It seems to me that almost every argument I have seen involving Mormonism (where one of the participants is Mormon and the other is not), either online or in the real world, and including arguments I have been party to on both sides of the issue, has essentially boiled down to the non-Mormon party making assertions about Mormonism, and the Mormon denying them, claiming that Mormonism is being misrepresented, misunderstood, maligned, overgeneralized, or distorted.

I wonder why? Are criticisms of Mormonism really so unfounded? Are they really so groundless? While many of them certainly are groundless or deceptive, I do think there are a lot of earnest and legitimate criticisms out there, but I rarely hear a Mormon, when confronted with one of those criticisms, accept it. While I don’t necessarily expect to see Mormons granting the truth of negative assessments of their religion (although it would be incredibly refreshing), that’s not the only option. The Mormon in the fight could always go the “it’s a feature, not a bug” route, and claim that the criticisms about the Church are true, but they are ultimately not negative. I guess, to be fair, I have seen people argue like this, too, and it gets on my nerves as well. So maybe it really isn’t a preferable option.

Assuming that some criticisms of Mormonism are legitimate and grounded in fact and/or actual experience, why then do defenders of the faith not own up to them? Why do they habitually deny or claim that they are being misrepresented? Is it simply the case that so many lies and misrepresentations are in fact made about the church that defenders are just in the habit of playing the “nuh-uh” card, so they do it as a reflex? Or is there something unique about Mormonism that makes it so that its members will go to great lengths to avoid conceding that it has any bad points?

I guess it’s fair to ask if this is really “unique” or not, and how much it exists when talking about other faiths, but in my experience, most Christian denominations that aren’t NRMs are pretty open to internal dissent and criticism from within.

Everyone’s writing about the big issues in the communion: homosexuality, schism, Lambeth, GAFCON, the global South, post-colonialism, the covenant, etc

These are a big deal, sure, but in the meantime, nobody is really writing about, well, Jesus.  Or anything else.  It’s not that I expect people to pretend that the big happenings aren’t happening, but as I’m more and more certain that Anglicanism is the direction for me, I’m eager to engage in conversations about theology, about spirituality, about God, about prayer, about Church history, about the Bible, about liturgy, about Christian life, about the environment, about poverty, about war, about government.  About poetry, art, mythology, history, music, anything.  There’s so much that is informed by faith that is worth talking about.

Instead, it’s all Church politics, all the time.  It’s disappointing.  Maybe Anglicans, especially in countries like mine where church membership is low and dropping, need to hear this: nobody’s going to want to join a church when the only issue is internecine politics.  Even those who do, like me, are finding it difficult to stay enthusiastic.

I’ve decided that C. S. Lewis is probably my favorite author, and I’ve been devouring everything by him that I can get my hands on.  I’ve read Mere Christianity a couple of times, bits of the Screwtape Letters, and most of the Chronicles of Narnia.  I think that’s where most people stop with Lewis, and I think that’s sad, because it offers an extremely misleading picture of the man, his ideas, his theology, his philosophy, and how it all fits together.  I think that a great many fans of Lewis would be shocked and surprised by much of what Lewis seems ot have really thought, if they read anything beyond the standard cliched offerings, and I certainly think that Evangelicals and Mormons would be a lot more hesitant to posthumously enlist Lewis as a defender of their faith.  Lewis is anything but an orthodox Evangelical Protestant, and very little of what he says is compatible with Mormonism.

Surprised By Joy and Till We have Faces are two of his more compelling, multilayered, and spiritually textured books, and I cannot overemphasize the massive impact they have had on my personal spiritual development.  But the deeper ideas contained in them are revolutionary and in many ways extremely heterodox.

Right now I’m reading the Space Trilogy, which is science fiction, but also overtly Christian–more so than Narnia because it is set in the real world with real Jesus (called Maleldil in the book’s “Old Solar” language) instead of in a magical world with a lion Jesus.  Many of Lewis’s more complex ideas about religion and theology from other works, especially Miracles, is parroted in dialogue and arguments between characters in the Space Trilogy.

I imagine a Mormon reader, especially one who is attached to the more ”space doctrine” aspects of the religion, would find much to like in the Space Trilogy, but ultimately I think the Mormon reader’s affection would be misplaced and based on a reading of the books that is superficial and divorced from the context of Lewis’s larger corpus.  The Space Trilogy certainly has interplanetary Christianity, and as such there are certain parallels to Mormon doctrines that are basically unavoidable, but in the final analysis I would assert that Lewis’s theology is ultimately incompatible on a very fundamental level with many of Mormonism’s core assumptions.

I’ve just started That Hideous Strength, the final (and longest) of the three, but so far the books are good, the ideas contained in them are compelling, and Perelandra contains what is possibty the most visceral fight scene I have ever read.

Make sure you check out Aquinas’s excellent post about C. S. Lewis on Summa Theologica.

I’m thinking about starting to blog regularly again.  One nice thing about blogging my spiritual journey was that in a way, the blog actually helped propel me forwards.  When I came to a new conclusion, or something stuck in my craw, the blog helped me reify the former and work through the latter (or in some cases, see that it couldn’t actually be worked through).  Since I’ve stopped blogging regularly, I’ve made some decisions and come to some new conclusions, but in some ways they haven’t made much of a difference because I haven’t done much about them.  Blogging would be a way for me to make my experiences real, and commit myself to my decisions by announcing them publicly, if that makes sense.

Also, having a blog is a way to, simply put, make sure things that interest me happen in the blogosphere.  Other people’s blogs are fine, but there’s a give and take, an ongoing conversation that is lost when I don’t blog myself.  The conversation suffers, I think.

On the other hand, I have some moderate concerns.  I’ve come a long way since I stopped blogging regularly, and I’m not sure if I would try to catch up, or just kind of pick up where I am now and fill in important details as I go.  I guess the latter is more realistic.

I also wonder if the public nature of the blog isn’t more than a little narcissistic.  Would my needs be better served by something like a diary or a journal?

The simple answer is that I just don’t.  While I don’t have a conceptual problem with God’s theoretical existence–I’m not actually convinced by the formal logical arguments of atheists because I’m not actually usually convinced by formal logic at all–I simply have a hard time believeing that a being matching the description of most theists exists.

I will grant that it doesn’t look to me like God is necessary.  We don’t need God to explain the phenomena of the natural world.  no, scientists haven’t figured everything out yet, but they have figured out a surprising amount and there’s no particular reason to assume that there’s any area where they won’t be able to make any headway at all.  At least, to our knowledge there’s not a big off-limits gap in scientific understanding that seems to be marked off by God as his and his alone.  So there’s no need for a “God of the gaps.”

I also don’t think that the existence of God is necessary to make sense of human existence.  Perhaps we need to believe in a God to make sense of our lives, but that doesn’t mean that such a deity in fact exists.  I’m not sos sure that the nonexistence of God necessarily implies a cold and unjust universe, but if it does, then so be it.  If the universe is cold and unjust then it is cold and unjust–the fact that it makes me uncomfortable does not imply the existence of an all-powerful supernatural being who can and will fix everything.

Certainly I do not believe in a personal God.  If something exists in the universe (or as the universe) that we could stretch the term “god” to fit around, and it certainly might, I’m skeptical that it would be a personal entity capable of (or likely to) interact with us on our level.  While I find the idea of a personal god appealing, I’m not going to believe it just because I want to, and it doesn;t resonate with me well enough for me to plunge into the idea without a better reason.  I think that at least some of the burden of proof is on God to reveal himself, especially if he is a personal God and especially if we make an effort to connect with him from our side.  I have never had an experience that would lead me to believe (or even really to infer) that God is personal.  God has never spoken to me, and “spoken to me through his Holy Book/Holy Prophet(s)/Only Begotten Son” absolutely doesn’t cut it.  That is a woefully insufficient copout.  If there’s a personal God, he should be able to talk to me personally.  He hasn’t and he doesn’t, so I have no reason to believe in him except for the testimony of others.

What of the testimony of others?  I realize that plenty of people claim to have had mystical experiences with a personal God.  I know some atheists would just label them crazy, but I’m not comfortable with that.  I’m inclined to think that there is something to these mystical experiences that people have been claiming to have since the dawn of time when the first shaman went on a vision quest, but I am also not inclined to believe that they are reliable evidence for a personal God.  There are too many alternate plausible explanations, even validating the mystical experiences.  Such experiences could be, for example, communication with or journey into the human psyche, clad in metaphor and symbol.  They could even be some kind of state of oneness with the external universe but one that has to me re-interpreted by human consciousness to make sense of it.  In other words, the mystics have touched something too big to be comprehended so their minds put a face and a personality on it so their heads don’t explode.  At the very least the diversity of recorded mystical experience would seem to undermine the likelihood of us being able to take them at face value (as contact with a personal God), especially since as I understand it, people tend to have mystical experiences that are more or less consistent with or at least complimentary to their native religious tradition.  If Jesus is talking to Christian mystics, Allah is talking to the Sufis, and Apollo is talking to the Neopagans, then we have a bit of a problem.  at least, none of their experiences tells us much about objective reality.

If I had a personal experience with a personal God, I might be willing to change my tune.  I realize that such a mystical experience would be intensely subjective and wouldn’t actually tell me any more about the objective universe than the mystical experiences of Joseph Smith or Joan of Arc, but at least I’d be willing to subjectively believe in a personal God.  Of course I would have to retain the reservation that it was extremely likely that the God I was experiencing was merely an aspect of my own psyche, or a face my own brain had imposed on an immense and unknowable transcendant reality.  But in any case, such a mystical experience of a personal God has never happened to me.  Even in twenty-eight years as an active, believing Mormon, the best I got as answers to my prayers were vague feelings and impressions, things that were far more likely to have come from inside my head than from outside it.

I’ve spent a good portion of this last year yearning for contact with God, but it hasn’t happened.  At least, not in a way that satisfies me.  It has come to the point where I don’t think God’s going to give me a call, so I’m not really waiting for it or expecting it anymore.  So while I’m not denying the existence of God, I can’t say that I actively believe in one.  You can only let the telephone ring for so long before you’ve got to eventually conclude that nobody’s going to pick it up.

I’ve really neglected this blog over the past couple of months while I’ve been tossing around new ideas, coming to conclusions, and maybe even figuring out what I actually believe, what I don’t believe, and why.  I haven’t really written about my experiments with and (possibly) final thoughts on Druidry.  I haven’t written about my experiences with trying to find meaning this Christmas without Jesus in my life, or at least without an obvious place for or a settled idea of what Jesus means, if he means anything at all.  I haven’t written about the frustration, anger, and tension in my family over the religion issue that has once again come to a head in the last few weeks.  I haven’t written about the intense series of conversations I have had about Self and no-self and how they may have brought me back full circle, in a sense.

There’s so much I haven’t written and things are moving so fast that I don’t know if I’m realistically ever going to write them, which is kind of sad, I guess.  But that’s just the way it is.

The thing is, I may have found Byzantium, or at least the closest thing to it that exists.  In any case think I may be ready to move beyond this blog and all it represents and into something new, into a whole new paradigm and a whole new phase of my life.  Things are in the process of changing, and I am as certain as I can be that they will never be the same again.  If you’re interested, follow me over to my new blog, because this one may be sitting in the harbor for a long time to come.

I’ve been moderately interested in Asatru for years, and as a Mormon I even often said and thought that if I wasn’t Mormon, I’d be an Asatruar.  But I don’t think it’s the direction I’m going to go, for a couple of reasons.

1. I don’t actually believe in the Norse Gods.  I don’t believe in any kind of literal polytheism (which means real Paganism in general is probably not going to happen–I’m more pantheistic or panentheistic in my ideas about what God is, if God is anything external to us at all). Furthermore, while I think the Norse Gods and Norse mythology are cool, and even compelling, that doesn’t translate in my head to the calling to follow and honor the Aesir as a religious practice.  Maybe if I had some kind of mystical experience with Odin, I’d feel differently enoh about it–perhaps even enough to overcome points 2 and 3 below, but since mystical experiences for me do not seem to be particularly forthcoming, there’s not much I can do to make myself believe something I don’ believe.

2. I like Vikings and Norse myth, but not at the expense of everything else.  I don’t really want to live a Viking-flavored life because I am a contemporary person, and I’m happy with that.  I don’t really feel constant yearnings for the past.  Formulated differently, this point is closely connected to my general dissatisfaction with the idea of Reconstructionist religion.  I’m not an ancient Norseman, so why is the religion of the ancient Norsemen the right religion for me?  Plus, I’d honestly feel like I was always LARPing.

3. I have serious problems with the “Folkish” strand of Asatru.  I realize that it can be phrased or looked at in a way that might not sound like overt white supremacy, but when you listen to the rhetoric of Folkish people like Steven McNallen, it winds up sounding an awful lot like just more racist tripe.  I also realize that there are plenty of universalist heathens out there (and there’s a kindred of them near where I live even), but I’m not necessarily comfortable self-identifying with a movement that has ties to white supremacy and neo-Nazism, even if it’s just be broad association.  The question is “am I willing, even in the broadest terms, to be in the same club as those people?” and the answer is no.  Especially given points 1 and 2 above.

There are a lot of things I like about Asatru, especially the heathen virtues, which I think are a more realistic and pragmatic ethical system than that which is offered by a lot of religions.  And like I said, Norse myth is extremely appealing to me.  But not so much that I think it’s the one way for me.

This is fun.  I’m kind of tired of writing essentially the same angst-ridden religion blog posts anyway.  I kind of wonder if it’s not time to either 1. expand the scope of this blog to start talking about other things, or 2. start a new general-purpose blog.  I have one over at Blogspot, but I don’t like Blogspot, and I haven’t kept up with it in a really long time and don’t really feel like starting it up again.  It’s mostly politics anyway, and I’m just not the angry fiery liberal I used to be.  Anyway, here’s today’s ten:

1. “Cry of the Black Birds” - Amon Amarth
2. “Ancestor Cult” - Machines of Loving Grace
3. “Caleb” - Sonata Arctica
4. “Learning to Live” - Dream Theater
5. “Kullervo’s Youth” - Jean Sibelius
6. “Any Colour You Like” - Pink Floyd
7. “Little Lies” - Fleetwood Mac
8. “Amazing” - Aerosmith
9. “House of Sleep” - Amorphis
10. “Move Over Darling” - Doris Day

This seems more representative of what I’m listening to right now, except for the random Aerosmith song, not a particular favorite of mine.

So, I thought I was going to be sent to Iraq with my National Guard unit this month.  Turns out it’s not happening.  If you have any experience with the military, you know how things can change at the last minute.  Anyway, I mentioned in an older post that I was reluctant to make any big decisions because of the upcoming mysterious, major life-changing event, and that’s what it was.  Now it isn’t happening.  So life goes on, and I no longer have an excuse for resting on my laurels.  But what do I do now?

We haven’t been going to church for awhile, and I have long stopped praying (since it started to seem mechanical and pointless).  Do I start again?  Do I give Christianity another go?  If so, what kind?  Back to Cedar Ridge?  Back to Grace Episcopal?  Just be a Christian on my own and don’t worry about church?  What does becoming a Christian even mean?  What does one do?  Becoming Mormon is a fairly regimented process: you take the missionary discussions, you read the Book of Mormon, you pray to know if it’s true (and get Your Testimony), you attend church meetings, you commit to live the Word of Wisdom and the Law of Chastity, you get baptized, you get confirmed, you get the priesthood, you go to the temple, you get callings, and you endure to the end.  It’s all extremely structured.  I know how to become Mormon.  But I don’t know how you become Christian.  At what point do you become Christian?  What’s the right motivation for becoming Christian?  What does “being Christian” look like?

Do I even want to be Christian?  Right now, the answer feels like no.  Especially since Christmas is over.

Do I start a candidate year with the Ancient Order of Druids in America?  Do I want to?  Do I really want Druidry as a belief system?  Is it all just New Age flakery?  Do I want my whole life to be Celtic-y?  Do I always want to be thinking about ancient times and yearning for the forest?  Not really.  After I’m done with law school we’re moving back to New York, where we’ll probably stay.  I like the woods and nature, but I also love the city.  I feel compelled to be environmentally conscious and take care of the earth, but I actually think in many ways urban living is the best way to do that (it’s certainly more sustainable than suburban living).

There are a lot of things about Druidry that I find very appealing, but do I want to color my whole life with that crayon?  The answer feels like no?

Do I abandon the journey and just get on with life without God and without religion?  I’ve been sailing for awhile and it doesn’t seem like Byzantium is anywhere in sight.  I’m kind of getting tired of looking for it.  My main roadblock is clear (I was nervous about making any hasty decisions with such a major punctuation mark on the horizon), so what do I do?  Hinduism?  The Qur’an?  What?

1. I think religious institutions, especially centralized, hierarchical ones, are either inherently oppressive and abusive or else so open and prone to abuse that human nature nevertheless makes abuse and oppression inevitable.

2. I have a hard time feeling like religious belief is valid without the stamp of approval from an authoritative religious hierarchy.

Thank you, Mormonism.