Mormons' Dismissive View of Theology

Terryl Givens once asked a big-wig at Deseret Book why they didn't publish more books on Mormon theology.  The response to his question was something along the lines of, "Well why don't you write one and if we like it we'll publish it."

This story highlights a weird trait about Mormonism.  Despite being very religious and spending a great deal of time reading scripture, they don't concern themselves much with theology at least as a systematic rational analysis of the word of God.  Sure, every Mormon is an amateur Theologian, but regarding official systematized theology, there's very little of it.  There's never been an Augustine of Hippo in Mormonism and never will be.

As far as official statements go, Mormon theology is very limited.  If you want to know every thing Mormons officially believe you only have to read James E. Talmage's Articles of Faith and Jesus The Christ.  Of course, these aren't nearly as useful for making straw man attacks against Mormonism as The Journal of Discourses or Mormon Doctrine and so aren't as widely known outside of Mormonism.

So if Mormons don't actually believe that many things why is The Journal of Discourses 26 volumes long and why doesn't Sunday School get boring?  As Matthew Bowman said: "There is a great deal which Mormons might believe; there is very little that they must believe."  (Actually his whole article is a great read: Why Is It So Hard to Figure Out What Mormons Believe?)

And this gets to the heart of Mormonism and it's extreme egalitarianism.  Not only can any Mormon be a prophet and theologian, they are encouraged to do so.

Joanna Brooks on the Daily Show

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-august-9-2012/joanna-brooks

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Maya Article from National Geographic

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/08/maya-rise-fall/gugliotta-text/1

Introducing Young Children to Science (and Science Fiction)

I checked out a book from the library called Icarus at the Edge of Time.  It's a board book about a boy living on a generation ship who decides to defy orders and investigate a black hole.  Due to the gravitational effects on time, instead of coming right back to his family on the ship, 10,000 years pass and everything is different.

Zula loves the pictures, they are all Hubble photographs.  However, Ducky is disturbed by the boy never being able to return to his family.  That's the interesting thing about acquiring knowledge.  It changes us and maybe not always for the better.  Either way, it can be scary.

Also, it makes for pretty good Science Fiction, which is a horribly scarce even for adult readers.  Someone once told me that reading a favorite book is like hanging out with an old friend.  I've never viewed books in that manner.  To me they are more like the hole in to which Alice falls.  I want the author to blow my mind with a world of language and ideas.

Venus Transit

When I got home from work today I hastily constructed a five foot long pin hole projector in order to view the Venus transit.

I had the live broadcast from NASA.com going on the computer while the kids helped me cut out the cardboard and tape it all together.

It worked surprisingly well.  The Sun's diameter was about an inch and the small black dot that was Venus was visible on the projection surface.  We only barely finished it in time. The sun was touching the neighbor's trees by the time we got it going so we could see the trees moving around the edges of the Sun's image.  And a short time later the sun set.

I need to make sure I catch it again in one hundred years.

Lin Carter At World's End Book Review

While in Oregon recently I had the opportunity to pick up some 70's era pulp pastiche by Lin Carter.  I bought four Jandar of Callisto books as well as four World's End books.  We'll stick with the end of the world for now.

As I said, I bought four books in Lin Carter's World's End series and those are all that I have read.  Ten, or maybe even eleven, books were planned by the author before falling popularity put an end to his grand designs.  Only six books ended up getting published and they are all out of print.  Check out the titles: The Warrior of World's End, The Enchantress of World's End, The Immortal of World's End, The Barbarian of World's End, etc.

What I was looking for was some outrageous sword and sorcery styled pulp novels -- the kind of fantasy that was published before everyone decided that fantasy wasn't fantasy unless it was a Tolkien knock-off.  After reading the first paragraph of the first novel, I thought I had hit pay dirt.  I mean, check this out:

"At the western end of the Crystal Mountains there flourished in former ages the city of Ardelix.  Once it had been a great center of a race called [the] Hybrids of Phex, but at the end of the period of which I write it had long been abandoned to ruin by the Phexians, who were themselves extinct, having succumbed to the Laughing Plague half an eon earlier."

It's these kind of descriptions that provide what delight these books have to offer.  The book is set 700,000,000 years in the future on Earth's last great super-continent Gondwane.  Most of the world has succumbed to barbarism.  The moon is slowly falling and is much larger in the night sky.  The sun is dying and burns with a dimmer golden light.  You have floating islands, vast plains of purple grass, flying castles, giant tiger men, androids with silver hair, mechanical birds, and -- my favorite -- an entire mountain range thousands of feet high carved into cyclopean statues by a race of beings so obsessed with their morality that they felt the need to build a monument that would last until after the Sun burned out.

Alas, the characters are wafer thin, the plot is all camp, and anytime our band of heroes gets into an impossible jam, some deus ex machina device pulls them from the jaws of defeat before they can break a sweat.  They pale in comparison to "classic" pulp fiction which at least managed to maintain a pulse pounding thread of action and adventure throughout the narrative.  There's nothing to these books but the scenery, but at times that's enough to make them worthwhile.

Quote: Brigham Vs. Parley

"Once when Brigham [Young] advised [Orson] Pratt that certain of his writings were not 'sound doctrine,' Pratt replied that he realized it was not his prerogative 'to teach publicly that which the President considers to be unsound.' But he hoped 'that you will grant me as an individual the privilege of believing my present views, and that you will not require me to teach others...that which I cannot without more light believe in.' Brigham contended that, as the Lord's mouthpiece, he had an obligation to assure that the Saints were taught correct doctrine. Convinced that his own views were based on the written canon, Pratt was reluctant to admit error. Convinced he was right, Brigham nevertheless was loath to publicly criticized and demean Pratt, whose mind and energy were among the Church's most valuable assets. Brigham feared the dangerous effects of Pratt's logic; Pratt feared the dangerous extremes to which Brigham might go in his impromptu sermons. Thus there was a continuous tension between Pratt the philosopher and Brigham the Prophet.
...
"'The trouble between Orson Pratt and me,' [Brigham] once said, 'is I do not know enough and he knows too much.'"

-Leonard J. Arrington, Brigham Young: American Moses