Further Light and Knowledge

Mark Butler is now a blogger on Millenial Star, the bloggernacle's equivalent of the Weekly Standard--(BCC is the New Republic, they like to pretend they're liberal but they're not, they just write well. T&S is the Atlantic Monthly, FMH is The Nation, Ned Flanders is Oprah).

Anyhow, Mr Butler is expounding on the nature of a church. I guess I must have been asleep for all those years in church, because I don't remember any of his ideas being mentioned as the reason.

Here it is (millennialstar.org/index.php/2006/10/02/dark_tower) :

First of all, what is a church in the generic sense? I submit that any organization that meets the following five criteria is a church:

1. A church is a society of believers or disciples

2. A church claims a functional monopoly on the truth - to be authoritative with respect to all the questions it addresses.

3. A church claims to be the spiritual court of last resort with regard to all questions of morality, policy, and behavior.

4. A church has a leadership, or priesthood, which sets the standards for what is to be taught in each subject or department, accrediting adherents, and discrediting disbelievers.

5. A church excommunicates heretics, if at all possible.

From this, he sets out to explain the Great and Abominable Church:

In short, a church is not a liberal institution at all (in the classic sense of the term), but rather a most conservative one. Now what are the salient characteristics of the institutions that compose the great and abominable church?:

1. They act as a functional unity and have dominion (authority) over all the earth:

And it came to pass that I looked and beheld the whore of all the earth, and she sat upon many waters; and she had dominion over all the earth, among all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people
(1 Ne 14:11)

2. Because of their influence, the dominion (authority, membership) of the true church is small:

I beheld that the church of the Lamb, who were the saints of God, were also upon all the face of the earth; and their dominions upon the face of the earth were small, because of the wickedness of the great whore whom I saw.
(1 Ne 14:12)

3. They promote creeds that are abominations, having a form of godliness, but teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. Their professors deny the power of God.

I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that: "they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof."

4. They have corrupted the commandments and ordinances of God

The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant.
(Isa 24:5)

5. They despise the words of plainness and the lessons of history and glory in the irrational and incomprehensible:

But behold, [they] were a stiffnecked people; and they despised the words of plainness, and killed the prophets, and sought for things that they could not understand. Wherefore, because of their blindness, which blindness came by looking beyond the mark, they must needs fall; for God hath taken away his plainness from them, and delivered unto them many things which they cannot understand, because they desired it. And because they desired it God hath done it, that they may stumble.

And now I, Jacob, am led on by the Spirit unto prophesying; for I perceive by the workings of the Spirit which is in me, that by the stumbling [they] will reject the stone upon which they might build and have safe foundation.

6. They are ever learning but never coming to the knowledge of the truth:

This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents,

Unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good,

Traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.

For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts, Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.

Now as Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, so do these also resist the truth: men of corrupt minds, reprobate concerning the faith. But they shall proceed no further: for their folly shall be manifest unto all men, as theirs also was.
(2 Tim 3:1-9)

Now of course we should say that the great an abominable church is manifest elsewhere than in academia, it is just that contemporary academia more greatly resembles a church, than the other manifestations thereof - the only possible contest is the church of commercial materialism. But that is merely an adjunct to the doctrinal development and propagation of the church of all things secular, all internal protest to the contrary.

Explicit materialism shows up in thirty second commercials. The great and abominable church carries the plot and the theme of the most of the books, films, and television shows now produced. Hollywood (by and large) is the press agent for the whore of all the earth - a whore like all whores that has a form of godliness, denies the power thereof - promoting a grand counterfeit to the real thing in accordance with his or her lusts, such that many perish, knowing not where true salvation is to be found, being deceived by the mists of darkness and slick promotional material that emanates (directly or indirectly) from the dark tower.

my apologies mike. i cant believe i missed this. damn me all to hell.

I only got to number two. This statement is deeply flawed. Actually only a JW or Mormon would think that this was a necessity for a church.

Assuming we are speaking of Christian churches then this is absolutly WRONG. Mainstream churches, Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, Anglican etc... all see the validity of each other and see themselves as being part of the greater church of christ. Very few churches believe that they are the only path to god - the only 'true' church.

If I'm Oprah, shouldn't I be richer? Hmm, but I do always have a picture of myself on the front page of the site....

I have to admit my eyebrows raised slightly at the name "Darth Vader" - after all isn't that what Boyd "Fudge" Packer's nickname at the COB is?


fook

_________________
the LDS church is the ugly girl at the dance who is all dressed up and is convinced that everybody wants to dance with her, but all the cool guys are laughing at her behind her back while they dance with the Catholic girls.
-Phouchg

I've heard some refer to him as Darth Packer.

But even old Boyd has never gone as far off the deep end as this guy does.

Oprah? OPRAH???!!!

Why do you have to besmirch by association one of my favorite magazines?

[P.S. I think it's called just The Atlantic now. According to my latest issue, anyway.]

Geez, you guys were the one blog I wasn't trying to rip on. I thought the symbol of a rich, powerful woman who calls her own shots was a compliment .

Yeah, I started reading that one. I have to be honest, however, I was asleep before I got to #2. What a complete bore!

_________________
[A] made bed is the beginning for order and peace in the universe.

BYU-Hawaii Pres. Eric B. Shumway

You mean shit like the following, which he posted later as a comment, doesn't get your juices flowing and your testimony growing?:

I don't mean physicists do not recognize that Einstein's theories have limitations, I mean to say that they do not recognize that his theories are radically wrong and radically incompatible with quantum mechanics, which as J.S. Bell said is an irreducably non-local phenomena. If an ensemble of particles are appropriately phase entangled, what happens to one of them will affect all others, instantaneously (and per Bohm non-randomly) whether they be a million meters away or a million light years away.

According to not so special relativity, any influence that travels faster than the speed of light entails backward causation, e.g. in some reference frame the effect happens before the cause.

Now as it happens in a deterministic world, that is inconsequential, because there is no such thing as causation in the metaphysical sense. The future causes the past and the past causes the future.

Such radical time symmetry (or the idea of time completely looping back on itself per the Poincaire recurrence theorem) is also radically incompatible with what we know of the plan of salvation, which is to redeem all mankind from the Fall, not have them all Fall over and over again like some sort of broken record. The At-one-ment is meaningless in a deterministic world - there is no free will, no action, no causation, no morally significant responsibility and so on.

That means that a radically deterministic theory such as Einstein's relativity theories are also radically incomplete. Quantum Mechanics is better, (as a radically non-local phenomena, allowing room for the Spirit to actually operate) but it is also incomplete, as it is also a deterministic theory.

But in conventional relativity theory time and space are mixed up in a way that is radically incompatible with the plan of salvation, as in salvation (and all its aspects) would be a metaphysical impossibility in such a world. And that is why I favor scalar and Lorentzian relativity theories over the dominant variants derived from Einstein's. But per my theme, the handful of professional physicists who would like to pursue such theories are ostracized, excluded, and ignored by the church of all things Einstein, especially with regard to grants. That is a typical example of academic excommunication and unwarranted group think.

Lee Smolin is much in the news these days for complaining about the unproductivity of string theory, which is dominant group think in exactly the same manner. Hundreds of physicists pursuing a mathematical abstraction that has yet to bear any fruit whatsoever, as a physical theory at any rate. I imagine he is not very popular right now, and it is much more likely that he is going to be ignored than effect a major change in the theoretical "physics" status quo - for reasons that he himself explained very well in his latest book.

Now I agree that the majority of physicists certainly believe in God. However by virtue of their membership in the great and abominable church, they are not allowed to take him seriously, to the point that the vast majority will not even recognize the relevance of the question, or at least will raise their hands in resignation, and sigh "what can I do?".

Is the plan of salvation compatible with the heat death of the universe? Hardly - the plan of salvation is the opposite of the heat death of the universe - thus we may know that the second law of thermodynamics is radically incomplete, i.e. not a law at all, or at least a law with limited applicability

This man is trying to take the King Mormon Nut title from John Pratt.

Exactly, just like that shit. WTF?

It just kind of cracks me up when guys who believe in angels and gold plates and seer apparatai, etc. go and get all intellectual(?) on us.

Perhaps it's just an attempt to cover up the dissonance he must suffer. One day, he is going to burst or go crazy.

Who knows? One day he may just be posting here on his way to recovery. LOL

_________________
[A] made bed is the beginning for order and peace in the universe.

BYU-Hawaii Pres. Eric B. Shumway