- Not a Cougar on Dirt, Divinity, and DNA: Avram Shannon on the Two Creation Stories of Genesis: “Chad, maybe “begging the question” isn’t the right term, but you seem to butting up against the question of how important the historicity of Genesis is to LDS theology. Whether Adam and Eve are historical or not, they seem to be fundamental to LDS understanding of exactly why we need Jesus as a Savior. If this is all just allegory or a primitive explanation of how things were created, how much of what we call the Plan of Salvation is an inaccurate attempt to help us understand our relationship to God? Is this something akin to Newtonian vs. the theory of relativity where our Plan of Salvation is a “good enough” explanation for the “low velocity” at which we operate in this life or is it really just a 19-20th century attempt at an explanation that we shouldn’t judge too harshly just like we shouldn’t judge their Bible-writing forebears too harshly?” Jan 11, 12:27
- on Spiritual Experiences Going off the Rails: “BJ I really appreciate your courage in sharing such a raw experience, I think it is valuable for so many to better understand the challenges in attribution we all struggle with in relation to psychosis.” Jan 11, 05:49
- on Weekly Calls as a Safeguard Against Mission Abuses: “Why do we have missionaries who can’t tell their parents bad stuff and get help with that from their parents or others? This is shocking in so many ways. Parents need to be working towards being their kids ‘go to’ people especially in cases of danger, and the church should be promoting this. I know that kids get confused and a lot of us don’t measure up to this standard as families but it should be our earnest aspiration both as a church and as individuals.” Jan 11, 05:38
- on Dirt, Divinity, and DNA: Avram Shannon on the Two Creation Stories of Genesis: “Very good points.” Jan 10, 22:18
- on Weekly Calls as a Safeguard Against Mission Abuses: “ReTx, I agree 100%. After the BOM musical, we really should drop the black pants and short-sleeve white shirt which is no longer business casual. I thought the elders had updated clothing specs too and could wear chinos (tan slacks) and casual colored shirts. Yet I still only see white shirts. Whether we’re talking about dress or other “tradit” we really need more changes.” Jan 10, 22:04
- on Spiritual Experiences Going off the Rails: “I do think our church (and every church) tends to attract people in spiritual/psychic/emotional need and that perhaps these people are more likely to believe what might otherwise be seen as irrational things. The First Vision story is an incredible selection test for the investigator. I say this with great love and respect: if you believe that story as told on your doorstep by a couple of 19-year kids, I suspect you may be predisposed to belief generally. I would also suggest that some of our more peculiar doctrines may lead us to think about things which may seem pretty fringe even for other religious folk. I doubt that this predilection for belief selects for mental instability or illness and I certainly do not think that it correlates to a greater incidence of psychotic or aberrant acts. I am the parent of a person who has experienced extreme psychotic episodes, during which they committed violent acts against family and community members and destroyed a fair amount of public and private property. Recent high-profile news stories of violence committed by psychotic family members have hit us pretty hard. In our child’s most radically unhinged moments, messages from Joseph Smith, God, Satan, aliens, the FBI, etc were all major themes intertwined at various times. Book of Mormon stories were randomly mixed with covid conspiracies. There were screaming rants in public and private spaces which elevated to violent incidents that required police responses. Having been right up close in many of the most intense moments, it seems relatively clear to me (and few things are clear in these situations) that if we hadn’t raised them in the church, they would simply have had other source material at hand during those horrific episodes. The church stuff was just one ingredient in a random stew of real and imagined things. On this journey with our child, we have learned that for people who experience psychotic episodes, there can be indelible remnants from previous psychotic episodes that stay in the mind and seem to pile up and intertwine even after years of medications and treatement. These “memories” of horrible experiences in a psychotic state are often recorded in the mind as real experiences and they are sometimes very hard to extinguish and to disambiguate from things that really happened. In many cases, the sick person’s perception of how they arrived where they are is not reliable in any way. The stories that they tell to explain their experiences are often a mixture of things that really happened in our observable world and things that only happened in their brain. I could tell story after story of psychiatrists and psychologists who believed stories that our child (in a psychotic state) fabricated from thin air. We were often astonished at the breadth of creative license, the almost-logical construction, and the fluency with which these stories were told. Big institutions, like parents, are the easiest things to blame and the easiest things to weave stories around, but in many such cases there is actually no person, group, or institution at fault. Whatever the varied social and environmental sources of mental illness, there are often biological processes over which we have no conscious control. In our child’s case, what is happening is not about spiritual weakness, moral laxity, or poor character. They don’t have any of those problems. What is happening to them is cells, DNA, neurons, and chemical interactions not working as they should. And yes, I am very deliberately not getting into how “spirit” can/should be disambiguated from brain biology or concepts of mind. One thing we have learned as parents is not to try and figure out the “why this?” or “why that?” or “what did we do?”. It is most likely impossible to figure out and doesn’t really help the person most of the time. In our child’s case, psychiatric medications are the only thing that helps and these medications are far from an ideal solution. Talking and thinking therapies of various kinds are necessary and welcome helps but only when their brain is in a relatively stable state. This has been a long story but one I wanted to share to perhaps build empathy and compassion for people who experience these extreme forms of mental illness. I guess the essence of what I want to say is that people often try too hard to ascribe logic or sense to the acts of people who experience this level of illness. We are looking for rational patterns in a place where we will not find them.” Jan 10, 16:36
- on Weekly Calls as a Safeguard Against Mission Abuses: “Anna Thanks for sharing. My thought back in the day and now is that missionaries are not even given a # to call if there is an issue besides the parents. (that I am aware of) There should be a HQ # to call like we bishops had when the hard stuff came up that was not in any handbooks. I didn’t tell my parents about the crazy stuff either but my mission pres didn’t tell us to not tell. To your point, why are we sending anyone to these types of areas? For numbers? Even my mission in the US we were living in areas you wouldn’t want to live. Even tho I paid for all my mission expenses I did not have the option to move to a nicer/safer location. My mission pres told me to tract on the local military base even tho it was against the base law. I thought it was odd that he would even ask. I did it for one day with a close call with the base police. Never did it again. Safety is clearly not the mission departments top priority.” Jan 10, 15:23
- on Weekly Calls as a Safeguard Against Mission Abuses: “This post has had me thinking about how missions have changed and if weekly phone calls home is even enough to avoid some of the problems. My son was in Brazil and there were some really dangerous things, that we as parents never found out about until long after he was home. After my son got home and the doctor took care of parasites he had picked up and he regained most of the weight he lost, the truth trickled out slowly. The first thing of importance to come out, was they were told not to tell their parents any of the bad stuff. Really, telling parents any of the problems was forbidden. Yeah, I think that is a problem weekly phone calls will not fix. There were drug dealers with machine guns guarding their territories. They didn’t care much about the missionaries and would allow them into the areas. But there was always the chance of getting caught in cross fire during the drug dealer conflicts. The missionaries were told not to carry money or cameras or anything of value because mugging were common. They were told to carry one or two dollars, not so much its loss would hurt, but enough to tell the mugger that was all the money they were carrying. He and his companion were robbed at knifepoint more than once, at gunpoint twice, and one mugging ended badly when his companion resisted and was stabbed. Sanitation was nonexistent and they were told they would get parasites, so just don’t worry about it and take care of it when you get home. Food poisoning was common, even a mass food poisoning at a zone conference where many of the missionaries ended up hospitalized. That hit international news, but he obediently never mentioned that his companion was one who ended up so sick he was hospitalized. His companion stole money from him, so leaving it in his apartment wasn’t safe either. So, no, I don’t think a weekly phone call will overcome the mission president forbidding them from telling their parents any better than weekly letters. It is like I used to tell children about abuse prevention, “if anyone asks you to keep a secret that is not a happy secret, tell your parents or a trusted adult, because some secrets are not good to keep secret.” The mission president in this case had instructed the missionaries in his care to keep dangerous secrets.” Jan 10, 15:03
- on Dirt, Divinity, and DNA: Avram Shannon on the Two Creation Stories of Genesis: “Great supplement for next weeks lesson and what I’m reading in the Oxford Bible right now on how two narratives are being combined. Going through the D&C and other JS related scriptures, documents, and books I found it interesting how often he returned to the origins and genesis in his thoughts and expansions throughout his life. It’s interesting how much Catholics and Protestants read the Trinity and ex Nilo creation into the narrative while Latter Day Saints use the origins to expand on the pre existence.” Jan 9, 19:12
- on Weekly Calls as a Safeguard Against Mission Abuses: “Mortimer – I’m with you the wardrobe, but not just the sisters. The elders in their white shirts and suits all look like they are children playacting at being lawyers. I drove past a different local church and a 18 y-old boy (happens to be a friend of my kids) was standing outside wearing jeans and a sweatshirt holding a sign. He felt welcoming in a way that our missionaries playacting in their missionary costumes just do not. Our missionaries look kind of foolish. Or at least they do in my part of Calif. Perhaps it is less true other places.” Jan 9, 18:17
