Postmodernity vs LDS

 https://x.com/nicoraytruth/status/2096973605418737940?s=20

Kirk Rollins

@nicoraytruth

Postmodernity vs LDS I come from postmodernity and secularism. That world erodes everything good. The wife, the family, the community, the children. It does not erode them a little and then stop. It destroys. Start with the drugs. I saw addiction everywhere. I saw it in the youth. I do not mean the kind people mean when they talk about a rough stretch. I mean the evil kind, the kind that destroys families and causes crime. I grew up in Los Angeles. On the drive in to watch the Dodgers play, we passed men folded over on fentanyl and madmen screaming at no one. That was the scenery on the way to a ball game. My own aunt was a methamphetamine addict, and my cousin was born carrying the consequences of it. Whole bloodlines wrecked by one drug. And it was not only the hard drugs. It was alcohol. It was kids driving drunk and dying in cars. That is what I saw growing up. Death. So let me start where the Saints start, with the Word of Wisdom. Do not drink alcohol. Do not abuse substances. If people simply kept that one rule, it would be proof enough for me to join something. I mean that. My best friend in law school was named Jared. He graduated summa cum laude. He was a brilliant mind, a genius. He was also an atheist, shaped by the same postmodern mindset that shaped me. Jared drank himself to death. How much sorrow do his parents carry today because of it? How much of it would a rule simple enough for a child to keep have spared them? That is the first thing. The substance abuse, the addiction, a society built for pleasure. That is what postmodernity and secularism are at their core. Not a philosophy. An absence. The absence of God. Now look at the families. Take my five closest friends. Three never married. One married and had a child, and he is estranged from that child, who is growing up in Spain without him. These are normal men. They are not maladjusted. They have jobs and friends and nothing wrong with them. They are simply not marrying and not having children. Multiply them by a generation and you have the birth collapse. It is not a statistic to me. It is my friends. How much joy are they not having? I know why. I remember being a teenager in an affluent secular community, and I remember what every parent told us. All of them. 'Establish your career first.' 'Your twenties are for finding yourself.' Not one of them said what should have been said. Find a spouse. Find a job that can support a family. In that order. The spouse first, then the children, then the job. Not the job first. Not the career first. The job matters because it feeds the family. The family does not exist to feed the job. They had the priorities exactly backward, and my friends are living out the arithmetic of that error. No families, or one child. The Word of Wisdom keeps a man alive. The family keeps him alive. It turns out the Saints whole way of life is spiritual preservation, and my friends were talked out of every part of it by people who loved them. Then there is my own blood. I have written about this before. My grandparents were cut off over land in North Carolina, and the cut held. So my family does not get a big family reunion. I never will. It breaks my heart. I would give a great deal to sit at a long table with everyone who shares my name, and that table was taken before I ever had a chance to sit at it. Whatever the Family Proclamation is in the abstract, on the ground it produces a people who believe the cost of a cut is forever, so they hold reunions like sacraments, hunt down the names of their dead, and forgive faster than my people ever did. So no. Nothing good comes from the secular mindset. Nothing. Postmodernity at its core is death. Spiritual death. I have seen its fruit. Empty cradles, and a table with no one at it. So many christians get caught up on things that do not matter. Does anyone stand up and say, I am going to prove with scientific rigor that Eve bit the fruit? No one does. And the same rigorous positivism could be aimed at the resurrection. You could deconstruct that too. You could deconstruct all of it. So obviously truth has to be reached by another road. The question is not whether my faith satisfies a laboratory standard. No religion will. Every religion has baggage, and at some point you will have to apply nuance. The question is whether your faith holds you. Whether it produces joy. Whether it mitigates suffering. All the darkness I have just described, all of it, does this faith push back against it or not?

Book of Abraham and assumptions and inferences

 

LEGO Joseph Smith

@Mormonger

·

4h

The Church itself openly acknowledges the central Egyptological fact: both Latter-day Saint and non-Latter-day Saint Egyptologists agree that the surviving papyrus fragments are ordinary Egyptian funerary texts and that their characters do not correspond to the English Book of Abraham text. So an LDS response should not pretend otherwise. But there are at least two importantly different claims being conflated: 1. The extant fragments are not a conventional Egyptian-language manuscript of Abraham. Agreed. 2. Therefore Joseph could not have received an authentic revelation concerning Abraham. That does not follow. Joseph's use of “translation” was demonstrably broader than modern academic translation. His revision of the Bible, for example, sometimes produced revelatory expansions without access to an underlying ancient manuscript. The Book of Abraham could therefore have arisen through what is commonly called a catalyst model: the Egyptian artifacts occasioned a revelatory process rather than supplying, character-for-character, the English text. The Church explicitly recognizes that as a possible model while declining to canonize one particular theory of the process. There is also a genuine evidentiary limitation critics sometimes glide past: most of the papyri Joseph possessed no longer survive. Contemporary descriptions speak of longer rolls and multiple pieces, while today's fragments constitute only part of the collection. That does not prove a lost Abraham manuscript existed, but neither can someone legitimately argue from the surviving fragments alone that nothing Joseph possessed could have had any relationship to his production of the text. More fundamentally, from an Ostler-style LDS perspective, revelation is not divine dictation through a perfectly transparent human instrument. God communicates through historically situated, fallible persons whose concepts, vocabulary, assumptions, and interpretive activity participate in revelation. Joseph could misunderstand aspects of Egyptian, speculate incorrectly about particular symbols, and still genuinely receive revelatory insight. Prophetic inspiration does not entail prophetic omniscience. So “Mark and avoid” assumes the very theological premise that needs defending: that a true prophet must produce an academically correct Egyptological translation whenever he calls something a “translation.” That criterion is neither established by the biblical prophetic tradition nor required by a Latter-day Saint model of revelation. A stronger critical argument would be: Joseph appears to have associated Egyptian material with Abraham in ways modern Egyptology does not sustain. That's fair evidence that an LDS believer has to explain. But the leap from there to “therefore Joseph Smith was a false prophet” requires additional premises - and those premises are exactly where the debate really lies.

Adam Thomas Dommeyer

@AdamDommeyer

·

Sep 5

Joseph Smith was a false prophet. The Book of Abraham had nothing to do with the writings of Abraham or the patriarch himself. Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism? Mark and avoid.

Affirming creeds

 

Thoughtful-Faith

@ThoughtfulSaint

·

2h

“By this shall men know ye are my disciples… if you hold the proper orthodox theology related to the Nicene creed and the hypostatic union because that is what really matters to me. I will literally torture your forever in hell if you refuse to affirm these propositions about my ontology even if they make no sense to you”- Jesus probably. ————- If you want evidence of the great apostasy… look no further than the obsession with attaching salvation to “belief” (meaning affirmation of propositions) instead of attaching it to “faith” (meaning relational loyalty/ covenant allegiance) that emerged after the death of the apostles.

Ethan Muse

@emuse1955

The problem is not that you dont know — it’s that you dont care. I’ve seen you guys explain ‘orthodoxy’ vs. ‘orthopraxy’ a million times — it essentially boils down to: knowing and loving the truth about God is a matter of secondary importance compared to my own natural virtue.

Scott Adams

@PTSPentax

I think what’s superior to orthodoxy or orthopraxy is what I’ve heard termed orthocardia - having your heart right before God. Of primary importance isn’t a perfect understanding of dogma, or simply the correct rituals carried out as if they’re a magic spell. What matters more than anything else is, is our heart right before God - and are we seeking Him out in our lives. Doesn’t mean that correct doctrine isn’t important. The more correct our understanding of God and His plan, the more we can have true faith in Him. The correct ordinances performed by one with true authority from God are essential. But, it’s all meaningless without true intent - and with true intent - the rest can be made up for.