- E on Thoughts on Our Polygamy Problems: “I really look forward to your additional posts on this!” Oct 14, 06:39
- on Thoughts on Our Polygamy Problems: “The notion of heavenly mothers (yes, plural) has a long and detailed provenance in the church — and this notion arose wholly in support of the polygamy argument (by attributing to God what men in the church were doing). The notion has no basis in scripture or revelation, but it has percolated through Mormon thought for a long time.” Oct 14, 06:35
- on CFM 10/19-10/25: Thoughts and Poetry for “Before I Formed Thee in the Belly I Knew Thee”: “I don’t think the comment was snide – it seemed completely in earnest, which is all the more reason for someone to take a long walk through peaceful natural settings and think things over. I am 100% certain that a collection of 19th and 20th-century Mormon poems based on curricular themes and a curricular calendar selected over a year ago were not an ingenious plot to influence an election. Not everything is about politics (my post later this week is about politics).” Oct 14, 00:18
- on Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, Infinite Regress and the Eternal Chain of Gods: “I love the idea of an infinite regress of divine beings. I don’t feel the need to argue for it, but in my mind if we take the idea of exaltation seriously, with all the future eternal posterities that entails, the there can’t be a “beginning” of that chain. Thanks for touching on it, our weirdest and most distinct doctrines are what makes Mormonism such a compelling religious tradition to me.” Oct 13, 19:57
- on Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, Infinite Regress and the Eternal Chain of Gods: “That’s a good point that it’s not just late Nauvoo theology, and that the King Follet Sermon touches on scripture and revelation from the earliest Restoration. Personally, I find the late Nauvoo stuff intellectually fascinating, but it’s not what I most respond to devotionally, so these days I look at our cosmology as a wide space of things we can believe, which includes everything from mildly traditional trinitarianism to infinite regress and more, without requiring a specific point within that space.” Oct 13, 18:18
- on CFM 10/19-10/25: Thoughts and Poetry for “Before I Formed Thee in the Belly I Knew Thee”: “I apologize for not removing the snide and erroneous comment earlier. Please keep any comments civil and respectful, and don’t assume you know the author’s unstated intentions. FWIW, two strikes and you are banned from T&S if it happens on my posts.” Oct 13, 17:21
- on The Bronze Threads of Fate: A Handbell Journey: “RLD, I can imagine! Those are some of my favorite pieces too.” Oct 12, 22:27
- on Latter-day Saint on Joe Rogan: “If “the data” is as hostile to (LDS) belief as Dan claims, then I’d really like to see him provide the general (or specific) grounds for his continued belief. Otherwise, it’s just fideism.” Oct 12, 16:10
- on Latter-day Saint on Joe Rogan: “Just one example, in “marriage and sexuality” on celibacy. Professor Pablo A. Torijano of the Complutense University of Madrid aptly points out, the consensus of the “Third Quest for the Historical Jesus” (with scholars such as E.P. Sanders, John P. Meier, and Geza Vermes) insists that Jesus and his first followers operated entirely within the parameters of Galilean Common Judaism. • Marriage was the absolute norm: In that environment, marriage was not one “lifestyle choice” among several; it was the connective tissue of the economy, family survival, and religious duty. • Jesus’s celibacy: Although the historical Jesus probably did not marry—which was a striking eccentricity in his context—his central message was not an institutional endorsement of celibacy, but rather the apocalyptic proclamation of the imminence of the Kingdom of God. The first disciples (such as Peter, whose mother-in-law is explicitly mentioned in the texts) were married men who lived according to average Jewish customs. McClellan adopts a macroscopic and diachronic perspective (across the entirety of biblical history). In attempting to dismantle the modern theological argument for a “single, permanent biblical design for marriage,” McClellan assembles all the pieces that appear in the New Testament (including Paul’s letters and second-century texts) to demonstrate that the Bible contains contradictory narratives. However, in doing so, he flattens the sociological reality of 30 AD, where celibacy did not have nearly the same institutional or social status as marriage. So, was there diversity? Yes, of course. Can you flat to what Dan does in his videos? Nope. You must ponder and be honest with proportions, and explain what represented the most to the society in different times, especially in the inter-testamentary times (Also that being a paradox in those videos because Dan jumps from Mesopotamia to biblical time, to Jesus’ time even to rabbinic time… it’s a mess). And this affects the Petrine Church (term used by Antonio Piñero), the original jew christian movement that preserve all Jewish traditions, it exists high chances, in the first century of expecting that Jewish marriage would be the average, the norm in Jesus followers.” Oct 12, 14:01
- on Latter-day Saint on Joe Rogan: “I was reminded a little when reading the comments of when the Book of Mormon musical first came out–15 years ago, maybe–and journalists were looking for reasons why it was okay to like a musical that made fun of a religion. At some point, someone invited John Dehlin to an early performance of BoM and the NYT basically did an entire story saying, “Hey, this Mormon liked it, so it’s okay to make fun of them!” (Or that may just be my jaded recollection; it’s been a while.) And I remember thinking to myself that even if he was still on our books at the time, Dehlin wasn’t really much of a member anymore and seemed to have left the faith in all but word, so maybe he wasn’t the best member to represent us as as whole. And I knew all that because I’d been “on the blogs” for a lot of years before that, including John’s blog. FWIW, like what I’ve seen from Dan McLellan, though admittedly I’m not even a scholar, let alone a Biblical scholar. But like the Dehlin/NYT story, to the extent McLellan is going to be held out representative of what Mormons are or believe to the world as a whole, I think it’s fair to ask if he’s even still believing. What I admittedly don’t know is the extent to which people actually associate him with the Church.” Oct 12, 12:08
