Where I would disagree with some interpretations of Oaks’ talk is when persons suppose the Holy Spirit to be the best source for knowledge about physical matters. While I acknowledge that one may conceivably learn to extrapolate from spiritual experience to physical experience, that is like extrapolating from smells to sights. When I smell a rose with my eyes close, I may with some degree of success assume that rose will be visible when I open my eyes. However, seeing a rose makes me certain that I see a rose — definitionally. Thus, when we make physical claims extrapolated from spiritual experience, we should be prepared to adjust the interpretation of our claims as new physical evidence becomes available.

As for the cultish groupthink… Are we really that cultish Jonathan?

And if so, are we any more cultish than your last employer-mandated company retreat? Or youth summer football camp? Or the Sierra Club?

As for the statement “I know”… It’s never been my favorite and I never use it in bearing testimony. Last testimony meeting, I actually read a passage from the D&C on spiritual gifts – and how they are different for everyone – and flatly admitted that I don’t “know” whether all this stuff is true, predicted that there were others like me in the audience, and pointed out that according to the D&C passage I had just read, not everyone in the audience is even going to get the opportunity to “know” for themselves.

Reception was a mixed bag. A couple older members came up to me after the meeting with concern on their faces and bore their own testimonies and encouraged me to get my own. A couple others quietly let me know the message was VERY appreciated. But nothing else happened.

That was my first impression too, but as I thought about it (I had plenty of time to think about it as I transcribed it) I wasn’t so sure anymore. I gave him the benefit of the doubt that he was optimistic. He might be writing atheists off, though. Either way, it’s still interesting.

As for the cultish groupthink… Are we really that cultish Jonathan?

And if so, are we any more cultish than your last employer-mandated company retreat? Or youth summer football camp? Or the Sierra Club?

Cultishness is a spectrum. All of those things you mentioned fall somewhere in the spectrum, just like the LDS church. I’m not going to say that the LDS church is a cult. It has its cultish aspects.

As for the statement “I know”… It’s never been my favorite and I never use it in bearing testimony. Last testimony meeting, I actually read a passage from the D&C on spiritual gifts – and how they are different for everyone – and flatly admitted that I don’t “know” whether all this stuff is true, predicted that there were others like me in the audience, and pointed out that according to the D&C passage I had just read, not everyone in the audience is even going to get the opportunity to “know” for themselves.

I commend you for your honesty. I never had the guts to say what I really thought while I was in the church. With the greater availability of information that casts doubt on the claims of the church, I think the church is going to need to accommodate itself to the idea of accepting people who don’t “know” and don’t ever expect to.

You know, my PB said that sharing my testimony would bring me comfort and joy. Would that be because I would be lying to myself?

About children. I am having somewhat guilty feelings about encouraging the belief in Santa Clause to my son. Because I know the truth about him, I can’t bare the day when I will have to fess up. I wonder if parents within the church, but don’t believe, feel the same way. Will they be destroyed when they have to explain that the church is not true?

In my fake-it moments, I did feel a sense of relief. It was like someone was prodding me saying “Now that wasn’t so hard was it.” No, it wasn’t so hard to profess knowledge of something that I didn’t really know, and it felt good to be part of the group. Maybe I did know after all, I thought to myself. That nagging feeling that I wasn’t being completely honest never went away for good.

I wonder if parents within the church, but don’t believe, feel the same way. Will they be destroyed when they have to explain that the church is not true?

This is what prompted me to investigate the church more deeply. I wanted to be completely honest with my children. I couldn’t say with complete honesty that I “knew” that Mormonism was true, but I wanted to be able to.

I’m not such a non-believing-yet-participating parent, but I imagine many of them signal their feelings in subtle ways.

As for Christ, of course I tell her he was a real person, and of course I believe in the miracles and will teach her likewise.

Any parent who thinks they are going to raise their own kids without forcing their own biases on the little tykes is just fooling themselves. In fact, letting your kids choose for themselves is even more damaging than imposing your belief system on them. My kids may grow up to resent my religion. They may rebel against me. But even then, at least they’ll have a direction in life – a point of reference. I’m doing them a favor.

Better than some so-called open-minded parents who essentially feed the kids to the wolves and tell them to sort out their own beliefs – in spite of the fact that the kid is freaking FIVE YEARS OLD and hasn’t got the first idea of how to form a belief system. Kids come into the world naturally looking to mom and dad to give them some direction. Refusing to provide that direction isn’t just bad parenting, it’s irresponsible and mean.

Parents need to grow a spine and realize that parenting isn’t some cosmopolitan personal vanity project. It isn’t about whether you appear to be fair, or whether you look “open-minded,” or whether you’re “the cool dad,” or whether you’re meeting some self-help book’s guidelines. It’s about raising kids. And it really isn’t about you.

Who cares if you end up looking like some close-minded zealot? The point is whether the kids turned out all right. Loss of “hipness” is a small price to pay for well-raised kids.

Reminds me that the entire church is built on witness testimony of the sort:

Interro: So tell me, did you see it with you physical eyes or with your spiritual eyes?
Witless: What’s the difference?

And this then is the core of the issue. Religon has a private vocabulary with special definitions for words like “testimony”, “witness”, “truth”, “knowlege”, etc which it controls … and holds perpetualy outside the reach of science or other forms of secular inquiry by virtue of their so-called religious context.

But I much prefer Thomas Paine’s take … that such is a form of lying and what mischief can arise when a man lies to himself so completely.

In this Oaks speech and elsewhere (eg. between sessions BYUtv ran a special on Henry Eyring) is a repeated association with science. Clearly this is a message that the church is pushing: “true science and true religion … come and get it. -A message from the Chuch of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. ‘The Mormons’”

Unlike you, Jonathan, I was unfortunate enough to have listened to both Sunday sessions. It just kept striking me that what the Mormons have mastered is the ability to thoroughly mainstream the outward appearance and other aspects that scream respectability. I found myself listeneing to the words wondering how such a respectable-looking-sounding human being could be saying such things with so much grim certainty. It just boggles — and what’s worse: but a few years ago I was totally on the take. No so long ago, Oaks was my idea of true LDS intellectualism.

As you may have noticed, I responded in a post.

Matt,

Exactly. If someone accepts “spiritual” witnesses as valid, at least they should acknowledge that they are not the same as physical, openly observable facts. Let’s be at least that honest with ourselves.

I used to like Oaks, too. It still boggles my mind once in a while that I believed the way I did without examining the assumptions that underlaid my beliefs. To be honest, I should have followed up on my nagging questions that were pointing to those assumptions, but I was too caught up in the idea that questioning implied doubt, a fatal character flaw.

That’s an excellent question that I’ll have to ruminate on for a while before I’ll have a solid answer. Examining my unconscious biases is hard work.

My first reaction is to wonder what the difference is between self-flagellation and saying “Don’t make the same mistakes I did.”

My conscious feelings when I contemplate my past beliefs is one of surprise and amazement, not so much remorse. I do wish I had found out earlier, but my life is what it is and can only unfold in time as circumstances permit. To find peace, I need to let it be.

Peace is for the dead.

Lincoln, I’d really like to hear about the type of interpretation which does not require the big lie. You know, the “righteous” as opposed to the so-called “sinful” interpretation.

O.K. Santa, I will be sending you my son’s list come Dec.

Does a man who is lying to himself know the truth of it? I expect not, At least not until his lie has been exposed to him and therein lies the catch. This is the reason that folks like Jonathan and I speak of being boggled by our past beliefs.

Other than the rather ridiculously uninformed sensationalism of this comment … And? Is there something here you think can be generalized to the epistemology of science?

BTW, did Brian Greene say he “knows” that quarks or strings exist?

Having been through the exact same experiences you have outlined on this blog (which I only recently discovered), I would recommend that you read “On Being Certain” by Robert Burton. He does an excellent job outlining the whole concept of knowledge and certainty as simply an expression of our underlying neurobiological circuitry, and discussing why we may feel we are certain about things, despite evidence to the contrary. As a neurologist myself I felt that he did an excellent job outlining and summarizing much of the scientific evidence in explaining belief in this manner.

One of the most fascinating studies on belief and certainty was done by Ulric Neisser, and referenced by Burton. Neisser asked the students in his psychology classes, in the days immediately following the explosion the Challenger in 1986, their memories; where they were, what they were doing, how they felt, what they saw, etc. Two and a half years later he interviewed them and asked them about their memories of the Challenger disaster. What he found was that almost none of them remember things the way they had described them in their original description. And almost all were convinced that their current memories were the “right” ones. One student even went so far as to say, “yes, that’s my handwriting, but that’s not how it was.”

If these students could feel so certain that they were “right”, what does that say about our abilities as humans to “know” anything about God based purely upon feelings, or “a still, small voice”?

The book is a fascinating read, and I would highly recommend it.

Thanks for the recommendation. It’s now on my local library’s hold shelf waiting for me.