 10% reduction in income and
extended working hours–hardly great temporal incentives to join. To
be fair, there are benefits in networking and friendship that
an unconvinced convert might secure, but the promised and effective
benefits of church membership are largely spiritual; and to cash in on
these, you’ve got to believe those pesky threshold claims.

So when will we get off first base and engage the deeper meaning of
our scriptures and unique doctrine, leaving aside questions of
historicity and legitimacy? It’s a question of the company we’re
keeping. Among the gentiles and new converts, we should know nothing
“save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” (1 Cor. 2:2) In our spare
time, when we’re not proclaiming the gospel or fulfilling our church
callings or taking care of our families or earning our bread, we can
indulge in conversation with firm believers that transcends the milk
and gets to the meat. My prediction: it will have to wait for the
Millennium.

My understanding is that the key to Muslim apologetics is the Qua’ran itself. The claim is that the Qua’ran is such a fabulously beautiful and miraculous book that it becomes, in effect, self-warranting. Since the scripture braught forth through Mohommed is self-evidently divine, he was God’s prophet and the rest of Islam follows a fortiori.

1. It seems to me that the church meetings are filled with many members celebrating literal faith as expressed by Nate and Lyle. Maybe even 95% or greater.
2. It seems to me that the ranks of the less active are filled with doubters in the literal historicity of every degree. And a surprizing number still active, on the back row and even those rarely in more responsible positions are closet doubters and metaphorists.
3. It seems to me that both of these groups have a tendency to demonize each other.
4. I believe that the metaphorists have much of value to give. They are not inherently evil. Of course the true believers are the back bone of the church.

So although I am not asking anyone to give up literal belief or knowledge, I wonder if we could have more tolerance and even respect for those who try to believe but not as sucessfully and try to contribute even if they do not have the same burning testimonies.

I know from experience that in my ward the Bishop calls only the most zealous believer to any position of responsibility and with much less if any regard of their ability otherwise. Extremely talented and capable leaders and teachers are marginated if they have the slightest free-thinking tendencies. What are they afraid of?

Who exactly is stuck on constantly emphasizing history over results?

Aaron B. Cox, you creep me out when you go on like that about revelation and authority.

The continuing analogy to legal thought seems to put the focus upon what we are actually talking about when we talk about “little Mormon hooks”. Are we talking about the basic doctrines of the gospel? Scriptural narratives? Examples from Mormon history? Current practices and policies of the church? Uniquely Mormon Christology? We might readily say “Yes!” to this list of alternatives, but I still think that we would then need to acknowledge that these different kind of things ‘hook into’ philosophy, political theory, law, literary criticism, etc. in different ways. Take the field I’m most familiar with, political theory. Mormon scriptural narratives, doctrinal teachings, and Christology may lead us in the direction of certain alteratives in political theory rather than others. But much more immediately and concretely, the actual kingdom of God on earth happens to exist within actual political communities. We seem to have real duties as members of each, in addition to a different kind of (religious) duty to make the coexistence between the two good and effective, or pleasing in the sight of God (e.g. it seems we should neither refrain from telling the world that its ways are bad, nor bring down the wrath of the temporal authority upon the church needlessly). This second kind of (“existential”) hook is more than mere doctrinal material lying around wating to be applied to certain academic questions–it’s a starting point for political theology at which Mormons seem to find themselves almost automatically. These natural starting points seem to me to be where we could most rigorously begin to answer “little questions first”, and the place where Mormon thought would find the energy to sustain big projects.

Incidentally, in Islamic thought Abu Nasr tried to develop a kind of philosophical theology out of the Islamic practice of kalam (dialectical theology or apologetics). The idea was that since Muslims already found themselves trying to defend the “opinions of the lawgiver” to non-believers, kalam should found itself on rational, universal principles which would be acceptable to non-believers. While I’m not recommending something exactly like this, the strategy seems sound. My idea is that if Mormon thought is going to be authetically Mormon, it will do more than take seriously Mormon doctrines and practices; it will gravitate toward those questions and problems which are most pressing for us as a people and church.