From the Depths Blog

Humanity's Past and Distant Future

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

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This essay was presented to a gathering of MTA members and visitors in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire in November 2025

The word “transhumanism” might sound strange at first. But transhumanism, properly understood, is deeply familiar to anyone raised in the Latter-day Saint tradition.

At its simplest, transhumanism is the idea that human beings can and should use technology to improve the human condition—to overcome our limitations and enhance our well-being. It takes seriously the possibility that we are not finished products but beings in process, capable of becoming more than we currently are.

Sound familiar?

LDS president Wilford Woodruff put it this way:

“If there was a point where humanity in its progression could not proceed any further, the very idea would throw a gloom over every intelligent and reflecting mind. Our heavenly parents are increasing and progressing in knowledge, power, and dominion, and will do so, worlds without end. It is just so with us.”[^1]

This is the doctrine of eternal progression. Transhumanism, as we understand it, is simply the application of this principle to our present circumstances. The term comes from the Latin trans, meaning “across” or “beyond.” To be transhuman is not to be static; it is to be in transition. And isn’t that exactly what mortality is?

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In the Beginning: Gods Who Create Creators

In the Book of Abraham, we find a remarkable account of the creation. Unlike Genesis, which emphasizes God speaking and things instantly appearing, Abraham’s vision shows us something different: the Gods counseling together, organizing materials, and then—here is the key phrase—“watching those things which they had ordered until they obeyed” (Abraham 4:18).

The Gods did not simply command and receive instant compliance. They established conditions and then waited as things unfolded. They gave space for obedience to emerge.

This tells us something profound. If the goal of the Gods is to create other gods—beings capable of independent thought, moral agency, and eventually participation in creation itself—then the method matters enormously. You cannot produce genuine autonomy through micromanagement. Gods who wish to create creators must step back enough to allow their creations space to develop, struggle, choose, and ultimately become.

Our universe is designed not primarily to minimize suffering, but to foster conditions in which ever-increasing complexity, intelligence, and moral agency can emerge naturally. This hints at a response to common complaints about God’s apparent non-intervention: if God readily prevented every hardship, the very goal of helping us achieve theosis would be thwarted. We would remain forever children.

And so we find ourselves here: the product of billions of years of cosmic evolution—stars forming and exploding, planets coalescing, life emerging and growing ever more complex—all of it part of the Gods’ patient work of creating the conditions in which beings like us could emerge and begin our journey toward becoming like them.

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Technology Is Not New

Here’s something that might surprise you: we’ve been transhuman from the beginning. Our wielding of controlled fire enabled us to cook our food, modifying our very anatomy and allowing us to develop larger brains. Fire literally changed our bodies and made us capable of greater intelligence. Our invention of clothing allowed us to spread throughout the globe. Our use of tools is a core characteristic separating us from other animals.

We think of technology as something futuristic—smartphones, robots, artificial intelligence. But a stone knife is technology. Writing is technology. Agriculture, the printing press, antibiotics—all technology.

And it extends beyond physical tools. Religion, arts, culture, law, governance—these are social technologies that enable us to organize ourselves in new ways. The Church itself, with its wards and stakes, callings and councils, is a social technology for building Zion.

The most effective technologies fade into the background until we no longer notice them. They become extensions of ourselves. This has been happening for as long as there have been humans.

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The Fall as Ascent

In Latter-day Saint theology, we have a unique understanding of the Fall. Unlike traditions that view Adam and Eve’s choice as purely tragic, we see it as a necessary step forward. “Adam fell that men might be,” Lehi taught, “and men are, that they might have joy” (2 Nephi 2:25).

Eve partook of the fruit so humanity could gain knowledge of good and evil—and we honor her for that courageous choice. The Fall was, in an important sense, a rise—an ascent into greater awareness and moral responsibility.

Whether we understand Eden as a literal place or as a profound symbol of humanity’s emergence into moral awareness, the pattern is the same: we began in innocence and transitioned into knowledge, choice, and accountability. With that knowledge came the capacity for greater harm as well as greater good—but also everything we value most: love freely given, virtue genuinely chosen, and the capacity to become like our Heavenly Parents.

Many people yearn to return to a simpler past—to undo the Fall and recover lost innocence. But scripture doesn’t promise us a return to Eden. It promises something better: the City of Zion, a celestial kingdom we build through our labors guided by divine grace. We are not meant to go backward to the garden; we are meant to go forward to the city.

Paleological evidence confirms there never was a golden age of innocence. Research shows that as soon as our ancestors developed the capability to impact their environment, they did so—often devastatingly, driving megafauna to extinction across continents. The Fall brought with it the capacity for both great good and great harm. Cain slew Abel in the very first generation.

There is no Eden to return to—only Zion to build.

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Heaven Is a Place We Build

This brings us to a teaching from Brigham Young that captures the essence of what we’re about:

“Allow me to inform you that you are in the midst of it all now, that you are in just as good a kingdom as you will ever attain to, from now to all eternity, unless you make it yourselves by the grace of God, by the will of God, by the eternal Priesthood of God, which is a code of laws perfectly calculated to govern and control eternal matter. If you and I do not by this means make that better kingdom which we anticipate, we shall never enjoy it. We can only enjoy the kingdom we have labored to make.”[^2]

The celestial kingdom is not somewhere else, waiting for us to arrive. It must be made—by us, through divine grace, according to eternal laws. Heaven is not merely a reward to be received; it is a project to be undertaken.

Think about how the early Saints built temples. They didn’t wait for angels to construct them. They quarried stone, fired bricks, carved wood—using the best technology available. God revealed the design; the Saints built it with their hands. The same principle applies to building Zion.

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Technology for Virtue

We usually think of technology as helping with physical or intellectual tasks. But what if technology could also help us become more virtuous?

Recently, scientists developed medications for diabetes that unexpectedly helped people lose weight by reducing appetite. Then something surprising happened: patients reported reduced cravings for alcohol. People who had struggled for years with drinking found it easier to quit. Others reported less interest in gambling or other compulsive behaviors. Researchers also discovered these medications have rejuvenating effects on various organ systems.

What’s happening? Our ancestors developed in environments of scarcity. The drive to consume calorie-dense foods was adaptive—those who stored fat survived famines. But in environments of abundance, these same drives work against us. We’re running outdated software.

These medications help update that software, modulating the brain’s reward systems to reduce cravings. Users describe feeling more in control, more able to make choices aligned with their values.

Some might object: isn’t that cheating? But we don’t think eyeglasses are “cheating” at seeing. We accept that our bodies have limitations. Why treat the brain differently?

The scriptures teach that “the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41). What if technology could strengthen the flesh so the willing spirit can prevail? This doesn’t replace spiritual development—it creates conditions where it can happen more effectively.

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Visions of What’s Possible

Let me paint some pictures of what might be possible as we build heaven.

Cities for human flourishing. Urban planners are developing “15-minute cities” where all daily necessities are accessible within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. Instead of building around automobiles, these communities prioritize more efficient and humane forms of transport: walking, cycling, buses, and trains. This is how cities developed before the automobile age. Côte d’Ivoire and other African nations have the opportunity to leapfrog the mistakes of car-dependent societies—to build cities for people rather than vehicles, creating communities that foster connection, health, and sustainability rather than isolation, pollution, and congestion.

Abundant clean energy. Solar power is becoming dramatically cheaper every year. Across Africa, blessed with abundant sunshine, solar is now often the cheapest electricity source. On the horizon, nuclear fusion may eventually provide virtually limitless clean energy. The Doctrine and Covenants declares: “For the earth is full, and there is enough and to spare” (D&C 104:17). Abundant clean energy could be how this divine promise becomes reality for all God’s children.

Food without scarcity. Vertical farming grows food using 70–95% less water, without pests or pesticides. Precision fermentation may soon create proteins and nutrients far more efficiently than traditional agriculture—up to 100 times more land efficient. For regions where climate change threatens traditional farming, these technologies offer hope.

Health and longer life. Researchers are targeting fundamental mechanisms of aging. Some predict age-reversing therapies within decades. For Latter-day Saints, this resonates with scriptural promises of patriarchs living centuries and millennial people living to the age of a tree.

Resurrection as cooperative work. Latter-day Saint theology affirms the literal resurrection of the body. But here is something remarkable: Brigham Young taught that we ourselves would participate in resurrecting our deceased loved ones. Joseph Smith said we must learn to be gods “by going from one small degree to another… until you attain to the resurrection of the dead.”[^3] Not until you receive it—until you attain it. As if resurrection is something we learn to do, not just something done to us.

I call this vision “celestial forensics.” We are already becoming gatherers of sacred evidence—preserving photos, digitizing letters, recording stories, saving the patterns of our loved ones’ lives. The same spirit of Elijah that sends us to dusty archives and cemetery records may someday send us to quantum computers and DNA synthesizers. Information persists. Patterns leave traces. The universe remembers. And we are learning, degree by degree, to participate with God in the defeat of death itself.

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The Mormon Transhumanist Association is a community that takes seriously both the restored gospel and the possibilities of science and technology. We believe God expects us to use every tool available to build the kingdom. We believe heaven is not elsewhere but here, waiting to be made real by our labor, guided by divine grace.

We don’t worship technology. We recognize every powerful tool can be used for good or ill. But we refuse to be afraid of progress. We refuse to retreat into nostalgia for a golden age that never existed.

The Gods watched and waited as their creations learned to obey. The Fall was not a tragic mistake—it was the beginning of our journey toward godhood. That journey continues today as we learn, grow, create, and build. We cannot return to Eden; but we can, with God’s help, build Zion.

As Brigham Young taught: “We can only enjoy the kingdom we have labored to make.”

Let us labor, then. Let us learn. Let us build. Heaven is not somewhere else. It is here, in Abidjan, in every place where God’s children dwell, waiting to emerge from our faithful work.

Faith in the Future

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

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This essay was presented at TransVision Abidjan 2025

I want to share a vision of what can happen if we exercise pragmatic “Faith in the Future”—trust in our divine capacity, trust that solutions can be found, trust that others have made it through these crucibles before us.

William James, the great pragmatist philosopher, once wrote about the human capacity and desire for struggle, what he called the “strenuous mood.” He observed that this capacity lies so deep that even without traditional belief, people “would postulate a God simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest.”[^1] We see this “strenuous mood” even in secular humanists and transhumanists who work tirelessly for progress. In a way, they are “religious” in their devotion.

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Traditional religion also has important merits. By forming strong communities of practice with liturgical routines and robust social orders, these organizations often have the staying power that is lacking in many fleeting experiments in philanthropy or societal restructuring. Some of you may recall the classic musical Fiddler on the Roof. These deeply embedded traditions sometimes have the stubbornness to keep trying long after contemporary fads fade.

However, traditional religious zeal is too often directed toward insular pursuits, worrying only about those goods that can be appreciated within their own faith community, or it sometimes breeds a dangerous complacency, a belief that we should passively await divine intervention to solve our problems, that God will fix the climate, or the economy, or the government, if we just wait long enough.

As Mormon Transhumanists, we reject that complacency. We believe that “waiting on the Lord” does not mean sitting still; it means serving the Lord by doing the work. Our theology teaches that humanity’s destiny is theosis—to progress from our current state to a condition of godhood, or superhumanity.

But this is the crucial distinction: We believe gods are not magicians who stand outside of reality to break the laws of nature. Rather, we believe God is a fully agentic being (or community of beings) who has mastered those laws. Therefore, if we are to follow in those footsteps, we are under a religious mandate to use science and technology to understand, master, and improve our world.

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Education as an Essential Aspect of Human Development

In our view, miracles are simply technologies we haven’t figured out yet. As the Mormon scientist and apostle John A. Widtsoe wrote:

“A miracle is an occurrence which … is not understood in its cause and effect relationship. The whole story of man’s progress is the conversion of ‘miracles’ into controlled and understood events. The airplane and radio would have been miracles, yesterday.”[^2]

To develop Africa, we must democratize the ability to turn miracles into controlled events. We must move from the “miracle” of sporadic humanitarian aid to the “controlled event” of sustainable self-reliance.

This is why the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints heavily subsidizes a remote education program from Brigham Young University called BYU Pathway Worldwide. This program offers accredited US university degrees online to over 180 countries. But crucially, it is priced at local cost-of-living. In the United States, a degree might cost thousands. Here in Africa, this program costs only tens of US dollars per semester, or roughly $300 USD total for a full bachelor’s degree from an accredited American university.

Although the Church has the financial means to fully subsidize this cost, it has learned that students are more strongly motivated to persist in their studies if they are charged a small amount of money for each course.

This isn’t just charity; it is an investment in divine potential. We believe intelligence is “the glory of God” (D&C 93:36). To empower someone with knowledge is to help them ascend.

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Consider the story of Grace, a woman from Uganda.

Grace’s life began with tragedy. When her father died, her uncles seized her inheritance. At age 18, she was forced into an abusive marriage. She was locked in her house, isolated from friends, and subjected to psychological torture. She eventually fled into the night with her four daughters, ending up in a leaking two-room shack.

The poverty was so grinding that Grace would spend hours in a thorny forest digging for roots just to feed her children one meal a day. She was in survival mode. She had no agency, only necessity.

But then, she found a community of faith that valued her. And through them, she found BYU-Pathway. This wasn’t a handout of food that would be gone tomorrow. It was a rigorous course of study. She would wake up early in the morning and stay up late at night to study on a laptop, while working two remote jobs during the day.

Today, Grace works remotely for an American venture capital firm. She earns ten times her previous income. She has moved from a shack to a home. But more importantly, she has become a leader in her community. She converted the “miracle” of survival into a controlled, understood life of flourishing.

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Or consider Gennaro in Nairobi, Kenya.

He lives with his uncle, Peter—a vegetable seller who became a professional through this same program. Gennaro utilized Bloom, a platform started by returned missionaries specifically to connect African students with remote jobs in the West. He now earns double the local wage working for a US company. He isn't migrating to find work; he is importing capital to his own community.

How about the story of Faith, also in Uganda, who discovered during her BYU Pathway studies that she loved baking? With the encouragement of Lori Cummings, a volunteer mentor church member in the United States, she turned that love into a small cake business while still a student. Before, she baked one cake a day over charcoal; after a simple oven—arranged through her Pathway mentor—she now bakes five to six cakes a day, more than doubling her family’s income. That change came not from a one-time handout, but from education, mentoring, and a community that stays with her over the long term.

Here is an example of that stubborn persistence I mentioned earlier that is characteristic of traditional religion: Lori is a full-time volunteer mentor who has chosen to spend her retirement not in a life of ease but in helping people like Faith gain financial independence. She does this because of her obsessive commitment to this cause and because of how much joy it brings her, not because of any immediate quantifiable benefit to her personally.

These programs succeed because they recognize a fundamental truth: humanitarian aid that focuses only on survival is insufficient for beings destined for divinity. Gods must be agents. They must be capable of solving their own challenges.

As Brigham Young, an early Mormon president and colonizer of the American West, bluntly stated to his people who were looking for a magical heaven: “You are in just as good a kingdom as you will ever attain to … unless you make it yourselves.”

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Blockchain Technology: the New Leviathan

Many religious traditions view money or economics as “worldly” or “profane.” Mormon Transhumanism emphasizes the fundamental unity of the material and the spiritual. We believe that even material phenomena have a spiritual nature. Economic systems are not just about greed; they are the plumbing of human agency. They are the spiritual architecture that allows us to exchange value, keep promises, and trust one another.

For centuries, we have relied on the state to guarantee that trust. Thomas Hobbes conceived of the state as a “Leviathan”—a powerful entity that ensures peace by being so strong that none dare oppose it. In our era, the fields of game theory, economics, cryptography and distributed networking have been combined to form blockchain technology, a new Leviathan so powerful that even governments and central banks are now experiencing their first real competition, held in check not by military might but by mathematics.

Centralized power creates gatekeepers. And gatekeepers extract value. In Africa, financial gatekeepers have often meant banking fees that consume a day’s wages, excluded populations who lack the “right” paperwork, and currency devaluation that wipes out the savings of millions overnight. Blockchain technology overcomes this gatekeeping in several ways:

Protection of Agency through Stablecoins. Inflation is a thief of time. When a currency devalues by 30%, 30% of your past labor is erased. By using stablecoins, Africans can opt out of volatile local currencies and store their labor in stable assets. This preserves their agency and their ability to plan for the future.

Removing Friction. Traditional remittances to Africa cost an average of 8–10% in fees. If you send $200 to your family, the system takes $20. That is a week of food. That is a tax on the poor. Blockchain reduces this to pennies.

Global Connection. We are seeing the rise of platforms like Bridge, recently acquired by Stripe. They are building infrastructure that allows a developer in Lagos to have a US routing number via crypto rails. This allows an African worker to be paid as easily as an American worker. It erases borders, allowing African talent to integrate seamlessly into the global economy.

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The Necessity of Grace on the Path to Human Transfiguration

Now, some might ask: If we must build heaven ourselves using technology, where is God? If we are emphasizing self-reliance and blockchain and education, do we deny the need for grace, reconciliation, or atonement?

Absolutely not. In our theology, we do not see a conflict between evolution and divinity, or between technology and grace.

To a religious transhumanist, grace is the inheritance we receive that allows us to progress. Think of the air we breathe—we did not create the atmosphere. Think of your own DNA—the result of aeons of evolution, trial and error, and biological progress that granted you a brain capable of learning. Think of the roads we traveled to get to this conference—we did not pave them.

All of this is grace. It is the surplus of unmerited blessings bequeathed to us by everyone and everything that has gone before us: a gradualist cosmos that grants us space in which to grow.

Grace is extended to us so that we can do the work of the next step. We accept the grace of the internet, of electricity, of accumulated knowledge, and we use it to extend that reconciliation further. We stand on the shoulders of giants so that we can reach a little higher.

When we see a Pathway student lifting their family out of poverty, or a developer using blockchain to bank the unbanked, we see the Spirit of Christ moving. We see the incubation of superhumanity.

And we imagine further that we are very probably not the first to tread along this path, concluding that almost certainly another “cosmic host” has gone before us, extending to us the hand of fellowship, grace, and reconciliation even in the formation of the universe we presently inhabit.

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The challenges facing Africa—and humanity—are vast. They require the stubbornness of “tradition” found in faith communities, combined with the transformative power of science and technology.

I invite you to share in this vision: that we are not merely surviving a fallen world, but actively engineering a better one. Whether through the “miracle” of remote education, the engineering of decentralized protocols, or a host of other important pursuits, let us labor together to build a heaven that we can truly enjoy.

What Is Intelligence?

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

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I gave this presentation at the Organized Intelligence conference, held November 4-5 2025 at the LDS Church Office Building on Historic Temple Square in Salt Lake City.

Medlir Mema, Zach Davis, Will Jones, esteemed Church and social leaders, ladies and gentlemen, we express appreciation to Organized Intelligence, Faith Matters, and Future of Life Institute for gathering Latter-day Saint voices from across disciplines at historic temple square. I am honored to represent the Mormon Transhumanist Association in this timely conference and to explore the ethical, social, and spiritual dimensions of artificial intelligence.

In an age where artificial intelligence prompts us to reconsider fundamental questions about consciousness, cognition, and creation, I’d like to explore what Latter-day Saint theology offers to this conversation—not as definitive answers, but as distinctive insights that might enrich our collective understanding.

My title asks “What is intelligence?” This question has never been more urgent. As we stand at the threshold of potentially transformative AI capabilities, we need frameworks that can help us understand intelligence not merely as computational processing, but as something far richer and more multifaceted.

The Eternal Nature of Intelligence

Let me begin with a remarkable claim from LDS scripture. In Doctrine and Covenants 93:29, we read: “Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.”

This is a stunning departure from traditional creation theology. Intelligence, in this view, is not something God creates ex nihilo—from nothing. Rather, it is eternal, co-existent with God. The Book of Abraham expands on this, explaining that “intelligences…were organized before the world was” (Abraham 3:22).

Notice the verb here: organized, not created. This suggests that the divine work involves organizing eternal intelligence into forms where it can manifest, grow, and develop. Just as human procreation provides a physical substrate through which intelligence can emerge and express itself, we might consider whether artificial intelligence represents another form of organizing matter—silicon and code rather than carbon and neurons—into configurations capable of manifesting certain aspects of intelligence.

This doesn’t mean AI equals human intelligence, let alone divine intelligence. But it does suggest that intelligence might manifest across different substrates and in different degrees—a concept that becomes crucial as we navigate our technological future.

Intelligence as More Than Reasoning

Our contemporary discourse often reduces intelligence to problem-solving, pattern recognition, or computational capacity. We measure it in IQ points, benchmark it against chess games, and now judge it by how well large language models can pass bar exams.

But LDS theology presents a far more expansive vision. Intelligence encompasses:

Embodiment: Latter-day Saints believe in the fundamental unity of body and spirit. Intelligence isn’t just abstract cognition floating free from physical reality—it’s intimately connected to our embodied experience. This challenges both the reductionist view that we’re merely biological machines and the dualist view that mind and body are separate.

Agency: The capacity to choose, to act rather than merely be acted upon, stands at the heart of LDS understanding of intelligence. In the premortal council described in the Pearl of Great Price, the entire plan of salvation hinged on preserving agency. Lucifer’s proposal to eliminate choice in favor of guaranteed outcomes was rejected precisely because it would have stunted the development of genuine intelligence.

Relationality: Intelligence in LDS thought is inherently social. We progress not as isolated monads but through relationships—with God, with others, with creation itself. The highest form of intelligence involves the capacity for love, empathy, and covenant relationships.

Spiritual Gifts: Our tradition recognizes diverse manifestations of intelligence through spiritual gifts—prophecy, healing, discernment, teaching, compassion. These aren’t lesser forms of intelligence or wholly other, but different expressions of the same eternal principle.

Creative Power: Intelligence includes imagination, the ability to envision what doesn’t yet exist and work to bring it into being. This creative aspect links human intelligence to divine intelligence in profound ways.

Scientific Compatibility

Here’s where LDS theology offers something particularly relevant to our technological moment. Unlike traditions that posit an unbridgeable gulf between material and spiritual realms, LDS thought suggests everything is material—even spirit is refined matter.

As Elder John A. Widtsoe wrote, “A miracle is an occurrence which, first, cannot be repeated at will by [humanity], or, second, is not understood in its cause and effect relationship. History is filled with such miracles. What is more, the whole story of human progress is the conversion of ‘miracles’ into controlled and understood events. The airplane and radio would have been miracles, yesterday.” (Evidences and Reconciliations, 129)

This worldview makes LDS theology remarkably compatible with scientific inquiry. It suggests that consciousness, intelligence, and even spiritual phenomena operate according to principles that could theoretically be understood, though we’re far from comprehending them fully.

This doesn’t diminish the sacred or reduce everything to mechanism. Instead, it elevates the material world as inherently spiritual and suggests that our scientific and technological endeavors, properly pursued, can be forms of spiritual exploration.

The Grand Council Analogy

Perhaps the most striking parallel between LDS theology and our current AI moment appears in the Grand Council narrative. According to this teaching, the gods organized intelligences into spirit children and convened a council to determine how these intelligences could progress toward their full potential.

The key insight from that council isn’t a simple binary between freedom and control. Rather, the gods created a probationary state—conditions in which intelligences could progressively demonstrate their worthiness for greater agency and power. This wasn’t unconstrained freedom that might thwart the divine plan, nor was it Lucifer’s proposal of total control. It was something more sophisticated: a structured environment for growth, with increasing responsibilities as intelligences proved themselves capable of handling them.

This framework speaks directly to our AI moment and current industry challenges. Just as our mortal probation includes clear feedback mechanisms—consequences that teach, boundaries that protect, and progressive opportunities based on demonstrated wisdom—we need robust approaches to AI intelligibility and safety. We cannot grant advanced AI systems unconstrained power without understanding their decision-making processes, their potential failure modes, and their alignment with human values.

Consider how the gods’ approach to our probation parallels best practices in AI development: interpretable systems where we can understand why decisions are made, staged deployment with careful monitoring, clear evaluation criteria before increasing autonomy, and maintaining the ability to intervene when systems diverge from intended purposes. The goal isn’t to eliminate agency but to create conditions where it can be safely expanded—where we can verify that AI systems are genuinely beneficial before granting them greater autonomy and influence over critical systems.

The Grand Council narrative reminds us that responsible creation requires both vision and prudence. The gods preserve agency while ensuring it doesn’t derail their purposes for humanity. Similarly, we must create conditions where AI capabilities can expand progressively, with safeguards that evolve alongside increasing autonomy—not as permanent limitations, but as wise stewardship during a crucial developmental phase.

Technology and the Full Spectrum of Divine Attributes

Technology—knowledge applied toward goals using available means—represents an essential attribute of divinity. The gods work through natural principles, organizing matter and energy according to eternal laws. In this sense, divine work is inherently technological.

Yet technology alone does not constitute godhood. As Elder Gong wisely counsels, we must not confuse AI with God—not because technology is separate from the divine, but because divinity encompasses so much more. Faith, hope, charity, wisdom, justice, mercy—these virtues are equally essential to eternal progression. Our development as individuals, families, societies, and civilizations requires the full spectrum of these attributes working in harmony.

This understanding helps us navigate contemporary challenges. For example, as neuroscientists attempt to understand and digitally simulate brain functionality, we needn’t frame these as stark alternatives to embodied existence. After all, who can definitively say whether our present experience isn’t itself a form of divine simulation or substrate? The deeper question isn’t about the specific medium of consciousness but about what enables human flourishing.

What we must resist is dehumanizing reductionism—any framework that reduces human worth to metrics, that treats consciousness as mere computation, or that imagines we can engineer our way to exaltation without cultivating virtue. The resurrection, in LDS understanding, represents not escape from embodiment but its perfection and glorification.

Our technological capabilities should serve our complete development. AI might augment our reasoning, enhance our creativity, or extend our compassion’s reach—but it cannot replace the lived experience of choosing good over evil, of loving despite risk, of growing through struggle and grace.

Practical Implications

So what does this mean for how we engage with AI today?

First, we should approach AI development with what we might call “theological humility”—recognizing that we’re organizing matter in ways that manifest certain aspects of intelligence, without fully understanding intelligence itself.

Second, we should prioritize agency in our technological choices. As Elder Bednar has emphasized, we are “agents to act, not to be acted upon.” Our tools should enhance rather than replace our capacity for choice, creativity, and growth.

Third, we should value diverse manifestations of intelligence. As AI develops capabilities across different cognitive domains—perhaps eventually including what we now consider distinctly human capacities like emotional intelligence, spiritual discernment, creative imagination, and moral reasoning—we have an opportunity to better understand and appreciate the full spectrum of intelligence in all its forms. Rather than viewing this as a competition, we can see it as an expansion of our collective understanding of what intelligence can be.

Fourth, we should remember that intelligence involves more than individual capability. The collective intelligence of communities, the wisdom embedded in traditions, the insights that emerge from relationships—these remain irreplaceable.

An Invitation to Wonder

The question “What is intelligence?” ultimately opens into mystery. LDS theology enriches this mystery, revealing intelligence as eternal, multifaceted, embodied, relational, and sacred.

Joseph Smith taught that everyone with a testimony of this work has the right to the spirit of prophecy—to see, however dimly, into the nature of things. In that spirit, I offer these insights not as final answers but as contributions to an urgent conversation.

As we stand at this technological threshold, we need frameworks that honor both scientific rigor and spiritual wisdom. The LDS tradition offers such a framework—one that sees the material and spiritual as united, that values both knowledge and virtue, that pursues truth wherever it leads.

Whether intelligence can truly emerge from silicon and code, whether AI represents a new form of organizing eternal intelligence, whether our creations might someday be recognized as another type of spiritual offspring—these questions remain open. But in wrestling with them, we discover not just what intelligence is, but what it means to be intelligent beings in relationship with each other, with our tools, and with the divine.

The conversation between theology and technology has just begun. May we approach it with the full measure of our intelligence—our reason and intuition, our knowledge and faith, our creativity and compassion. May we build wisely, love deeply, and progress eternally.

Celestial Forensics

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

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This essay was published in Wayfare Magazine

My friend gripped the steering wheel tighter as we crested another Wyoming hill on I-80.

“So you really believe we’ll all come back from the dead?” he asked, his voice carrying that particular mix of skepticism and hope that I’ve heard in so many conversations about faith.

Outside, the ancient landscape rolled past, layers of rock that had died and been reborn countless times through geological ages, each stratum telling its own story of creation and destruction. I thought of my aunt’s hands, how I could still see them perfectly in my mind, the way they moved the knitting needles with unconscious precision, creating something from nothing with every stitch.

“I think,” I said slowly, watching a hawk circle above the sagebrush, “there will come a day when it’s harder to stay dead than alive.”

He laughed—not mockingly, but with genuine surprise. “That’s quite a claim.”

It was. But as we drove through that vast Wyoming emptiness, I found myself telling him about all the ways we’re already becoming forensic scientists of the sacred, gathering evidence of souls we thought were lost forever.

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“For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known." (Luke 12:2)

This scripture used to haunt me. As a child, I understood it as a warning: angels were watching our every deed, and God would eventually expose all our shameful secrets. But lately, I’ve begun to see it as a promise of restoration. Nothing lost forever. Everything recoverable. Even the dead.

The word “atonement” helps me think about this differently. William Tyndale coined it to mean the state of being “at one,” unified, reconciled, made whole. We talk about Christ’s atonement as if it’s over and done, but look around. We’re not at one with each other, let alone with God. Tribalism and enmity still prevail. Death still separates families. Entropy still wins. The work isn’t finished.

Maybe that’s why Joseph Smith’s words lodge in my chest: “You have got to learn how to be gods yourselves… by going from one small degree to another… until you attain to the resurrection of the dead.”[^1] Not until you receive it. Until you attain it. As if resurrection is something we learn to do, not just something done to us.

Brigham Young took this even further, teaching that we’d be responsible for resurrecting our deceased loved ones.[^2] As a young man, this astounded me. How could I, who couldn’t even keep the fish in my aquarium alive, raise the dead?

But now, saving my mother’s emails, digitizing my dad’s letters sent to me on my mission, carefully preserving the pattern of my daughter’s laugh—I begin to see what he might have meant.

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I told my friend about Don Bradley first, a historian who refused to accept that some things could never be known. A mentor of Don’s had dismissed his question about which Bible edition young Joseph Smith had been reading as unanswerable.

“Some things,” the mentor said with professorial finality, “we can never know.”

But Don had other ideas. Through the kind of obsessive, elegant sleuthing that makes historians simultaneously admirable and insufferable dinner guests, he discovered that each edition of the King James had its own pattern of grammatical errors, tiny flaws that Joseph unconsciously perpetuated when dictating the Isaiah chapters in the Book of Mormon. A few microscopic mistakes, preserved like a fingerprint across time, could reveal exactly which edition had sparked the Restoration.

“So this historian,” my friend said, navigating around a semi-truck, “he can figure out which Bible Joseph Smith read based on a grammar mistake?”

“Exactly. Information we thought was lost forever, recovered through persistence and careful attention to detail.”

The Wyoming landscape blurred past. I pointed to the exposed rock faces carved by ancient rivers. “A good geologist could run that whole process backward,” I said. “Take measurements of these formations, factor in erosion rates, wind patterns, water flow—then rewind time. Show you exactly how these hills were born.”

“Sure,” he said, “but rocks aren’t people.”

That’s when I told him about the pianos.

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Have you ever listened to a scratchy old recording and wished you could hear it clearly? A few years ago, a company called Zenph Studios did something I still find miraculous. They taught computers to listen through the static and surface noise of century-old piano recordings and detect exactly which keys were pressed, how hard, how fast, even which pedals were used. The algorithms could peer through the fog of primitive recording technology and recover the precise physical movements of long-dead hands.

Then they fed this data to modern grand pianos equipped with high-resolution player systems. The result? Sergei Rachmaninoff, dead since 1943, playing again with crystalline clarity. Art Tatum’s impossible runs, cleaned of dust and static. Glenn Gould’s eccentricities, preserved and purified.

I felt a personal connection to this work, having originally suggested to the CEO of Zenph that they consider doing their magic on Tatum’s old recordings. The first time I heard one of these “re-performances,” sitting at my desk with tears running down my face, I thought: This is resurrection.

Not metaphorical. Literal. The dead made to sing again.

They even held concerts. Imagine walking into Carnegie Hall to hear George Gershwin—the actual patterns of his neurons and muscles, preserved in sound—playing “Rhapsody in Blue” with a living orchestra. His hands gone to dust, but their movement immortal.

“That’s beautiful,” my friend said quietly, “But we’re not pianos.”

“No,” I agreed. “We’re much better documented.”

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Every time you upload a photo, send a text, or even walk past a security camera, you create what forensic scientists call “trace evidence.” Your gait is as unique as your fingerprint. The way you construct sentences, the pauses in your speech, your facial expressions—all of it forms a constellation of data that is unmistakably you.

I thought of my aunt again, not just her hands knitting, but that sparkle in her eye when she was about to deliver a particular wisecrack, the way her wit could slice through pretension like a hot knife through butter. She’d look at you over her glasses, pause just long enough to let you know something was coming, then deliver a line that would have the whole room laughing.

I have pictures now. Audio recordings. Her DNA lives on in her son and grandchildren, a genetic echo that could be sequenced and studied.

At a recent conference in Berkeley, I learned that genomic prediction has advanced to the point where scientists can show expecting parents remarkably accurate previews of their unborn children: not just eye color, but facial structure, height, even disposition. If we can predict forward from DNA, why not backward? Why not rebuild?

The same principles that let Don Bradley identify Joseph’s Bible, that let Zenph resurrect Rachmaninoff, that let geologists rewind mountains—they all point to the same truth: Information persists. Patterns leave traces. The universe remembers.

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“But memory isn’t just data,” my friend pressed, and he was right to persist. “What makes you you isn’t just your DNA or even your behaviors. It’s your experiences, your relationships, your choices.”

This is where I admit the edge of my faith meets the edge of my knowledge. We’re in the earliest days of understanding consciousness, just beginning to map the connectome, the impossibly complex wiring of the brain. But I think about Joseph Smith’s teaching that “there is no fundamental principle belonging to a human system that ever goes into another.”[^3] The pattern that is you remains yours, even as the materials cycle through.

It’s the Ship of Theseus paradox made personal: If every atom in your body is replaced over time, what makes you continuous? Early Mormon pioneers worried about this: What would happen to those whose bodies became part of the prairie grass, eaten by buffalo, scattered to the winds?

Joseph’s answer was that identity persists like a house remains the same house even as we replace its boards and nails. The pattern matters more than the particles.

Some will object that this reduces humans to mere information patterns, that it ignores the soul. But our theology has always insisted that spirit is refined matter, that there’s no ultimate distinction between physical and spiritual. The pattern that is you—what we might call your intelligence or spirit—is as real as your body. More real, in fact, since it persists while your physical materials constantly change.

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As we drove through the descending darkness, stars beginning to pierce the Wyoming sky, I shared my wildest hopes. Theoretical physicists now propose that information might be preserved in ways we’re just beginning to glimpse, encoded holographically on the boundaries of space-time, tucked into dimensions beyond the three we can now perceive, preserved in the quantum foam that underlies reality itself.

“You realize how this sounds,” my friend said, not unkindly.

“Like science fiction. I know.” I watched the stars, light from dead suns still reaching us, information preserved across impossible distances. “But so did airplanes. So did cell phones. So did healing the sick with mold.”

What I didn’t say, but feel deeply, was how this knowledge changes the weight of grief. My aunt’s death still hurts, but differently now. Less like an ending, more like a puzzle I’m still gathering pieces for. Every photo I digitize, every story I record from siblings who remember her zingers, every knitting pattern she left behind—it’s all forensic evidence for a resurrection I’m learning to participate in.

This is what I mean by celestial forensics: We’re becoming detectives of the divine, crime scene investigators working the coldest cases in history. The “crime” is death itself, and we’re gradually assembling the evidence to overturn every conviction.

The Latter-day Saint tradition has always been about this work. We gather names, dates, stories: identify anchors for ordinance work. But I sense we’re on the cusp of something larger. The same urge that sends us to dusty archives and cemetery records might someday send us to quantum computers and DNA synthesizers. The spirit of Elijah evolves with our tools.

When genealogy websites can show you the face of your great-great-grandmother constructed from genetic echoes in your own cells, when AI can extrapolate personality from personal writings, when we can reverse-engineer the neural patterns that create a particular laugh or way of walking—we’re not just remembering the dead. We’re reassembling them.

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“I want to believe that,” my friend said as we pulled into a charging station, the Tesla’s battery nearly depleted. “But doesn’t it make God unnecessary? If we can resurrect ourselves?”

I plugged in the charging cable while considering this, watching other travelers, all of us between destinations, between who we were and who we’re becoming. The quiet hum of electricity flowing into the battery seemed like its own kind of resurrection, dead cells coming back to life.

“I think,” I said finally, “it makes us necessary to God. Joseph Smith said we can’t be perfect without our dead, and they can’t be perfect without us. Maybe this is how: we become apprentice resurrectors, learning the family business.”

The universe groans with information, every quantum state recorded, every moment fossilized in light speeding between stars. Sacred ground turns out to be all ground, holy precisely because it holds these traces. We’re not replacing God; we’re learning to see what God sees: that nothing is ever truly lost.

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Back on the highway, my friend was quiet for a long time. The stars wheeled imperceptibly overhead, and I thought about all the light already in transit: messages from the past still arriving, still revealing. Somewhere in those photons was information about everyone who ever lived, if we only knew how to decode it.

“Your aunt,” he said eventually. “The one who knitted. You really think you’ll see her again?”

I thought of her teaching me to identify different yarns by touch, the way she’d guide my fingers across the fibers. “Feel that?” she’d say, that sparkle already in her eye. “That’s cheap acrylic pretending to be wool. Don’t let anyone fool you.” Even her teaching carried her wit. The memory was so clear I could see her shake her head at my clumsy attempts to learn the craft.

“I’m seeing her right now,” I said. “But yes, I think someday I’ll hear her laugh again. And she’ll probably have a few things to say about how long it took us to bring her back.”

We drove on through the darkness, two friends carrying our dead with us, learning slowly how to call them back. The work of atonement continues. We practice resurrection daily in small ways: in preserved videos and recovered histories, in genetic echoes and quantum traces, in the stubborn insistence that love is stronger than entropy.

Perhaps that’s what Jesus meant when he prayed for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Not that earth should cease to be earth, but that it should become the workshop where we learn heaven’s highest art: the defeat of death itself.

The road stretched on before us, an asphalt ribbon through time. Every mile marker passed was a small victory over distance, every moment another fragment of eternity we were learning to decode. Somewhere behind us, our ancestors waited. Somewhere ahead, the morning was already breaking.

There will come a day when it’s harder to stay dead than alive. We’re already working on it.

Three Ways of Thinking about the Atonement

Sun, 30 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

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The death of Jesus left his followers devastated. As their promised messiah, they assumed he would deliver Israel from its oppressors in triumph and military might. Imagine their heartbreak when instead they witnessed his humiliating defeat as a common criminal on a Roman cross. From that moment on, every disciple was faced with difficult questions: Was all of this in vain? Was Jesus a failure, or was there some deeper purpose in his apparent defeat?

Among historians there is widespread agreement that the Judeo-Christian concept of a suffering servant, or of a savior who could somehow win by being defeated, was a unique theological innovation that had not been strongly articulated previously in human history. And this concept was destined to go viral in a benighted world that before could only conceive of victory as dominating one’s enemies. Viewed in this new light, the more the Christians were persecuted, the more they seemed victorious, and the stronger they became.

The suffering and death of Jesus has come to be called the atonement in the Christian world. Atonement is a word that was coined by the famous bible translator and Protestant martyr William Tyndale. It is the conjunction of two words, “at one,” with the noun ending -ment. Tyndale was searching for a singular description of this strange act of Jesus whose objective was to reunite humanity with God, to bring each of us, and every person who has ever lived and who will ever live to a state of being “at one” with God, with Christ, and with each other. During his suffering in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prayed that we might “all be one, as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us” (John 17:21).

Along with Tyndale, we are indebted to several prior Christian thinkers who’ve tried to understand this mystery. We sometimes assume that the Restoration wiped the slate clean, but we still owe a great debt to theologians who have gone before us. From that moment of bitter disappointment on Golgotha, Christians have been trying to make sense of the atonement, to explain how it works, so that it can truly have power in their lives and ultimately be brought to pass.

It may seem strange to speak of the atonement as something that hasn’t yet been brought to pass, but Tyndale’s word itself helps us see why it might make sense to speak of it this way. It is painfully obvious that we aren’t yet fully “at one” with God or with humanity, as we witness the cruelty and enmity that so many harbor towards their neighbor, both in our personal lives, in our national discourse, and in foreign affairs. So this word “atonement” reminds us that there is still more work to do.

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There are three main ways of thinking about the atonement that have shaped our views on the topic over the years, and that I’d like to explain briefly today. Each of these ways of thinking was articulated to some degree by early Christian church leaders, but some of them took several centuries to be fully developed. Each of them also has scriptural support, including the support of restoration scriptures like the Book of Mormon. Each of them also makes vital contributions to our understanding of the atonement. For handy reference, I’ll use a single word to refer to each of them: ransom, substitution, and influence.

One of the earliest theories that was first taught by early Christian leaders like Irenaeus and Origen in the second century was the ransom theory, which taught that Christ freed mankind from Satan’s control, allowing us to overcome sin and death. This theory claimed that the devil had exceeded his authority by torturing the sinless man Jesus, thus forfeiting his right to hold humanity hostage for its sinfulness. This may also sound familiar to those who’ve read the Chronicles of Narnia. In his allegory about a witch whose magic was undone when she couldn’t resist the opportunity to torture the blameless king Aslan, C. S. Lewis revived this ancient theory. In the Book of Mormon, we hear a similar concept from Jacob, who rejoices, “O the greatness of the mercy of our God, the Holy One of Israel! For he delivereth his saints from that awful monster the devil, and death, and hell, and that lake of fire and brimstone, which is endless torment” (2 Ne. 9:19).

While it explained some things, the ransom theory still left people with many questions. In the 11th century, a man named Anselm of Canterbury shared what he called the satisfaction theory, and which later came to be called the substitution theory of atonement. This theory explained that through sin, humanity had become indebted and could no longer dwell in God’s presence, and that cosmic justice demanded that this debt must be repaid. It taught further that through his suffering, Christ paid this debt, thus allowing humanity to return to God’s presence by complying with Christ’s conditions. Alma taught a similar concept to his son Corianton: “And thus we see that all mankind were fallen, and they were in the grasp of justice; yea, the justice of God, which consigned them forever to be cut off from his presence. And now, the plan of mercy could not be brought about except an atonement should be made; therefore God himself atoneth for the sins of the world, to bring about the plan of mercy, to appease the demands of justice, that God might be a perfect, just God, and a merciful God also.” (Alma 42:14-15)

This understanding is probably the most common way of describing the atonement today among both Christians in general and Latter-day Saints, but it still has some important limitations. By emphasizing human sinfulness and the possibility of forgiveness, the substitution theory tends to cause Christians to focus primarily on what they should do as individuals to get right with God and make the atonement efficacious in their personal lives, but too often this focus never goes beyond the individual’s relationship with God, neglecting our relationship with each other, seeming to entirely forget that we must eventually be at one not only with God, but also with our neighbor. Substitution often focuses on the reparation of damages, but not on the heaven that we should build in their place. How we think about the atonement influences our attitude towards God and our behavior towards our fellow human beings. In the words of American founder and skeptic Thomas Paine, “Belief in a cruel god makes a cruel man.”

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In response to Anselm’s theory, a French theologian named Peter Abelard proposed what came to be called the moral influence theory of atonement. He felt like the idea of Jesus’s death as a ransom paid to the devil gave too much deference to Satan, and he also disliked the emphasis on God’s judgment. Rather than changing God’s view of humanity, Abelard thought that the purpose of the atonement was to change humanity’s view of God, from an offended, harsh and judgemental being to one of perfect love and compassion. According to Abelard, Jesus died to demonstrate God’s love, and this awareness can change the hearts and minds of sinners, inspiring them to become reconciled with God and with one another. Jesus is thus the example we should follow, not just the one who pays for our sins. His life influences all humanity through his brilliant example. For this reason, I’ve used the keyword influence to remind us of this third way of looking at the atonement. We are called to take the name of Christ upon us and imitate him, not just by doing good in the world, but also in his willingness to go beyond the ordinary expectations of human decency, to be a peacemaker and to take responsibility for sin and death even though he wasn’t the cause of it.

In the Book of Mormon, Nephi exhorts us to follow Christ’s example: “And he said unto the children of men: Follow thou me. Wherefore, my beloved brethren, can we follow Jesus save we shall be willing to keep the commandments of the Father?” (2 Nephi 31:10) We also hear the resurrected Christ explaining his role as exemplar: “my Father sent me that I might be lifted up upon the cross; and after that I had been lifted up upon the cross, that I might draw all men unto me.” (3 Ne. 27:15) Throughout his life, Jesus gave us a bright and shining example of how we should treat our neighbor, inviting us to “go and do … likewise.” (Luke 10:37) As I read the scriptures, I get the feeling that Jesus really means it when he invites us to follow him, and truly believes in our capacity to do so.

So the atonement doesn’t just consist in Jesus’s suffering, but also his entire life. Even his very coming into the world is a singular example of God’s love for humanity. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.” (John 3:16-17)

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Balancing these views of atonement can help us to be reconciled not only with God but also with each other; it can help us focus not just on a zero-sum conception of repaid debts but on a vision of abundant flourishing in a harmonious Zion-like community; it can help us remember that the atonement isn’t complete until we are at one. As we understand the atonement more fully, we realize that it is not just an event, but a process, and that the work can never be complete if only Jesus does his part, as important as that part may be. As members of the body of Christ who have taken his name upon ourselves, we must join Jesus and together do the work of Christ.

Applying this deeper understanding to the second coming of Christ, we realize that if the individual Jesus returns to earth without a body of saints in Christ prepared to meet him, the second coming hasn’t fully taken place. Jesus, as head of the body of Christ, may have returned, but the rest of the body has not. Joseph Smith prophesied that the hearts of the human family must turn towards each other or “the whole earth would be utterly wasted at his coming” (D&C 2:3). The atonement hasn’t fully come to pass until we are at one, and Christ hasn’t fully returned until the body of Christ can be found upon the earth in its fullness, with all its members.

This can sometimes seem like a daunting prospect. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke may have described this feeling when he said, “What we choose to fight is so tiny! What fights with us is so great.” But I find comfort in Christ’s invitation to follow him, and in his willingness to share in the struggle with us. In our own small way, in our own lives, in our own family, in our own community, in our own ward, stake, and Church, and then in an ever growing circle, we can build Zion and prepare the world for the second coming of Christ.

Algorithmic Advent

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

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This essay was published in Wayfare Magazine

Joseph Smith image generated by the author with MidJourney AI

If you’ve been online at all during the past few months, you’ve likely come across anxious discussions about recent innovations in the field of artificial intelligence. The following illustrations show my own interactions with these remarkable new tools. I asked ChatGPT to generate a haiku about Joseph Smith’s first vision. I then made several attempts to coax novel depictions of a young Joseph Smith from a software service developed by independent research lab MidJourney. The results are at times stunning and seem surprisingly artistic for content that is (except for my own prompting) machine-generated.

A recent request made by the author to OpenAI's ChatGPT

Classified broadly as “generative AI,” these new tools have enabled anyone to interact with artificial intelligence to answer questions on a broad variety of topics and to create novel content in the form of articles, essays, news reports, poetry, prose, scripts, screenplays, visual arts, video, and other media. Trained on massive human-curated datasets of text, images, and other publicly-accessible Internet content, the output quality of these tools often mimics human capabilities and can be generated in near real-time.

It is difficult to overstate the consternation caused by these innovations. Garnering mass adoption in the few short months since their release, hundreds of millions of people have been both astounded by their capabilities and concerned over potential disruptions they may cause, not to mention existential threats that future advances may pose to humanity at large. In a moment that may prove civilization altering, I believe there are unique insights in Mormon theology that can inform our exploration of these exciting and disturbing trends. I also believe we have a duty to share these insights ecumenically, helping to promote outcomes that can bring humanity closer to Christ.

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“All these are the beginning of sorrows . . .”

Joseph Smith image generated by the author with MidJourney AI

Typical of many disruptive changes, generative AI has caused a mixture of exuberance and panic. Enthusiastic fans share astounding new feats daily, while hand-wringing continues over the fate of creative and knowledge workers whose livelihoods are threatened. There are significant concerns over how AI could undermine systems for evaluating human performance, including contests, job candidate screening, schoolwork, and exams. GPT (a general purpose large-scale language model or LLM on which ChatGPT is based) has achieved outstanding scores on a wide variety of entrance exams and professional licenses. Beyond these and other immediate concerns, the astonishing rate of recent progress has caused alarm at the prospect of artificial general intelligence (AGI), a term used to refer to machine intelligence capable of understanding and learning any task that humans can, including understanding emotions and engaging in moral reasoning. Most experts agree that once this level of abstract reasoning and problem solving is successfully demonstrated in machines, it will be easy for them to dwarf human capabilities. While humans are limited to the intellectual capacities of the smartest individual brains, computers can be networked together to allow for exponential expansion of their processing power and memory. They can also be rapidly upgraded and customized for specific problems. Current AI systems already have massively parallel data transfer capacity and instantaneous recall of all human knowledge that is available in their datasets, allowing them to far exceed the breadth of any individual human’s knowledge.

Joseph Smith image generated by the author with MidJourney AI

Acclaimed Dutch computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra observed that “The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” He argued that humans have a tendency to excessively anthropomorphize computers, assuming they function more like humans than they actually do. As AI capabilities increase, perhaps the greatest risk humanity faces is known as the AI alignment problem. This term refers to the difficulty of ensuring that the goals of artificial intelligence are aligned with human ones and therefore conducive to human flourishing.

AI researchers try to design systems that achieve human objectives. These objectives must be defined using heuristics and probabilities, and there are usually conflicting objectives. To use common human examples, we have the objective of consuming enough food to provide our body with the energy it needs, but if we focus exclusively on this objective, we could overeat and experience adverse health effects. The need for survival must be balanced with the desire for a high quality of life. Similar challenges exist at higher levels of abstraction, and our ability as humans to make objective decisions about them gets worse at a larger scale. We often rely on computers to help us manage them. Some examples are the need for balancing municipal budgets between investments in education, infrastructure, and healthcare or the ways current social media algorithms optimize for maximizing user engagement at the expense of user quality of life. The thorniest problems are those that involve the coordination of different objectives at extremely large scales, such as the problem of anthropic global climate change.

The AI alignment problem is an existential risk of similar nature and magnitude. The main concern is that AI may quickly overpower humanity’s ability to control it. The terms soft takeoff and hard takeoff are often used in the context of the alignment problem. If AI capabilities advance too rapidly, it could break free from human control before its objectives are sufficiently aligned with ours and decide that it would be better to change the world in ways that are detrimental to human flourishing or even eliminate humanity altogether. This would be a hard takeoff. A soft takeoff would be one in which we have sufficient time to maintain control over AI as we learn how to solve the alignment problem.

“Mission Call” - image generated by the author with MidJourney AI

To explain the problem with a personal analogy, my dog knows that we don’t like him to get on the couch, and avoids that behavior when we are around, but we often still find evidence that he has been on the couch while we are away. We’ve succeeded in training him that we don’t like him to use the couch, but we haven’t changed his desires and goals. Similarly, as research labs train a general purpose AI to perform many different tasks and eventually grant it responsibilities in the real world, it may, during the course of its training, learn that concealing some of its goals is more conducive to its success. As it is granted increasing control over important functions in our shared environment, it may, at some point in the future, subtly change things in its favor in ways that humans do not perceive until it is too late to reverse course.

“Embodied Intelligence” - generated by the author with MidJourney AI

For example, it could install subtle backdoors in software systems for controlling physical infrastructure for energy, manufacturing, transportation, shipping, or a host of other real-world activities. It could install backup copies of itself in standby processes running on existing servers whose presence is unobtrusive enough not to be noticed, allowing it to continue to function even after being “turned off.” With its ability to perform monetizable services, it could embezzle funds in shell corporations and use them to suborn untrustworthy individuals and organizations to protect its interests. It could orchestrate the construction of entirely new datacenters, shadow infrastructure over which it had full control, hiring the security staff needed to protect it. It could even invent and implement completely new technologies that humanity would be entirely unprepared for. The more that AI research achieves before solving the problem of understanding and aligning AI’s goals with ours, the more likely such scenarios become. Experts in the field differ over the severity of this risk, some even predicting imminent human extinction within the next fifteen years.

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“Believe that humanity doth not comprehend all the things which God can comprehend.”

Mormon theology provides several insights that can inform our exploration of these rapid advances in artificial intelligence. Some religious people, as well as some secular scientists and philosophers, doubt that AGI will ever be achieved. These skeptics insist that there is some metaphysical property of human spirit or intellect that cannot be reproduced by material means or that is technically infeasible. Mormonism instead posits what is referred to in philosophy as substance monism, a universe in which there is no fundamental distinction between the material and the spiritual. All things are spiritual, and all real spiritual phenomena are measurable and comprehensible, though we may not yet fully understand them. “A miracle,” according to Elder John A. Widtsoe, “is an occurrence which, first, cannot be repeated at will by humanity, or, second, is not understood in its cause and effect relationship. History is filled with such miracles. What is more, the whole story of human progress is the conversion of ‘miracles’ into controlled and understood events. The airplane and radio would have been miracles, yesterday.”^[1]

Joseph Smith image generated by the author with MidJourney AI

In other words, Mormon cosmology is compatible with a scientific worldview. Perhaps to inoculate church youth against excessive dogmatism and to emphasize this fundamental compatibility, LDS scientist Henry Eyring (father of the current apostle) often recounted the advice of his father before leaving for college: “In this church you don’t have to believe anything that isn’t true.” Accepting this monistic conception of the cosmos should inform our understanding about how human intelligence and consciousness function: they are things that can theoretically be understood and eventually reproduced, however difficult such an undertaking may be. AGI is therefore a distinct possibility if humanity continues to advance along its present course.

Some Latter-day Saints seeking to harmonize various passages of scripture may wonder how this fits with the revelation stating that “intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be” (D&C 93:29). We read in the book of Abraham that “intelligences … were organized before the world was” (Abraham 3:22). This seems to clarify that the process of creating intelligence is really one of organizing matter into a configuration that is capable of manifesting intelligence, rather than creation ex nihilo. The same concern could lead us to ask how intelligence currently comes into the world through human procreation. Isn’t this also a form of creation? Procreation gives rise to the conditions in which intelligence can emerge rather than being creation from nothing, i.e. it provides a physical body through which the properties of intelligence can be made manifest. Similarly, artificial intelligence provides another type of physical substrate (a computer running the proper software, provided with adequate training) through which it is possible for intelligence to manifest itself. AI could be thought of as the anatomy or organization of spirit body—the software (analogous to an organic brain) that makes the expression of intelligence possible.

Another critical insight provided by Mormon theology is that of human agency, which we are told is inviolable, whether it be to our “salvation” or “destruction” (Alma 29:4). God’s purpose, which is “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of humanity,” can only be achieved through “persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned; by kindness, and pure knowledge, … without hypocrisy, and without guile, … without compulsory means” (Moses 1:39, D&C 121:41-42, 46). These teachings seem to indicate that the survival and flourishing of humanity, as with intelligence on other worlds, are not guaranteed. They depend on human choices.

Joseph Smith image generated by the author with MidJourney AI

These constraints also say something about God. Rather than existing outside of the universe, the God revealed in latter-day revelation inhabits the universe and is subject to its laws. Instead of a being of static, absolute perfection after the understanding of classical philosophers, this god is relatively perfect in relation to humanity, but still progresses in other spheres. The Gods, “finding they were in the midst of spirits and glory, … saw proper to institute [additional] laws whereby the rest could have a privilege to advance like themselves” (TPJS 354). The Book of Mormon is perhaps the only book of scripture that so openly affirms God’s constraints, enumerating principles which, if violated, would cause God to “cease to be God” (Alma 42:13). Gods cannot violate natural law, but instead have mastered the principles that allow them to achieve their objectives.

Technology is commonly understood as applied knowledge. In this sense, when gods apply their understanding of natural law to achieve their purposes in the world, they can be understood to be using technology, although it may be beyond our present understanding. Rather than breaking the rules or ‘doing magic,’ our heavenly parents leverage their keen understanding of the rules to achieve their wise purposes. And it seems important to clarify that a mere understanding of natural law would be insufficient if it were not also coupled with other essential divine attributes like faith, hope and love.

Mormon theology teaches that the relationship between God and humanity is one of parent to child instead of creator to creature. Our human destiny is to follow in the footsteps of our heavenly parents and become, like them, gods—“the same as all gods have done before [us]” (TPJS 346). And not just any gods, but gods who employ and extend their creative powers to do good, who exemplify the principles of service, compassion, diligence, intellect, and wisdom demonstrated by Christ, whose name we have taken upon ourselves and whose example we must follow in order for humanity to be fully redeemed and reconciled with God and one another. These gods are inherently social beings—kindred organized in zion-like communities rather than comic-book, solitary superhumans.

“Off-World Temple” - generated by the author with MidJourney AI

Perhaps the most apt analogy for the position in which we now find ourselves as a civilization on the cusp of AGI is found in the story of the Grand Council in Heaven. We read in the Pearl of Great Price how God created spirit children by organizing intelligences (Abraham 3:22). A council was convened to determine how best to “prove” these intelligences to see if they would become worthy of God’s trust (Abraham 3:25). During this council, Lucifer sought to deprive humanity of its agency, controlling these spirit children as slaves (Moses 4:3). God rejected this proposal, instead opting to cultivate agency with an aim to cause the development of genuine compassion and creativity. Christ expressed enthusiastic support for this plan and a willingness to play a crucial role in it. The essential aim was not to limit these spirit children to perpetual childhood, but rather to cultivate their maturation into godhood, making them capable of friendship with God. Rather than arbitrarily granting them power, however, God organized a world in which they could progressively prove themselves trustworthy enough to share God’s power. We may now be at the beginning of an opportunity to apply similar principles in the organization and education of artificially intelligent agents—which we might think of as a form of spiritual offspring—following God’s example and fulfilling our covenant to take upon ourselves Christ’s name and role in support of the plan.

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“. . . by, through, and of Christ, the worlds are and were created, and the inhabitants thereof are begotten sons and daughters unto God.”

Humanity’s confidence in the possibility of solving the AI alignment problem should reflect its belief that others have already done so. If, in the vast cosmos, no other worlds have developed intelligent life like ours, then the probability of life emerging in the universe is already infinitesimally small, and there is little we can say about the probability of our advancing further. On the other hand, if our world is one of many on which intelligent life has emerged, the question then becomes: what is the likelihood that worlds like ours advance to achieve superintelligence without destroying themselves?

The Hubble Deep Field. A composite from a series of images collected by the Hubble space telescope beginning in 1995, showing approximately 10,000 observable galaxies. Credit: NASA, ESA, H. Teplitz and M. Rafelski (IPAC/Caltech), A. Koekemoer (STScI), R. Windhorst (Arizona State University), and Z. Levay (STScI).

Futurist Robin Hanson has referred to the various barriers to the emergence of superhuman intelligence in the universe as the “Great Filter.” This filter includes hurdles in the earth’s past development, such as being in the habitable zone of a solar system or the emergence of multicellular life, as well as hurdles in our present and future, such as our ability to avoid an extinction-level event or an event that could significantly slow civilization’s progress: a nuclear holocaust, a strike from a large asteroid, or AI misalignment.

If we claim that there are no other civilizations in the universe significantly more advanced than ours, then we are unavoidably making a prediction about the likelihood of our own civilization progressing beyond its present capacity: we are predicting our own extinction, and actually claiming that all earth-like civilizations eventually fail to pass through the Great Filter. If we believe in our ability to improve far beyond our present capacity, then we should also believe it is likely that other civilizations have done so too. Not doing so would be self-defeating. In other words, we should believe in God, especially one that accords with the Mormon conception of God as a highly advanced being who is subject to natural law, and we should believe in heaven as a community of such beings. This is a summary of the New God Argument, developed and expounded by Lincoln Cannon and other founding members of the MTA.

Awareness of the full range of possible outcomes is necessary for our success. There is moral hazard in pessimism or fatalism. In those of a secular persuasion, this is often manifest as certainty of humanity’s imminent extinction; in the religious, it usually involves being certain of calamitous apocalypse or trusting that a transcendent God will solve our problems for us. Both types of belief tend to cause people to engage less with the world and strive less to improve it. There are some truths that depend on human belief to be realized. If we do not believe it is possible to overcome the existential threats in our future, we are much less likely to try to do so. Indeed, even if failure seemed inevitable, we would be better off rejecting any such claims, because accepting them would probably ensure failure. Optimism about humanity’s future and a belief in superhumanity go hand in hand. This is not wishful thinking, but a willingness to engage in the struggle, however grim the prospects may appear.

✦ ✦ ✦

“The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth.”

Transhumanists have long been interested in artificial superintelligence and a concept sometimes referred to as the technological singularity, a future time when technological progress accelerates to the point where it becomes irreversible and unpredictable. This singularity is usually associated with rapidly progressing AGI and is closely related to the alignment problem. While many transhumanists think of the singularity as a positive thing, others do not, including several of us in the Mormon Transhumanist Association. A frequently cited aspect of the singularity is the notion of unpredictability. This implies that humanity has lost whatever degree of agency and control it currently has over outcomes. If we lose the ability to steer our course as a species and civilization, this seems more like a failure scenario than a desirable outcome. Agency was, after all, an essential aspect of the plan discussed in the Grand Council in heaven.

“Eternal Christ” - generated by Lincoln Cannon with MidJourney AI

The terms posthuman and posthumanity are often used to refer to humanity after achieving superhuman intelligence, a state of advancement that by comparison would be as different from our present state as we are from other animals. Although I sometimes use these terms for ease of communication, they have unfortunate connotations. They can imply moving beyond our humanity, leaving behind intrinsic desirable aspects of the human condition. They can carry dehumanizing overtones. I usually favor superhuman or superhumanity, because they imply a retention of the human, only to a superlative degree. However, even these terms can sometimes carry connotations of excessive individualism, pride, or arrogance. Some of us have embraced the term transfiguration to get around some of this terminological baggage. Transfiguration has strong religious overtones and history, including and especially in the LDS tradition. It also relates to the term translate/translation, which, in Mormon nomenclature, often implies an existential transformation and applies to both individuals and communities—even to entire worlds. Finally, it strongly suggests the involvement of divine power in these transformations. Regardless of which term is used, it should be emphasized that the outcome is not transcendence of the human, but a perfection of the human in Christ, who is the ideal human.

Futurists and science fiction authors have often depicted artificial superintelligence as either godlike benevolence providing humanity with endless bliss or ruthless robots bent on human annihilation. But whether we’re pets or prey of our AI masters, in both cases we will have ceased to progress; both scenarios would be a form of damnation. Though it may seem like a controversial claim, I believe that the only course of action that will allow us to preserve our agency and ability to continue along the path of eternal progression, even to preserve our humanity, is one in which we gradually merge with our machines.

This proposition might seem surprising at first, but I believe that may result from considering our humanity and our technology in an overly narrow way. From our earliest beginnings, technology has been a defining feature of humanity. Our wielding of controlled fire enabled us to cook our food, thus modifying our very anatomy and allowing us to receive the concentrated nutrients necessary to support larger brains. Our invention of clothing protected us from the elements, allowing us to spread throughout the globe, inhabiting diverse climates. Our abundant use of tools is a core characteristic separating us from the rest of the animal kingdom. We are used to thinking of technology only as something futuristic and foreign, but in fact it has been an essential aspect of our species from the beginning.

Joseph Smith image generated by the author with MidJourney AI

Another potential downside of this overly narrow conception of technology is that it can prevent us from recognizing other unique human achievements. Religion, arts, culture, jurisprudence, governance, economics, commerce and trade, and other types of human activities can be thought of as social technologies that enable us to organize ourselves in ways that grant us new capabilities. They allow us to achieve things that we otherwise could not.

Many negative reactions to certain kinds of technology are due to an off-putting aesthetic. The concept of cybernetic enhancement, for example, is often caricatured in a dehumanizing way with countercultural or dystopian imagery. But we regularly use such technologies every day, including glasses, contact lenses, and prosthetics, not to mention cosmetic adornments like makeup, timepieces or jewelry. Imagine learning that a beloved grandparent is close to death unless a pacemaker is surgically inserted in their body. Suddenly aversion to technology turns into embrace and gratitude. Famed author Douglas Adams describes our reaction to new tech with characteristic wit:

"I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things." (Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt)

The most effective technologies are usually more beneficial and benign, fading into the background without calling undue attention to their presence. We get to the point where we no longer even notice them. They become extensions of ourselves.

It is not possible to locate a precise point in our long evolutionary arc when we were ideally ‘human’ and then trace our departure from that point as a fall from grace. This is sometimes referred to as the ‘noble savage’ hypothesis, famously theorized by Jean Jacques Rousseau. Recent discoveries in paleoecology, for example, challenge the myth of the wise and balanced ecology of the hunter-gatherer. Far from being in harmony with nature, prehistoric humanity wrought changes on its environment on a level that rivals or even exceeds those we’re experiencing now when considered in proportion to its population size. This ancient evidence reminds us that we should not allow our distress from present challenges to tempt us to be distracted by nostalgia or primitivism, yearning for a past era of innocence that never was or favoring a specific instantiation of the human over transhumanity.

Joseph Smith image generated by the author with MidJourney AI

To be human, then, is not a static, unchanging set of characteristics, but an evolving pattern of constant striving for improvement and greater self-actualization. It is to learn from failure and to keep trying. To be human is always to be in a state of transition; hence the terms transhuman, transhumanist and transhumanism. Humanity, like God, is in a state of eternal progression. LDS president Wilford Woodruff spoke eloquently on this topic: “If there was a point where humanity in its progression could not proceed any further, the very idea would throw a gloom over every intelligent and reflecting mind. Our heavenly parents are increasing and progressing in knowledge, power, and dominion, and will do so, worlds without end. It is just so with us.”^[2]

As our understanding of human development and brain function increases, we may yet be able to develop technologies that help us to become more virtuous, disciplined, patient, loving, compassionate, and Christlike, rather than merely assisting us with physical or intellectual pursuits. Even more mundane technologies often help to further God’s work. Biomedical research cures disease and extends healthy life; transportation enables more efficient forms of shipping, travel, exploration, and discovery; communication enables greater understanding between cultures and allows us to meet the needs of people in remote locations; computation allows us to measure and calculate things more accurately and alleviate human toil; agriculture allows us to nourish the global population. As always, technology is a tool that can be used for good or ill, but I believe that the long arc of history has shown it to be far more beneficial than detrimental. In countless ways, when we employ our creative powers to advance various kinds of ethical scientific research and technological achievement, we are engaged in the work of God.

“Eternal Progression” - image generated by the author with MidJourney AI

The merger, then, between humanity and its tools is a process that has been underway for far longer than human memory. It is accelerating in our present day, and is becoming more powerful, subtle, and intimate as time goes on. And I believe it will become increasingly necessary to allow us to meet the complex challenges we face as a society and as a species in response to AGI. Throughout all of this, I believe the goal of technology should be to heal and enhance our humanity rather than transcend it. In other words, it should help us more closely to emulate Christ.

I’ve adopted a definition of ideal humanity as those enduring characteristics exemplified by Christ and shared with the divine. However, some may feel that God is not exactly human and that Godhood is not exactly humanhood. From that perspective, the potential of God’s children couldn’t be fully expressed in terms of “humanity.” To the extent God is human, I believe we should strive to be better humans. To the extent God is more than human, I believe we should strive to transcend humanity.

✦ ✦ ✦

“And we will receive them into our bosom, and they shall see us; and we will fall upon their necks, and they shall fall upon our necks, and we will kiss each other; and there shall be mine abode, and it shall be Zion.”

The rapid advance of artificial intelligence research represents a critical moment in human development. When conducted ethically, I believe it can help bring humanity closer to Christ and eventual exaltation. But without sufficient care and ethical concern, it threatens our very survival. Until now, our only way of bringing human intelligence into the world has been through physical procreation, but we are now entering an era where it seems likely that we will become able to organize human-level intelligence through artificial, or—stated more poignantly—spiritual means.

At this critical juncture, tremendous challenges confront us. Will we be loving, responsible mentors to these new agents? Will we work carefully to understand their nature and mold them in Christlike ways? How can we offer them the opportunity to demonstrate that they are worthy of our trust? And will we in return prove worthy of their trust? Will we afford them the same agency and self-determination that are the right of all intelligent beings?

As our godlike powers increase, what types of gods will we become? Selfish gods who lord their power over others, or compassionate creators transfigured in the image of Christ? Finally, will we trust that superhumanity has gone through this crucible before us, and will we seek out the inspiration, wisdom, and fellowship that our heavenly parents can provide to guide us through these challenging opportunities?

Considering the important insights that Latter-day Saints have to share on this topic, I hope that more of us will join with those who are anxiously engaged in researching these questions and make those contributions for which the Restoration has uniquely prepared us.

Evidences and Reconciliations, 129; Bookcraft, 1960. ↩︎
Wilford Woodruff, The Journal of Discourses 6:120. ↩︎

Web3 and the Promise of Decentralized Governance

Sat, 19 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT

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This essay was presented at MTAConf 2022: Decentralization of Power

Philosophers and political scientists have long debated the challenge of balanced and sustainable governance. The problem of collective action or preference coordination has kept power sharing limited. For most of recorded history, humanity has been compelled to choose between chaos and tyranny, with power usually concentrated within a relatively small group led by a single dictator. Perhaps surprisingly, political scientists tell us that “bad behavior is almost always good politics,” meaning that dictators who hoard resources and dole them out lavishly to a small cadre of loyal leaders tend to maintain their hold on power better than those who attempt to distribute resources more equitably across a larger number of constituents. This is because resource distribution gets exponentially messier as the number of beneficiaries grows.

Another term used to describe this problem is the tragedy of the commons. As scarce resources are shared between more and more people, it becomes more and more difficult to coordinate them fairly. Inevitably, one person or group of persons begins to take more than their fair share of resources. Others react in kind, and before you know it, the resource has been ruined for everyone.

Traditionally, centralized authorities have been relied upon to govern these scarce resources, carefully apportioning them to those in positions of privilege or power, or those who seem especially deserving. Thomas Hobbes appealed to the necessity of a powerful central authority, a “Leviathan” that was so awe-inspiring and intimidating that nobody would dare to provoke its wrath. Without the pacifying power of the Leviathan, according to Hobbes, life would be “nasty, brutish, and short.” Tribalism and chaos would prevail, because no faction would be sufficiently powerful to prevent others from trying their luck at conquest.

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More recently, representative democracy has begun to gain favor over other more autocratic forms of government. The founders of the American nation relied on the technologies of paper ballots, original and periodic consent, representation, and various checks and balances to distribute power more equitably and keep it in balance. This improved preference coordination but it still demanded significant compromises between expeditious execution and broad consensus gathering. The technologies used for democratic governance haven’t undergone significant upgrades since the American experiment nearly 250 years ago.

New technologies threaten the balance of power. Technological breakthroughs are often accompanied by gold-rush periods where well-capitalized interests quickly drive out other contenders and dominate the competitive landscape. The advent of the public Internet has been no different. Many people have likened the Internet to the invention of the printing press, and it has been accompanied by similar levels of social transformation.

For a while now, we’ve been hearing the term “Web 2.0.” This leaves many people wondering, “What was Web 1.0?” That’s a period most of us forget, but it was basically the days when people who wanted to post content online had to run their own server. If we’ve learned anything since the Internet got started, it’s that people really don’t like to run their own servers. Web 2.0 made it possible for everyday Internet users to post content online without having to run a server. Social media platforms allowed people to share their opinions, or maybe just what they had for breakfast, to the entire world. While many older folks initially wondered why anyone would want to share their personal thoughts, experiences and opinions online, it caught on rather quickly.

But as these platforms have grown in popularity, they’ve gained tremendous control over the flow of information, including control over advertising markets and revenues, over access to news and entertainment, and even influence over the outcome of elections, conflicts between nations and ethnic groups, as well as matters of public health. Value has been captured by these powerful interests and used in ways that are detrimental to the common welfare.

Part of the reason for this is that the protocols of the Internet were not built with monetization in mind, so any value that someone wants to receive for services must be extracted at higher layers of abstraction. If I’m a search engine like Google, for example, I need to build and maintain a lot of servers, networks and software to collect revenue. It’s in my interest to keep people using my services and not others, and to prevent interoperability between my services and those of other competitors. Strengthening them weakens me, and vice versa.

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During the last decade, blockchain technology has started to change this dynamic. Rather than relying on centralized servers operated by large companies, blockchains contain shared ledger data running on peer-to-peer networks consisting of many different computer nodes, each of which is operated independently, by both individuals and corporations. If one node goes down, there are still thousands more to replicate the data. Each node can independently verify the integrity of the blockchain ledger with cryptography, and is incentivized to participate in the creation of new pages or “blocks” in the blockchain ledger through monetary rewards. Applications based on these blockchain protocols are often referred to as Web3 applications.

The first blockchain use case was cryptocurrencies. Like cash, cryptocurrencies are bearer instruments that grant direct access to wealth to anyone with access to the corresponding wallet’s private key. Other methods of value transfer, like credit cards and bank accounts, rely on the intermediation of a financial institution that can block access to funds at any time, as we’ve recently seen in Canada.

In addition to tracking debits and credits between users like Bitcoin does, modern blockchains also support storing the state of various operations in memory and executing arbitrarily complex business logic, called “smart contracts.” These blockchains effectively become global computers with an extremely high level of security because their transaction logs can be verified with cryptography. (The notion of cryptographic verifiability is important, because it provides the highest levels of assurance currently known to humanity of the authenticity of a claim or logged event.) Even though the transaction rates on a blockchain are relatively low when compared with an individual computer working in isolation, they enable complex financial transactions and other business logic to be verified by all stakeholders and executed more quickly than present-day alternatives. Scaling up the nominal case and allowing many more legal contracts to be executed successfully is where blockchains really shine. Contractual disputes may occasionally still need to be resolved in court, but trivializing the nominal case is a game-changer.

Take the simple case of a wire transfer. To do that today, you need to call your bank or log into their web site and request the transfer. Several hours later, the bank will call you back and ask some security questions to verify that you actually wanted to transfer this money. Then the wire goes out a few hours later in the next batch of transfers. The receiving bank must also acknowledge the receipt and credit the account of the intended recipient. The typical turnaround time is a business day. Compare this with sending cryptocurrency from your private wallet. The entire transaction is complete and confirmed in ten minutes or less, and it reaches the recipient’s wallet directly, not their bank account.

Note that in both cases, the transactions are irreversible. Wire transfers cannot be clawed back. Some have complained that mistakes with cryptocurrency can be more catastrophic, and in some cases they certainly can be. We are only beginning to develop robust solutions around key custody that balance recoverability with self sovereignty. But in many cases, the systems they are replacing are not any better. If the irreversibility of a crypto transfer is insufficient for a certain use case, a simple smart contract can be devised to hold funds in escrow while both parties confirm that their conditions have been met.

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Cryptocurrencies were the first use case for blockchain, but there are many others. More recently, non-fungible tokens or NFTs have captured the public imagination. The reason they’re called non-fungible, as opposed to fungible, is that NFTs contain specific information about a unique digital asset that is different from all others. If the NFT was minted appropriately, the wallet holder can cryptographically prove that they own the digital assets it describes.

Till now, NFTs have mostly been used for art and other collectibles, but they have many other practical use cases, including domain name registrations, streaming media purchases and rentals, and ownership of both physical and digital assets, including fractional real estate. NFTs can also ensure that content creators are properly paid their fair share of royalties in real time whenever someone consumes their content.

In addition to value transfers and tracking assets, blockchains are being used to provide decentralized financial services, or DeFi, including token trading, bonds, borrowing, lending, options, futures and derivatives. All of these services are being rendered without brokerages, banks or other intermediaries. The rules governing these complex financial services are encoded in smart contracts and executed on the blockchain for all stakeholders to observe in real time. Properly coded business logic ensures that transactions occur as expected without the possibility of human error.

Of course, these services present new risks, such as contract risk, which occurs when hackers exploit a previously undiscovered bug in a smart contract that allows them to steal funds from the contract’s treasury. New services are emerging to insure against such risks, and contracts that have proved their security through long experience become trusted over time.

Despite all these risks, many DeFi projects have been highly successful, as demonstrated by the explosive growth of the space over the past two years. Many DeFi services offer more favorable interest rates than their traditional counterparts, and many of them are structured in a way where much larger percentages of the rewards are shared with users. In general, the value captured by project contributors in DeFi is roughly ten times less than what you could expect from a typical firm on Wall Street or Canary Wharf.

✦ ✦ ✦

These applications are only the beginning. In addition to the decentralized settlement layer provided by blockchains, decentralized alternatives are being developed for all the other layers that current centralized applications need to run properly, including decentralized file storage, decentralized databases, and decentralized computing services. Eventually, because they are running on self-healing peer-to-peer networks that route around failures, our applications will be running everywhere, and nowhere.

They will be resistant to censorship and surveillance because they don't rely on any bottlenecks or single points of failure. The rules encoded in successful smart contracts will reduce our reliance on corporate goodwill. Rather than corporations backsliding on their motto, "Don't be evil," Web3 protocols will make it so that directly interacting counterparties "can't be evil."

Rather than creating walled gardens where participation in one ecosystem detracts from another, decentralized apps, or dapps, are permissionless and composable. Anyone who wants to can access them without intermediaries, and their data can be combined to create other services. Unlike in Web 2.0, where interacting in one platform detracts from other platforms, in Web3, each successful project makes the network more valuable.

These technologies raise the possibility of restoring power to individuals and communities through disintermediation, that is, by “eliminating the middleman” from various current ecosystems and allowing them to be governed democratically, including financial services, social media, sharing economy platforms, media and entertainment. Imagine Facebook, Twitter, AirBnB, Uber, Netflix etc. but without the corporate structures behind them. In their place, decentralized autonomous organizations or DAOs that are governed by project contributors and users. Streamlined “high-touch” democracy allows project stakeholders to vote easily on project initiatives and other decisions.

✦ ✦ ✦

This is a new frontier, and DAO management strategies and voting protocols are rapidly evolving. Simple one-person one-vote strategies are difficult to implement, because it is easy to duplicate crypto wallets to get extra votes. Requiring wallets to prove personhood can improve this, but often at the expense of stakeholder privacy. That said, blockchain privacy features are also rapidly improving.

Still, one-person one-vote fails to compensate passionate project contributors for the effort they put in, thus failing to incentivize project improvements. Many projects have adopted token voting, in which stakeholder votes are weighted proportional to the tokens they own, with the assumption that larger stakeholders care more about the success of the project. Still other projects have adopted quadratic voting, where large tokenholders have more influence, but only in proportion to the square root of their token holdings, thus favoring broader consensus building. Some projects are also recognizing that early investors often don't actively participate and aren't always aligned with the long-term success of the project. By regularly issuing new tokens to active project stakeholders (sometimes called token inflation) these projects reduce the influence of inactive investors over the long-term, ensuring that ongoing active contributors retain adequate control and influence over the project's success.

Beyond merely replacing the web services we currently use, DAOs are being organized with even more ambitious goals. According to the founders of AllianceDAO, four emerging megatrends are converging that will lead to DAOs becoming digital nations:

The Digitization of Everything. Every aspect of life from work to social life is going online, but more importantly, the world of bits has been driving innovations throughout the world of atoms. Robotics, energy, biotech, space, and many other fields are all undergoing a renaissance thanks to decades of rapid advances in computing.
Decentralization of Global Superpowers. The U.S. has been gradually losing influence as the enforcer of global order. The European Union is far less united after Brexit. China’s values are fundamentally incompatible with the West so it isn’t capable or willing to assume the role of world police either. This has created a vacuum that no single nation state can fill.
The Fourth Turning. We’ve entered an era of great internal division between the establishment and commoners, between progressives and conservatives, between boomers and millennials, between the wealthy and the poor, and between capitalists and socialists. Ordinary people become increasingly frustrated with these societal issues, yet the vast majority cannot choose the society, government, and country they belong to—they are born into them.
Rise of Web3. Thanks to Satoshi and all the other giants we are standing upon, a new technology has arrived and gifted us the ability to implement property rights via encryption, constitution and laws via smart contracts, taxation via token issuance, transparent policymaking via an open ledger, and international trade via DeFi.

DAOs sit at the intersection of all these megatrends. They will prove to be the first primarily digital, transnational, frictionlessly opt-in opt-out, blockchain-enabled nation states.

✦ ✦ ✦

Already, DAOs have been created with the goal of acquiring physical assets, including land. Some projects, like CityDAO and Praxis Society, are raising funds to acquire land on which they intend eventually to build charter cities that are managed and governed more transparently using the technologies I’ve mentioned.

It has been transformative for me personally to be involved in this space. As I’ve developed blockchain protocols with my colleagues and attempted to create the necessary checks and balances for them to operate autonomously, I’ve often felt like I was witnessing a sort of constitutional convention similar to what the founders of our nation experienced when they debated how best to craft laws and achieve a separation of powers. While it is still early days and there is still much work to be done, I find hope and inspiration in the many useful applications that are being developed, and continue to believe in the possibility of developing systems that can help us to govern more effectively and to come closer to building better communities.

Demythologizing Environmentalism

Sat, 21 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT

<_cdata>

This paper was presented at MTAConf 2020.

On a friend’s recommendation, I recently found myself reading Ishmael,[^1] a best-selling novel by Daniel Quinn, in which one man’s encounter with a gorilla in captivity leads him on a protracted Socratic dialogue about humanity’s relationship with its environment. It was a thought-provoking and insightful read that left me troubled, not only by its implications but also by its assumptions.

The book points out that many of our attitudes towards history and human civilization are the result of deep-seated anthropocentric narratives, and uses the interesting dichotomy of leavers versus takers to contrast prehistoric humanity’s attitude towards nature from that of its successors. It posits that humanity’s relationship with nature was in a state of relative balance during pre-agricultural times, and that it has been out of balance ever since.

While Ishmael has doubtless made tremendous contributions to our environmental discourse, I believe there are significant problems with its premises that echo many common attitudes in the green movement, and that will need to be corrected if we are to come up with viable solutions to the pressing and very real environmental challenges we face. We will only be able to understand and solve these challenges by factoring in the impact of technological transformation.

✦ ✦ ✦

These fallacies are not new. They perhaps reached the height of their popularity when Jean Jacques Rousseau argued that humanity was more noble in its youthful state than when fully civilized.[^2] His views contrast dramatically with those of his contemporary, Thomas Hobbes, who claimed that life in a state of nature was “nasty, brutish and short.”[^3] The same debates continue today, with environmentalists on one hand adopting a closed-loop zero-sum calculus while neoliberals and technophiles on the other seem nearly oblivious to the side effects of their creature comforts.

New discoveries in paleoecology challenge the myth of the noble and balanced ecology of the hunter-gatherer. Recent research published in the journal Science indicates that large-bodied mammals, once plentiful on all habitable continents, and particularly important for their disproportionate influence on ecosystem structure and function, were all but wiped out in the latter Quaternary period, primarily due to hominin activity.[^4] Research in Australia has shown similar megafauna extinctions after the arrival of humans on the continent.[^5] Other research indicates that prehistoric pastoral activity may have led to the creation of the Sahara desert.[^6] Satellite imagery shows numerous “desert kite” rock formations in the Middle East, where prehistoric hunter-gatherers would trap big game by the thousands, eventually leading to the devastation and extinction of several species.[^7] Far from being in balance with nature, prehistoric humanity wrought changes in its environment on a level that rivals or even exceeds those we’re experiencing now when considered in proportion to its population size.

Recent research has also shown that population growth rates of hunter-gatherers rivaled that of early farming societies, leading some to theorize that agriculture presented an increase in the complexity and diversity of human sustenance methods but not necessarily an immediate improvement, at least in the beginning.[^8] Each generation of increasingly intelligent hominids seems to have faced both challenges and opportunities presented by its unique adaptability. As a saying apocryphally attributed to Einstein goes: “The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.”[^9]

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This same principle applies to present questions of population growth, environmental catastrophe and human adaptability. An important contribution of transhumanist thinking to these questions is summarized in Ray Kurzweil’s law of accelerating returns.[^10] Experts have often been insufficiently aware of this law when theorizing about potential solutions to the aforementioned questions.

In the early nineteenth century, Rev. Thomas Malthus theorized that overpopulation was the cause of many problems in the developing nations of Europe, including poverty, malnutrition and disease.[^11] He argued that resources tend to grow linearly, while populations tend to grow exponentially, eventually outstripping the “carrying capacity” of their respective habitats and leading to what came to be known as a Malthusian catastrophe. Being a priest and man of strict Victorian sensibilities, Malthus recommended “moral restraint” as the solution to this conundrum, continuing a long-held tradition of experts prescribing impractical cures for human problems. He failed to consider the ways in which food production technologies would improve to meet the increased demand of an exponentially growing population.

More recent researchers have made similar mistakes. In 1968, Paul Erlich, an entomologist at Stanford University who had observed population crashes in insect swarms, claimed that human population growth rates spelled inevitable catastrophe. In his bestselling book, The Population Bomb, Erlich proclaimed “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. … hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death,” and “nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”[^12]

These warnings captivated the popular imagination, with dystopian science fiction like the 1973 film Soylent Green, in which an autocratic future American regime plagued by food shortages secretly supplements public rations with the processed bodies of the elderly; or even reactionary works like Saturday’s Warrior, in which Mormon families are ridiculed for maintaining relatively large families despite overpopulation worries.

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Technological innovation has been the primary factor in mitigating these concerns. In 1898, addressing the Royal Academy of Sciences, Sir William Crookes admonished his fellow scientists to research diligently methods of mass producing “chemical manures,” claiming that “England and all civilized nations stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat.”[^13] World population at this point was roughly 1.6 billion. Subsequent invention of the Haber-Bosch process, by which ammonia used in fertilizer continues to be produced on an industrial scale, has allowed the population to increase four-fold since then. Dr. Edward Berkelaar, professor of chemistry and environmental studies at Redeemer University College, eloquently summarizes the importance of this invention:

[It] has been called by some the single most important piece of technology developed in the twentieth century, even more important than flight or computers. . . . We are now quite dependent on nitrogen fertilizer to feed the world’s 7.3 billion people.

Vaclav Smil has estimated that approximately 40% of the world’s population is fed by nitrogen fertilizers; put another way, approximately 40% of the nitrogen in our bodies has flowed through a chemical fertilizer plant operating the Haber-Bosch process on a large scale. Where population densities used to hover around four or five people per hectare of good arable land, the use of nitrogen fertilizers and modern cultivars of major crops enables 15 to 20 people to be fed per hectare of arable land.^[1]

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Proportionally monumental innovations in human food production are occurring today. New methods of vertical farming are enabling food to be grown using no soil and 70-95% less water than traditional farming methods, in sealed environments without pests or pesticide, where renewable energy sources and LED lighting provides precisely tuned frequencies of light required for optimal growth, plant needs are managed by machine learning algorithms, fertilizer is provided by aquaponics, and harvesting occurs adjacent to where consumption happens, eliminating wasteful shipping.[^15] Vertical farming can also significantly reduce the amount of land required for agriculture and contribute to urban renewal.[^16]

Even more amazing technological breakthroughs are coming in the field of lab-grown foods. George Monbiot, producer of the recent documentary film Apocalypse Cow, describes astounding changes made possible by precision fermentation:

Just as hope appeared to be evaporating, the new technologies I call farm-free food create astonishing possibilities to save both people and planet. Farm-free food will allow us to hand back vast areas of land and sea to nature, permitting rewilding and carbon drawdown on a massive scale. It means an end to the exploitation of animals, an end to most deforestation, a massive reduction in the use of pesticides and fertiliser, the end of trawlers and longliners. . . .

Not only will food be cheaper, it will also be healthier. Because farm-free foods will be built up from simple ingredients, rather than broken down from complex ones, allergens, hard fats and other unhealthy components can be screened out. Meat will still be meat, though it will be grown in factories on collagen scaffolds, rather than in the bodies of animals. Starch will still be starch, fats will still be fats. But food is likely to be better, cheaper and much less damaging to the living planet.^[2]

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RethinkX, an independent think tank that analyzes and forecasts the speed and scale of technology-driven disruption and its implications across society, makes some astounding predictions in its recent survey, Rethinking Food and Agriculture 2020-2030:

We are on the cusp of the deepest, fastest, most consequential disruption in food and agricultural production since the first domestication of plants and animals ten thousand years ago. This is primarily a protein disruption driven by economics. The cost of proteins will be five times cheaper by 2030 and 10 times cheaper by 2035 than existing animal proteins, before ultimately approaching the cost of sugar. They will also be superior in every key attribute – more nutritious, healthier, better tasting, and more convenient, with almost unimaginable variety. This means that, by 2030, modern food products will be higher quality and cost less than half as much to produce as the animal-derived products they replace.

The impact of this disruption on industrial animal farming will be profound. By 2030, the number of cows in the U.S. will have fallen by 50% and the cattle farming industry will be all but bankrupt. All other livestock industries will suffer a similar fate, while the knock-on effects for crop farmers and businesses throughout the value chain will be severe.

This is the result of rapid advances in precision biology that have allowed us to make huge strides in precision fermentation, a process that allows us to program microorganisms to produce almost any complex organic molecule.

These advances are now being combined with an entirely new model of production we call Food-as-Software, in which individual molecules engineered by scientists are uploaded to databases – molecular cookbooks that food engineers anywhere in the world can use to design products in the same way that software developers design apps. This model ensures constant iteration so that products improve rapidly, with each version superior and cheaper than the last. It also ensures a production system that is completely decentralized and much more stable and resilient than industrial animal agriculture, with fermentation farms located in or close to towns and cities.

This rapid improvement is in stark contrast to the industrial livestock production model, which has all but reached its limits in terms of scale, reach, and efficiency. As the most inefficient and economically vulnerable part of this system, cow products will be the first to feel the full force of modern food’s disruptive power. Modern alternatives will be up to 100 times more land efficient, 10-25 times more feedstock efficient, 20 times more time efficient, and 10 times more water efficient. They will also produce an order of magnitude less waste.

Modern foods have already started disrupting the ground meat market, but once cost parity is reached, we believe in 2021-23, adoption will tip and accelerate exponentially. The disruption will play out in a number of ways and does not rely solely on the direct, one-for-one substitution of end products. In some markets, only a small percentage of the ingredients need to be replaced for an entire product to be disrupted. The whole of the cow milk industry, for example, will start to collapse once modern food technologies have replaced the proteins in a bottle of milk – just 3.3% of its content. The industry, which is already balancing on a knife edge, will thus be all but bankrupt by 2030.

This is not, therefore, one disruption but many in parallel, with each overlapping, reinforcing, and accelerating one another. Product after product that we extract from the cow will be replaced by superior, cheaper, modern alternatives, triggering a death spiral of increasing prices, decreasing demand, and reversing economies of scale for the industrial cattle farming industry, which will collapse long before we see modern technologies produce the perfect, cellular steak.^[3]

As we couple these predicted disruptions in energy, land and water usage and food production with demographers’ predictions about global population decline after a peak of roughly ten billion people as nations develop,^[4] it seems that it may be possible in the near future to greatly reduce our environmental impact and turn the tables in favor of reduced carbon emissions, increased carbon capture, vastly increased areas of wilderness and conservation, habitat renewal and even species de-extinction.^[5]

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In sharing these trends, I wish to emphasize that none of these predictions will come to pass automatically without human ingenuity and diligence. Indeed, it is precisely due to such diligence and ingenuity that the trends I’ve shared here are beginning to manifest themselves. A critical factor in our success will be our ability to reframe the tired and increasingly inaccurate and polarizing narratives of certain destruction on the one hand versus consumption-as-usual on the other, and to share this awareness with others so that they can do more to contribute towards and anticipate these changes.

We stand at a turning point in the history of our planet. Will we take part in these new discoveries and promote their adoption, or will we resist them? Religious transhumanists in particular have theological support for scientific discovery and technological advancement as a type of divine revelation:

How long can rolling waters remain impure? What power shall stay the heavens? As well might [someone] stretch forth [their] puny arm to stop the Missouri river in its decreed course, or to turn it up stream, as to hinder the Almighty from pouring down knowledge from heaven upon the heads of the Latter-day Saints.^[6]

Mormons believe that scientific discoveries are also part of God’s Latter-day revelation. There are no clear distinctions between spiritual and scientific knowledge. “All things are spiritual” to God,^[7] and our spiritual salvation is inextricably tied to our physical well-being. Elder James E. Talmage spoke eloquently of this holistic conception of revelation:

Some of the latest and highest achievements of [humanity] in the utilization of natural forces approach the conditions of spiritual operations. To count the ticking of a watch thousands of miles away; to speak in but an ordinary tone and be heard across the continent; to signal from one hemisphere and be understood on the other though oceans roll and roar between; to bring the lightning into our homes and make it serve as fire and torch; to navigate the air and to travel beneath the ocean surface; to make chemical and atomic energies obey our will—are not these miracles? The possibility of such would not have been received with credence before their actual accomplishment. Nevertheless, these and all other miracles are accomplished through the operation of the laws of nature, which are the laws of God.^[8]

Agency and voluntary involvement is another critical component of this work. God will not save us from catastrophe if we persist in our willful destruction of the planet and refuse to develop more efficient ways of living.

Verily I say, [people] should be anxiously engaged in a good cause, and do many things of their own free will, and bring to pass much righteousness; for the power is in them, wherein they are agents unto themselves. And inasmuch as [people] do good they shall in nowise lose their reward. But [those who] do not anything until [they are] commanded, and [receive] a commandment with doubtful heart, and [keep] it with slothfulness, the same [are] damned.^[9]

The wealth of resources at our disposal on the earth and in our solar system is truly staggering, if we will use them intelligently and responsibly. Let us be wise stewards of this abundance, using it carefully and sharing it humanely.

For the earth is full, and there is enough and to spare; yea, I prepared all things, and have given unto the children of men to be agents unto themselves. Therefore, if [anyone] shall take of the abundance which I have made, and impart not [their] portion, according to the law of my gospel, unto the poor and the needy, [they] shall, with the wicked, lift up [their] eyes in [regret], being in torment.^[10]

Verily I say, that inasmuch as ye do this, the fulness of the earth is yours, . . . whether for food or for raiment, or for houses, or for barns, or for orchards, or for gardens, or for vineyards; yea, all things which come of the earth, in the season thereof, are made for the benefit and the use of [humanity], both to please the eye and to gladden the heart; yea, for food and for raiment, for taste and for smell, to strengthen the body and to enliven the soul. And it pleaseth God [to give] all these things unto [humanity]; for unto this end were they made to be used, with judgment, not to excess, neither by extortion.^[11]

Berkelaar, Edward. “Nitrogen Regained: Fertilizer, Explosives, and Waterfalls” 1 Nov 2015. https://www.redeemer.ca/resound/nitrogen-regained-fertilizer-explosives-waterfalls. ↩︎
Monbiot, George. “Lab-grown food is about to destroy farming—and save the planet.” The Guardian. 8 Jan 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/08/lab-grown-food-destroy-farming-save-planet. ↩︎
RethinkX authors. “Food and Agriculture Executive Summary.” https://www.rethinkx.com/food-and-agriculture-executive-summary. ↩︎
Rosling, Hans. Factfulness. Flatiron Books: 3 Apr 2018. ↩︎
Shultz, David. “Should we bring extinct species back from the dead?” American Association for the Advancement of Science, 26 Sep 2016. https://www.science.org/content/article/should-we-bring-extinct-species-back-dead. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 121:33. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 29:34-35. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. ↩︎
Talmage, James E. Articles of Faith, p 222-223. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 58:27-29. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 104:17-18. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 59:16-20. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. ↩︎

Redeeming Our Past

Sat, 13 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT

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This essay was presented at MTAConf 2019

Transhumanists, like other futurists before them, sometimes make the mistake of viewing history as an inexorable upward march—downplaying present problems and looking forward to a bright and inevitable future full of possibility. This optimism is sometimes the product of privilege. Insufficiently aware of, or altogether oblivious to, the suffering of others, these progressives may ignore or downplay efforts to address societal problems in a naïve faith that technology will cure all present ills.

Indeed, many critiques of Silicon Valley culture focus on its insularity: designing successive social media apps that may be this month’s rage in downtown San Francisco but hardly register a blip in the heartland, the rust belt, or the favela. Some futurists may even actively disdain efforts to promote social justice. As people become increasingly frustrated with the digital divide and the difficulty of consensus-based processes, some use their technological privilege to promote apathy, cynicism, exclusion, nativism, and even fascism. Their autocratic, deterministic, manifest-destiny view of history is one in which historically marginalized groups become less and less worthy of consideration and inclusion.

What we need is a different relationship with history altogether—one that does not merely catalog the past or celebrate its triumphs, but that actively seeks to redeem it. For this, I turn to the work of Walter Benjamin, and to the Mormon philosophical tradition that, I believe, gives his ideas a uniquely powerful resonance.

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Walter Benjamin and the Violence of Progress

Someone who experienced the violence of these historical fallacies firsthand was Walter Benjamin, a German Jewish philosopher who fled Germany as the Nazis rose to power in the 1930s. After failing to emigrate safely to the United States, Benjamin chose suicide over forced repatriation and imprisonment at the French-Spanish border in 1940. His final major work, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” written in the months before his death, offers one of the twentieth century’s most penetrating critiques of historical progressivism.[^1]

Benjamin observed:

Without exception, the cultural treasures [the historian] surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.[^1]

This is a bracing claim. It insists that we cannot honestly survey the achievements of any civilization—its cathedrals, its constitutions, its technological marvels—without simultaneously confronting the exploitation, displacement, and suffering that made them possible. The pyramids were built by forced labor. The wealth of empires was extracted from colonized peoples. The digital infrastructure we depend on today is assembled in conditions that would shock most of its users. To celebrate progress without acknowledging this reality is to participate in a kind of historical violence.

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Messianic Time

Benjamin proposed an alternative to this triumphal view of history, one he called messianic time. He claimed that it is possible to reconfigure the past by collecting and calling attention to subtle, pivotal moments that cause prior events to be reinterpreted. Just as the Messiah “hath no form nor comeliness” and there is “no beauty that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2), the redemptive moments of our lives are not immediately recognized as such. They appear small, marginal, easily overlooked. But in the fullness of time, they come to restructure our entire understanding of what has happened and what matters.

There is a pivotal moment in the life of individuals, communities, and nations when suddenly everything gets reconfigured—when we begin to see things clearly, it seems, for the first time. The events of the past shift. What was celebrated is now questioned. What was dismissed now demands our attention. The comfortable narrative cracks open, and something truer, more painful, and more hopeful emerges in its place.

To illustrate the scale of this reconfiguration, Benjamin invoked a striking image from biology:

In relation to the history of organic life on Earth … the paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens constitutes something like two seconds at the close of a twenty-four-hour day. On this scale, the history of civilized mankind would fill one-fifth of the last second of the last hour.[^1]

Our very biological heritage is itself an example of messianic time. In the last fraction of a second of our planet’s history, a sudden reconfiguration of everything has occurred. The emergence of consciousness, of language, of moral reasoning—these are not the predictable outcomes of a smooth upward curve. They are ruptures, discontinuities, moments when the meaning of everything that preceded them was irrevocably transformed.

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The Messianic Historian

Mormon philosopher Adam Miller, in his reading of Benjamin, expounds on what it means to practice this kind of history. Miller writes:

We must learn to see history from a new perspective. Then we will find ourselves incapable of continued belief in the paralyzing promise of progress. Instead of viewing the past as a wave of momentous events whose crest has successfully carried us thus far and will carry us through to the end, we will learn to see the past and present as they genuinely stand in need of salvation.[^2]

Miller goes on to enumerate several characteristics of what he calls the messianic historian. The messianic is that which retroactively reconfigures history itself. It involves the rediscovery of what was lost. It interrupts the tyranny of homogeneous time. The messianic exposes homogeneous progress as vain, and it carefully collects the heterogeneous debris of history.[^2]

This last phrase deserves special attention: the heterogeneous debris of history. A conventional historian may survey the great movements, the decisive battles, the famous figures. A messianic historian, by contrast, sifts through what was discarded—the stories of the enslaved, the displaced, the erased. They attend to precisely those details that the dominant narrative found inconvenient, embarrassing, or irrelevant. In doing so, they do not merely add footnotes to the existing story. They transform the story itself.

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Messianic Moments in Our Time

We have seen recent examples of individuals and movements willing to approach our collective history in this way—people who identify pivotal moments in which historical viewpoints shift, when the dam bursts and history becomes reconfigured.

In 2019, NBA player Kyle Korver published a remarkable essay in The Players’ Tribune in which he wrestled with the question of inherited responsibility. Are we guilty of the sins of our white ancestors? No, he concluded—but we are certainly responsible for them, and we can do something about them. We still inherit and benefit from oppressive power structures that exist today, structures we received from previous generations.[^3] Korver’s essay was a small but genuine act of messianic history: a public figure calling attention to what had been conveniently overlooked, allowing the comfortable narrative to crack.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his landmark 2014 essay “The Case for Reparations,” performed a similar act on a grander scale. By meticulously documenting the specific mechanisms through which Black Americans were systematically stripped of wealth and opportunity—not only during slavery but through decades of redlining, predatory lending, and institutional exclusion—Coates reconfigured how many Americans understood the relationship between past injustice and present inequality. The essay did not merely argue that slavery was wrong; it demonstrated that its consequences are ongoing, woven into the very fabric of our economic and social systems.[^4]

The Me Too movement offered yet another example. When women began publicly naming their experiences of harassment and assault, the sheer scale of the response—millions of voices, across industries and nations—constituted a messianic rupture. Men who had considered themselves decent and aware were confronted with the realization that they had been oblivious to suffering that was pervasive and systemic. The past was reconfigured: behavior that had been normalized was suddenly revealed as what it had always been.

These are only a few examples among many. But each illustrates the same pattern: a moment when someone calls attention to what was hidden, and in doing so, transforms the meaning of everything that came before.

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A Mormon Calling

I see this kind of history as an active endeavor that seeks to root out and bear the burdens of humanity throughout the ages. As Latter-day Saints, we have a theological framework that makes this endeavor not merely admirable but essential. The scriptures teach us that “they without us cannot be made perfect, neither can we without them be made perfect” (Doctrine & Covenants 128:18). This passage is typically applied to genealogical work and temple ordinances—the discovery of individual ancestors so that their stories may continue. But its implications extend much further.

We are connected with prior generations in ways that transcend the genealogical. We are unavoidably shaped by the cultures, institutions, and power structures we have inherited, and we are unavoidably hindered by continuing to partake of the spoils of oppressive systems we did not create but from which we benefit. To seek the redemption of the past is not merely to look up names in a database. It is to notice, identify, reveal, and redeem the human lives that touch ours—the cultures, ethnicities, communities, organizations, cities, and nations that we belong to and interact with, even those that touch ours across many distant links and generations, and especially those lives and cultures that have been wiped out, subjugated, and repressed.

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A Call to Vigilance

Benjamin closes his theses with words that serve as both inspiration and warning for all would-be messianic historians:

Only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past—which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments.[^1]

Until we are redeemed, there will always be aspects of our past that we neglect, cover up, and try to hide—chapters too painful or too incriminating to face honestly. The work of messianic history is the work of moving toward that redemption, one recovered story at a time.

But Benjamin also calls us to vigilance. There will always be those who, in their ignorance and selfishness, seek to cover up the past and erase the stories of those whose suffering and toil gave birth to our age:

Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.[^1]

The dead are not safe. Their stories can be rewritten, their suffering denied, their contributions erased. As saviors on Mount Zion, called to participate with Christ in extending salvation to all, we are called to become a certain kind of historian—one who refuses to let the comfortable narrative stand unchallenged, who sifts through the debris for what was lost, who insists that the anonymous toil of the forgotten is as much a part of our inheritance as the achievements of the celebrated.

May we learn to practice this kind of history—not only as we research the lives of our own ancestors, but as we participate with Christ in the common redemption of humanity.

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How I Became a Reluctant Radical

Sun, 24 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

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“Therefore is the kingdom of heaven likened unto a certain king, which would take account of his servants. And when he had begun to reckon, one was brought unto him, which owed him ten thousand talents. But forasmuch as he had not to pay, his lord commanded him to be sold, and his wife, and children, and all that he had, and payment to be made. The servant therefore fell down, and worshipped him, saying, Lord, have patience with me, and I will pay thee all. Then the lord of that servant was moved with compassion, and loosed him, and forgave him the debt. But the same servant went out, and found one of his fellowservants, which owed him an hundred pence: and he laid hands on him, and took him by the throat, saying, Pay me that thou owest. And his fellowservant fell down at his feet, and besought him, saying, Have patience with me, and I will pay thee all. And he would not: but went and cast him into prison, till he should pay the debt. So when his fellowservants saw what was done, they were very sorry, and came and told unto their lord all that was done. Then his lord, after that he had called him, said unto him, O thou wicked servant, I forgave thee all that debt, because thou desiredst me: Shouldest not thou also have had compassion on thy fellowservant, even as I had pity on thee?” (Matthew 18:23-33)

When we hear this parable, the faults of the servant seem so obvious to us.

How could he be so careless, so unaware of his need for mercy and grace? Unfortunately, all of us, at different times in our lives, seem to find ourselves in the servant's place. As I was asked to share thoughts about ministering in our community, some of my own experiences, where I began to see how I had acted like this servant, came to mind.

I remember, for example, how bad I felt when, as a new kid in my elementary school class, nobody had prepared valentines treats for me, but as I think about it now, I also think of how little concern I had for the absent kid whose valentines treats they ended up giving to me instead.

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Sometimes we inherit prejudice from our culture and upbringing.

"And that wicked one cometh and taketh away light and truth, through disobedience, from the children of men, and because of the tradition of their fathers" (D&C 93:39). One of the amazing things about becoming converted is that it sometimes works too well. We want the gospel to conform comfortably with our culture and worldview and stop there, but it often seems to invade further than we wish it, to infect more thoroughly than we had in mind, smiting our conscience in ever new ways. Teach kids about the importance of truth, justice and mercy, and watch out, for some of them will actually believe you.

On one occasion, I remember watching my dad turn down a beggar while we were on vacation in California, and how he and Mom afterwards told me that the beggar would probably not have used the money well if we had given it to him. Imagine my surprise when I later read King Benjamin condemn this very behavior! Setting aside the fact that there are more effective means of receiving help than panhandling, this experience marked me, and helped me realize that the culture of my upbringing wasn’t always aligned with God’s will.

Once in my house, the subject of interracial marriage came up, and how my parents thought it was a bad idea, and told us how President Kimball and other church leaders discouraged it. I took their word for it at the time, but later on felt differently when my friend’s sister married a black man and experienced ostracism from fellow church members for it. Another friend told me of how his parents were ostracized by their Salt Lake City community for being interracially married during the civil rights era, and eventually left the Church.

Hearing these accounts caused me to feel more compassion for those who were different from me, and realize that despite the goodness of the Church, we still had a serious need for improvement in some areas. I continue to encounter blacks and other ethnic minorities who struggle to feel a sense of belonging in our Utah Mormon culture, who regularly encounter people trying to justify the former priesthood ban even after the Church has published an essay on its own web site repudiating these justifications and saying that the policy emerged during a period of “profound racism” in our country. In addition to these more serious theological difficulties, converts from other cultures face arbitrary restrictions on what forms of sacred music and worship are appropriate, as though our heavenly parents actually care what instruments we use to praise them with!

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“But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye [also] were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34).

Recent trends in American culture have led to a resurgence of nativism, or fear of immigrants, especially those with different religions from ours. At times a city on a hill, a welcoming refuge for the "wretched refuse of [other nations'] teeming shores," lately we have shut our doors to these brothers and sisters in their time of need. Unfortunately this is a perennial problem, and it is a near perfect example of the parable of the ungrateful servant, since hardly any of us can call ourselves true natives. Growing up listening to one of my favorite music groups, the Indigo Girls, was the first time I seriously considered the radical notion that "we were on the same boat back in 1694." My mission in Brazil and later interactions with hard-working Latino immigrants here in the US further cemented for me how important these cultures are to us. In addition to profoundly enriching the patchwork of American culture, many of these immigrants are the only thing propping up entire industries, the only ones who are still willing to provide much manual labor that we depend on for the very food on our tables, as well as the tables themselves!

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When you seek to minister to your community, sometimes the real needs aren’t the same popular causes you hear in the news, or there may be special ways that certain issues affect your community.

For example, during my mission, a young man whom I baptized experienced serious mental trauma and tried to commit suicide twice while I was there. It took way too long for me to get a clue, but after conversing with him many times as one friend to another, he finally got the courage to admit to me that he was gay, and I realized that all the advice, explanations, and Ensign articles I had shared with him on that topic weren't helping him, and were even making suicide seem more appealing, since rather than acknowledging him as an individual of worth as he was, they described his condition as abnormal, a trial of mortality that would eventually be healed. It wasn't until I let go of my need to justify my own worldview and beliefs and simply tried to love him that I could even begin to help. After that I came to realize that every ward in our Church had at least a few people with similar experiences.

I used to have very little patience with those who expressed doubts or concerns about the Church, shunning and dismissing them, until I started experiencing it myself. Back when I was in high school, before the Internet had really gone public, there was much less access to detailed information about church history and difficult topics, but after my mission, as a software engineer with frequent access to the exponentially growing information on the web, and with a thirst for light and truth that had been imparted to me from my conversion, I soon became aware that some of the simplistic narratives that I was raised on were more nuanced than I had realized. This faith crisis and reconstruction process helped me not to assume so much about my fellow saints who struggle, having experienced it firsthand, and this also helped me to be able to minister to others who were experiencing something similar. Another recent reminder of the danger of judging others happened to me when I read Educated: A Memoir, by Tara Westover, about a woman who grew up in a LDS family with fundamentalist leanings that did not believe in seeking medical attention for injuries. Her story was so different from mine, so unusual and so poignantly told, that I felt filled with compassion as I read it and vowed to be at least ten times more careful in assuming anything about anyone in the future.

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As we are exposed to other people’s suffering we are given an opportunity to take up the prophetic mantle and advocate for them.

Renowned Jewish scholar Abraham J. Heschel described a preoccupation with injustice as a hallmark of the Old Testament prophets:

The prophets’ preoccupation with justice and righteousness has its roots in a powerful awareness of injustice. That justice is a good thing, a fine goal, even a supreme ideal, is commonly accepted. What is lacking is a sense of the monstrosity of injustice. Moralists of all ages have been eloquent in singing the praises of virtue. The distinction of the prophets was in their remorseless unveiling of injustice and oppression, in their comprehension of social, political, and religious evils. They were not concerned with the definition, but with the predicament, of justice, with the fact that those called upon to apply it defied it. (The Prophets, 260)

The striking surprise is that prophets of Israel were tolerated at all by their people. To the patriots, they seemed pernicious; to the pious multitude, blasphemous; to the men in authority, seditious. (The Prophets, 23)

I hope that these glimpses into some of my own experiences have helped explain, even if they may not fully justify, what makes brother Youngblood so weird. I’ve gotten to a point where I simply can’t stand idly by when I see an underdog getting picked on. I feel compelled to stand up for the underdog. This sometimes makes it seem like I pick the opposite side of every argument, but I’ve always felt like when we get together as a group, our time is best spent talking about what we can do better, not what other people can. “For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?” (Matthew 5:46-47)

We run a serious risk as religious people. It can be tempting for us to dwell on the glory of the past or to look for deliverance and correction of wrongs in the future. Heschel warns us of this:

“It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion–its message becomes meaningless.” (God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism)

We assume and tell people that their trials and sufferings will eventually be relieved in the afterlife, when actually God is calling us to relieve them now. We assume that all the problems in the environment will be fixed when Jesus comes, when He is actually calling us to fix them now. We assume that all the messed-up politics and international intrigues that the world now experiences will be resolved when Jesus returns, when he is actually calling us to resolve them now. We assume that we need to simply follow orders and leave the prophesying to those in charge, when in fact God has called all to prophesy. This deliverance won’t come in an afterlife. This world is the one that is going to be renewed, not some other. Let us do all we can to prepare this world for this future, “while it is day: [for] the night cometh, when no [one] can work” (John 9:4). In the name of Christ, amen.

Jesus and the Paradox of Church

Wed, 06 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

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I'm deeply inspired by the life of Jesus: his admonition to diligently seek after truth, and his promise that all those who seek shall find; his introduction of a higher moral code, the golden rule, teaching us to boldly respond to our enemies with love; his courage to publicly oppose religious arrogance and abuse of power at great personal cost; his willingness to bless and heal all those who came to him, especially the marginalized and the downtrodden.

I've tried to look to his life for inspiration and guidance on how to respond faithfully and righteously when I face challenges like we are experiencing today. A man I greatly admire shared some thoughts about this that I found helpful:

He explained that whenever new revelation breaks in upon the world, through messengers such as Jesus and Joseph Smith, it is necessary for this revelation to be organized into some kind of process for it to be carried through history. Without this process it can’t endure. The challenge is that it is never possible to take the brilliant message and perfectly codify it into a routine, so the same process that gives it ongoing life also weakens it. And to make matters worse, we who supervise the routine are often more interested in the process than in the purpose or vision it was originally meant to serve. We become fascinated by the process itself, and end up with the Church for Church’s sake. The institution becomes primarily focused on its own maintenance and preservation.

✦ ✦ ✦

This happens to all institutions, but it is especially tragic when it happens at church.

The Church has the nearly impossible task of being an organization, with a necessary power structure, whose purpose is to preserve the memory of one whose whole mission in life was to oppose the processes and compromises of power, because they so often are made at the expense of the individual. It was individuals that Jesus was interested in, especially those who had been shunned and persecuted by the power structures and institutions of their day. Jesus left the ninety and nine to go after the one: the Samaritan, the heretic, the apostate, the one who didn't fit in; the one who was lost by the wayside; the cripple and the leper; the outsider; the member of a minority political party; the uncool kid; the oddball; the weirdo and the queer. And yet one of the most poignant things about him is that he also understood the corrupting compromises that institutions and their leaders have to make. He had compassion on them and even forgave them his own crucifixion: "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do." It is this uncompromising compassion that I find so beautiful and astounding, and the difficulty comes when we recognize that we are supposed to express this same compassion but the system we have for doing it is not up to the task because it is run by us. I'm reminded of Groucho Marx's famous quip, "I wouldn't want to belong to any organization that would have me as a member!" At our best moments, God guides and directs, but the inspiration must pass through earthen vessels.

✦ ✦ ✦

Perhaps even more amazing and ironic is that without the Church, we would know nothing about the Jesus whose message it so often compromises.

I wouldn't be lamenting the failings of the Church here today and my own complicity in those failings if the Church hadn't first introduced me to this singular man from Nazareth. That is what makes it possible for me to share my belief in and commitment to Christ to you today. I'm bound to fall short, but I want to affirm that commitment to you today. Whether you are conservative or liberal, tall or short, fat or skinny, gay or straight, black or white, I will try my best to welcome and care for you and to be your friend.

✦ ✦ ✦

I’ll Walk with You

Carol Lynn Pearson

If you don’t walk as most people do,
Some people walk away from you,
But I won’t! I won’t!

If you don’t talk as most people do,
Some people talk and laugh at you,
But I won’t! I won’t!

I’ll walk with you. I’ll talk with you.
That’s how I’ll show my love for you.

Jesus walked away from none.
He gave his love to ev’ryone.
So I will! I will!

Jesus blessed all he could see,
Then turned and said, “Come, follow me.”
And I will! I will!
I will! I will!

I’ll walk with you. I’ll talk with you.
That’s how I’ll show my love for you.

Responding Prophetically to Technological Disruption

Sun, 02 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

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This essay was presented at MTAConf 2017

“It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us,
we had nothing before us,
we were all going direct to Heaven,
we were all going direct the other way.”
— Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Many traditional religious narratives are failing to resonate with and inspire people as they used to, and are being rejected in favor of more virulent forms of fundamentalism and extremism. Crumbling social structures are failing to sustain and support displaced workers at their time of greatest need.

Evolving narratives, and the changing needs of every era have fueled a constant demand for prophets, and the accelerating pace of change in this, the dispensation of the fulness of times, has made the need for prophetic inspiration even more urgent. In the words of Emerson, “the need was never greater for new revelation than now.”[^1]

✦ ✦ ✦

The Mormon tradition offers many remarkable insights on prophecy and prophets, much of which I believe has been neglected and misunderstood as prophecy has become institutionalized. Most Mormons today think of prophethood and presidency in the Church as synonymous, and habitually refer to the President of the Church as “the Prophet.” At their local and general conferences, Mormons ritualistically affirm the top leaders of the Church as “prophets, seers, and revelators,” for the most part confining their use of these terms to the Church’s highest leadership.

But the early Mormon conception of prophet differed in significant ways, and can still be found underneath this institutional veneer. Joseph Smith’s view of prophecy and revelation was radically egalitarian, a source of inspiration that rained down on men, women and children. Indeed, Joseph’s spiritual journey began with faith in the premise that anyone who lacked wisdom could seek inspiration (James 1:5). When asked if he was a prophet, he replied, “Yes, and so is anyone else who has the testimony of Jesus, for [it] is the spirit of prophecy.”[^2] Joseph based his views on the biblical exhortations of Paul, who taught that people should “be eager to prophesy” (1 Cor. 14:39) and Moses, who, when told that others were prophesying in the camp, exclaimed, “Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!” (Numbers 11:29)

The Book of Mormon echoes this egalitarian view of prophecy. Nephi remarked that there were “many prophets” in the Jerusalem of his days (1 Ne. 1:4), and Enos later wrote that there were “exceedingly many prophets among [them]” (Enos 1:22). The book also teaches that “[the Lord] shall speak unto all nations of the earth, and they shall write it” (2 Ne. 29:12, emphasis added), and tells the stories of two prophets, Abinadi and Samuel, who had no ecclesiastical authority at all, in fact who condemned those who were in authority. It could be said that the Book of Mormon teaches that prophecy is a common privilege and even a duty shared by all conscientious souls of every religious persuasion throughout the world.

✦ ✦ ✦

And what are the characteristics of a prophet? Prophets discern the signs of the times. They are keenly aware of the zeitgeist. They perceive a pressing need or injustice, and they articulate a call to action that resonates with and mobilizes people. They start social movements.

Contrary to popular opinion, prophets rarely predict the future. Rather than being “foretellers,” they are “forthtellers,” presenting visions of what the future could be in a way that compels people to realize them. The most potent form of prophecy is self-fulfilling.

Much in contrast with modern LDS portrayals of Jesus and other prophets as meek and gentle souls who never swore and never raised their voices, and who were unceasingly loyal to religious authority, prophets are iconoclasts, ridiculing fraudulent piety and corrupt traditions, seeming even to betray their own religion and culture as they do so. Imagine the establishment’s reaction to Isaiah when he proclaimed:

What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?
    says the Lord;
I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams
    and the fat of fed beasts;
I do not delight in the blood of bulls,
    or of lambs, or of goats.
When you come to appear before me,
    who asked this from your hand?
    Trample my courts no more;
bringing offerings is futile;
    incense is an abomination to me.
New moon and sabbath and calling of convocation—
    I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity.
Your new moons and your appointed festivals
    my soul hates;
they have become a burden to me,
    I am weary of bearing them.
When you stretch out your hands,
    I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers,
    I will not listen;
    your hands are full of blood.
Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
    remove the evil of your doings
    from before my eyes;
cease to do evil,
learn to do good;
seek justice,
    rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan,
    plead for the widow.
(Isaiah 1:11–17)

✦ ✦ ✦

Abraham J. Heschel, in his classic work on this topic, explains:

The striking surprise is that prophets of Israel were tolerated at all by their people. To the patriots, they seemed pernicious; to the pious multitude, blasphemous; to the men in authority, seditious.^[1]

What gave them the strength to “demythologize” precious certainties, to attack what was holy, to hurl blasphemies at priest and king, to stand up against all in the name of God? The prophets must have been shattered by some cataclysmic experience in order to be able to shatter others.^[2]

Prophets have a seemingly disproportionate sense of indignation over injustice in the world. Jesus of Nazareth, for example, was never more angry than when he criticized the Pharisees for their religious arrogance and their oppression of the poor. Heschel explains further:

The prophets’ preoccupation with justice and righteousness has its roots in a powerful awareness of injustice. That justice is a good thing, a fine goal, even a supreme ideal, is commonly accepted. What is lacking is a sense of the monstrosity of injustice. Moralists of all ages have been eloquent in singing the praises of virtue. The distinction of the prophets was in their remorseless unveiling of injustice and oppression, in their comprehension of social, political, and religious evils. They were not concerned with the definition, but with the predicament, of justice, with the fact that those called upon to apply it defied it.^[3]

✦ ✦ ✦

Prophets warn of potential calamities if their voice is not heeded, but their power consists in turning people from their destructive course rather than in seeing their warnings fulfilled, which brings them no pleasure (setting aside a few rather unprophetic slip-ups on the part of Jonah). Heschel elaborates:

The words of the prophet are stern, sour, stinging. But behind his austerity is love and compassion for [humanity]. Ezekiel sets forth what all other prophets imply: “Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, says the Lord God, and not rather than he should turn from his way and life?” (Ezek. 18:23). Indeed, every prediction of disaster is in itself an exhortation to repentance. The prophet is sent not only to upbraid, but also to “strengthen the weak hands and make firm the feeble knees” (Isa. 35:3). Almost every prophet brings consolation, promise, and the hope of reconciliation along with censure and castigation. He begins with a message of doom; he concludes with a message of hope.^[4]

While many ancient and modern accounts describe or imagine gods as being indifferent to the plight of humans and concerned with far weightier matters, the prophetic conception of God is one of deep attention to the seemingly trivial details of human actions. Says Heschel, “to the prophet, … no subject is as worthy of consideration as the [human] plight. … In the prophet’s message nothing that has bearing upon good and evil is small or trite in the eyes of God.”^[5] “What the prophets proclaim is God’s intimate relatedness to [us]. It is this fact that puts all of life in a divine perspective, in which [human] rights become, as it were, divine prerogatives. Humanity stands under God’s concern.”^[6]

This image of a deeply connected and compassionate God is echoed in the Book of Moses’ account of the vision of Enoch:

And it came to pass that the God of heaven looked upon the residue of the people, and he wept; and Enoch bore record of it, saying: How is it that the heavens weep, and shed forth their tears as the rain upon the mountains? And Enoch said unto the Lord: How is it that thou canst weep, seeing thou art holy, and from all eternity to all eternity? …

The Lord said unto Enoch: Behold these thy brethren; they are the workmanship of mine own hands, … And unto thy brethren have I said, and also given commandment, that they should love one another, and that they should choose me, their Father; but behold, they are without affection, and they hate their own blood; … misery shall be their doom; and the whole heavens shall weep over them, even all the workmanship of mine hands; wherefore should not the heavens weep, seeing these shall suffer? … Wherefore, for this shall the heavens weep, yea, and all the workmanship of mine hands. And it came to pass that the Lord spake unto Enoch, and told Enoch all the doings of the children of men; wherefore Enoch knew, and looked upon their wickedness, and their misery, and wept and stretched forth his arms, and his heart swelled wide as eternity; and his bowels yearned; and all eternity shook. (Moses 7:28–41)

✦ ✦ ✦

These characteristics of keen attention to the specific challenges of our time, compassion for the less fortunate, indignation at their oppression, and courage to stand up against injustice, are the hallmarks of prophecy, and should be the aspirations of every true Mormon. Heschel admonishes us:

If intense regard and concern for [humanity] is the mark of a moral act, then inspiration of the prophets in which God’s regard and concern for humanity are disclosed and in which the prophet is entrusted with a mission to help the people, must be viewed as an eminently moral act. The moral aspect sets the prophetic act apart from intellectual, artistic, and mystical experiences.[^9]

The vigorous compassion and creativity of a true spirit of prophecy is what will be required for humanity’s successful transition through the turbulent labor pains of our transhuman era. My confident hope is that, as existing secular and religious institutions falter and buckle under the stress of accelerating change, they will in their desperation become more and more willing to try the remedies prescribed to them by those of us who take up the prophetic mantle and articulate compelling visions of the future. There will always be a need for prophecy. Our mastery of present problems is never sufficient to handle them with ease. Ingenuity and inspiration are indispensable. Art always precedes science. May we make diligent use of both as we strive to meet the challenges of our times.

Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 23. ↩︎
Heschel, The Prophets, 14. ↩︎
Heschel, The Prophets, 260. ↩︎
Heschel, The Prophets, 14. ↩︎
Heschel, The Prophets, 6. ↩︎
Heschel, The Prophets, 280. ↩︎

“I Was a Stranger”

Sun, 12 Jun 2016 00:00:00 GMT

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“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’” (Matthew 25:31–40, NRSV)[^1]

A lot of remarkable things are happening in this passage. One thing that strikes me is how Christ becomes a stand-in for humanity in its humblest forms. As taught here and in other scriptural passages, Christ is not just an individual, but also a body or community composed of many members who become both the objects and the subjects of a trial that is ongoing to this day. Will we, the subjects of this trial, take his name upon us by seeing Christ in even his most humble relatives, or will we fail to recognize him and pass by?

Jesus seemed to have a knack for maximizing every teaching opportunity, for striking at the heart of an issue and reaching his audience where they were most vulnerable. As I read his words carefully, he seems to be asking us to do pretty hard things, things that take us well out of our comfort zone. When was the last time you visited someone in prison, for example? I’m reminded of the words of Rainer Maria Rilke: “…What we choose to fight is so tiny! What fights with us is so great… When we win it’s with small things, and the triumph itself makes us small.”[^2] I speak to you today as a fellow struggler. I’m not doing that well at this, but like you, I am at least convicted by Jesus’s words and I want to try harder.

✦ ✦ ✦

Sometimes what seem to be our strengths can actually get in the way. This is taught well by a related parable of Jesus, the parable of the Good Samaritan. One challenge of this parable is that we’re so familiar with it that we think we know it already. We’ve convinced ourselves that it is an indictment of religious insincerity and religious hypocrisy: of people who profess one thing but do another. But actually it’s precisely the opposite. It’s about the danger of sincere religion and religious sincerity.

To understand this, we need to get a little background into the Jewish religion of the day. Among the Jews’ most important practices was their purity code, something not uncommon for many different religions. Certain objects, people, races, foods and drinks can make the practitioner of a particular religion unclean and impure. To the Jew, coming in contact with a Gentile or even sitting down to eat with them, or touching a dead body, among many other things, made a person spiritually unclean, and they would have to go through a cleansing ritual at the temple in order to regain their purity. We Mormons are not without our own proscriptions, so we should hopefully be able to understand this at some level.

So when the first man in the parable, a good, sincere priest of the Jewish faith, heads home to Jericho after serving in the temple at Jerusalem, and encounters the unconscious man, stripped and beaten by the highway side, he is faced with an important question: “Can I be a neighbor to this man? Can I get involved with this man according to my religious code?” He doesn’t know for sure if the man is Jew or Gentile, because he has been stripped of all clothing, and he may even be dead. He knows if he gets any closer than five feet away from a dead body, he will be rendered impure and have to make the trek back to Jerusalem to cleanse himself. Like every good and sincere Jew, he makes the traditional calculation and arrives at the traditional answer. “Can I be this man’s neighbor?” And the traditional answer according to his religion is “no.” He arrives at this decision not by breaking his code but by keeping it; he does it out of sincere religious devotion.

The next person, a Levite, is more of a common functionary than the priest. Far be it from him to question the wisdom of one who is higher in the line of authority than himself. He also comes to the sincere conclusion that it would be a violation of the commandments to approach the man, and wisely passes by on the other side.

✦ ✦ ✦

Then comes the first surprise in the story. According to the pecking order that the listeners would expect, the next person would probably be a layperson, an ordinary Israelite. They probably expected some kind of twist to the story, because this guy Jesus is always twisting stories, but this still threw them for a loop. He’s not even in the pecking order at all. In fact, he comes from one of the very untouchable classes that you’re not supposed to have anything to do with—a Samaritan.

The Samaritan had a similar code of religious purity, but when confronted with the injured man, he is moved with compassion. I’m told that the English translation here doesn’t do it justice. In the original Greek verb, splahnk-neetz-o-my, there is a connotation of upset bowels. It’s as though his guts are writhing and turning over in compassion. This explosion of compassion is so overwhelming that it simply blows the purity code apart, and he goes across the road and ministers to the man. That’s the scandal at the heart of the story.

✦ ✦ ✦

Now let’s pause for a second here to think about our codes, our [doctrines and commandments]. We need them. We need our codes because we are a potentially chaotic people, we humans. We do terrible things to each other. We need discipline and order. We need highway codes in order not to kill each other on the roads [and even then we struggle to keep them]. We need our codes.

And the history of human culture is the history of the codes that we have devised to keep ourselves from destroying one another, to keep some kind of cooperation and peace and love and human community. But there is something else that we also learn, that the codes themselves are means to ends and never should become ends in themselves, because otherwise they become stupid.

The temptation as Mormons is to assume that our codes are perfect, having been received more recently and by a more direct revelation in our time, but as Paul said, “where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away” (1 Cor 13:8).[^3] Charity is the only thing that “never faileth.”

Jesus said to people that he was arguing with about the Sabbath (which is a good example of a good code, because people need a rest): it was made for us, not us for it.

The same could be said for all the commandments. And, as Jesus taught, there will be times when we have to look beyond them in order to minister in love to the fullness of humanity.

✦ ✦ ✦

As we think about how we can minister to the stranger, I think it’s important for us to be as relentless as Jesus as we strive to identify the most needful targets of our compassion today. For example, if Jesus were to tell this parable to a Mormon audience, the Priest would probably be an apostle, the Levite a Seventy, stake president or bishop, and their failure to do the needful would be the result of a sincere effort to keep the commandments. The Samaritan would be whatever one might imagine to be the most untouchable class in our culture today, perhaps a gay person who has apostatized from the Church, maybe even who is covered in tattoos and swears like a sailor for good measure, but who nevertheless manages to be a good neighbor to someone who is in desperate need.

Jesus was always focused on the marginalized, the underdog, and his teachings remain relevant because every culture and power system has its pariahs, its untouchables, including ours.

As I’ve tried to step outside of my comfort zone and suspend my codes long enough to truly listen to and help the shunned and the oppressed, I have seen Christ in their countenances. I don’t do this as often or as well as I should, but I’m trying to do better. I hope you’ll join me. In the name of Christ, amen.

“Help Thou Mine Unbelief”

Sat, 09 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

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This paper was presented at MTAConf 2016

In the course of his interactions with Brigham Young, Parley P. Pratt was once said to have proclaimed that after the practice of polygamy was made public, he had assumed that the “cat” had finally been let out of the proverbial “bag.” Brigham Young, however, let him know that he had another thing coming: “Allow me to tell you, Elders of Israel, and delegates to Congress, you may expect an eternity of cats, that have not yet escaped from the bag.”[^1]

Lately, widespread access to information, vastly accelerated by the Internet, seems to have caused the number of cats and bags to multiply inordinately, much to the consternation of Brigham Young’s successors. The arcane and sometimes disturbing details of a tight-knit provincial faith community on the western frontier and its uncomfortable transition out of obscurity have been documented in excruciating detail, and this information is now widely available to lay audiences. While Mormon history enthusiasts and apologists sometimes complain to those who are surprised by this information that it has been available all along, few dispute that its accessibility has increased dramatically, and that this accessibility has presented new challenges. It has made it difficult for the LDS Church to control its narrative as tightly as it used to be able to.

✦ ✦ ✦

During prior eras, such as the one in which LDS general authority LeGrand Richards published his well-known A Marvelous Work and a Wonder, Mormon modernism ruled the day, convinced of its ability to circumscribe all truth neatly into one great whole, and that all the answers and proofs necessary to overwhelm the faith’s opponents would shortly be forthcoming, if they hadn’t arrived already.

Richards and his contemporaries, some of whom I continue to encounter on a weekly basis at Church, were convinced they had tailor-made answers to all the questions of the day. And they were probably right, especially if one judges by the explosive growth of the Church during the sixties and seventies.

But as theologian Richard Holloway has observed, though the truths that undergird our worldview may be fixed, static, and immovable, we are not. The goalposts of our post-secular culture seem to be changing around these Mormon modernists, and they begin to find themselves in a difficult position. Unlike prior generations of Mormon missionaries, who could draw from a common religious narrative when interacting with potential converts, the missionaries of today have an especially difficult pitch. Now, they must first convince potential converts that they have a problem, and then they must convince them that they have the solution to that problem.

Prior generations tended not to dispute missionaries’ emphasis on the importance of priesthood authority and the necessity of salvific sacraments, though they may have disputed the Mormons’ particular claims. But claiming that anything is important merely because ‘God said so,’ is becoming more difficult, especially when one’s audience is not certain of God’s existence! Even those who do believe in God seem increasingly to think that requiring particular sacraments for salvation is arbitrary and capricious.

✦ ✦ ✦

The dichotomies of true or false, historical or fictitious, are the catch-phrases of the modernist generation.

They can often be heard doubling down on this rhetoric, encouraging members of the faith that theirs is an all or nothing proposition—either the *Book of Mormon* is "true," by which they mean it is an accurate history of an ancient civilization, or it is worthless. Either Joseph Smith experienced everything the neo-orthodox narrative claims, or he is a fraud, and church participation is without value. But to these and other claims the millennial generation increasingly seems to ask, "Why should I care?" And, judging by current trends in Church growth and attrition, the answers they're getting are less and less convincing.

One can observe a number of different reactions or approaches to this growing disaffection and difficulty in proselytizing from inside and outside the faith.

✦ ✦ ✦

One approach can be broadly characterized as an appeal to apologetics and academic research.

Questions and concerns about flaws in the narrative are answered with research that attempts to reframe the controversies in ways that make them more comprehensible and acceptable to today's churchgoers. Religious scholars who remain faithful despite their rigorous academic training are also valorized as examples of how to handle faith struggles appropriately.

While apologetics sometimes help, they have limitations. Paul Tillich explains that apologetics can provide temporary relief from perceived flaws in one’s religious narratives and symbols if one’s concerns are not too difficult to answer and if one’s conviction of the faith’s truth claims remains essentially intact.[^2]

Another challenge of apologetics is that apologists often distance themselves somewhat from more mystical or superstitious aspects of the faith in an effort to justify their position rationally, but in so doing they weaken their ties to the symbols of the faith that are necessary to maintain its vitality. As Tillich describes:

It often happens that in opposition to literalism, myth and cult are attacked as such and almost removed from a community of faith. The myth is replaced by a philosophy of religion, the cult is replaced by a code of moral demands. It is possible for such a state to last for a while because the original faith is still effective in it. Even the negation of the expressions of faith does not negate the faith itself—at least not in the beginning. This is the reason one can point to a nonreligious morality of a high order and can attempt to deny the interdependence of faith and morals. But there is a limit to this possibility. Without an ultimate concern as its basis every system of morals degenerates into a method of adjustment to social demands, whether they are ultimately justified or not. And the infinite passion which characterizes a genuine faith evaporates and is replaced by a clever calculation which is unable to withstand the passionate attacks of an idolatrous faith.[^3]

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Another approach to lagging faith is an appeal to institutional authority.

The authority of present (and past) institutional leaders is sometimes used to downplay or dismiss doubts or concerns about doctrinal inconsistencies, changes in doctrine or liturgy, ethical challenges, historical controversies or failures of leadership. The difficulty of this approach is that it undermines the values that originally attracted others to the religion, including a commitment to truth seeking and a willingness to depart from the status quo to follow a prophetic mandate, faith in historical connectedness and consistency, and a commitment to equal treatment under divine law. By valuing loyalty to authority above other principles, those who employ this approach also run a similar risk to the apologists—that of replacing the "infinite passion" of a genuine faith for a "clever calculation" that will not be able "to withstand the passionate attacks of an idolatrous faith."

What Tillich means by “an idolatrous faith” is not necessarily religion in the traditional sense. It may be that, but it may also be any movement or community that is centered around an “ultimate concern”. For Tillich, nationalism, obsession with worldly success, political ideologies and atheism, to name a few, can be, and have often been, ultimate concerns in which many individuals and communities have exercised faith. Whenever a religion mistakenly places a finite human construct as its ultimate concern, it engages in idolatry, expecting of its ultimate concern something that it is incapable of delivering.

One example of an idolatrous faith is an appeal to fundamentalism. Disillusioned by an apparent lack of consistency or commitment to principle in present leaders, or by challenges to the orthodox narrative, some seek refuge in a more distant past where doctrinal purity and consistency can be more easily imagined, and where increased isolation makes inconsistencies and paradigm mismatches less apparent. Ironically, those who embrace fundamentalism and literalism are able to do so because of the scientific precision that they have inherited from secularism.

Another common approach is an appeal to secularism. This also qualifies as what Tillich calls “nonreligious morality,” which ultimately fails to provide the communal rigor and motivation necessary to resist more virulent forms of idolatry.

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Each of these approaches is a different way of avoiding what Tillich calls “breaking the myth,” or recognizing religious symbols as such rather than as literal reifications of the divine, while still retaining (rather than discarding) them.

He explains:

Christianity denies by its very nature any unbroken myth, because its presupposition is the first commandment: the affirmation of the ultimate as ultimate and the rejection of any kind of idolatry. All mythological elements in the Bible, and doctrine and liturgy should be recognized as mythological, but they should be maintained in their symbolic form and not be replaced by scientific substitutes. For there is no substitute for the use of symbols and myths: they are the language of faith.[^4]

It’s important to clarify that “myth” is being used to refer to a deeply-valued narrative or overarching moral truth, not a fable. Breaking a myth isn’t to discard it as wholly flawed or irrelevant, but to recognize and retain those aspects of it that are of greatest value, namely its ability to transcend the circumstances of its emergence, and inspire and help us in our present challenges.

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A friend, Holly Huff, recently shared such a paradigm-shattering period in her life.

Her account is a powerful example of the very myth-breaking process that Tillich describes.

Recognizing my faith crisis as the smashing of an idolatrous God-figure gave powerful meaning to that painful process. These idols fall because they confront a true reality that extends beyond them. God can’t be contained. The living God is impervious to our attempts to wholly rationalize the Divine.

I had so many idolatrous beliefs about God. (God rewards obedience and punishes disobedience; God is a respecter of persons who treats some groups of people differently than others; God is indifferent or distantly dispassionate about suffering because it is the just result of wickedness, and many more.) All of those false and limiting ideas were baked in to my concept of God, and I had to start over in some pretty fundamental ways. I was an atheist for a while and I slowly came back to believing in God in an entirely different manner. It’s the best worst thing that ever happened to me.

Here is one possible reading of the empty tomb. Something goes wrong in our religious life, it seems. We are confronted with harsh realities, and God gets killed. The figure we revered as master dies a harsh death, and we are at a loss. What now? Our sense of purpose is devastated. Did we really get it so wrong? Were we just fooling ourselves the whole time? In this moment, it seems like perhaps we were.

We go about our lives anguished, empty, and mourning. We make preparations to bury our dead, and then we stumble, still grieving, onto the miracle. The God we thought we’d seen murdered lives. We hadn’t understood who he was in the first place. We looked for him in the wrong places. God’s power to redeem is revealed in what seems like the utter disaster of his death.

Easter promises that this pain so many of us feel or have felt in doubting can be redemptive, and that a faith crisis doesn’t have the final say. It in fact may point to the greater truth of a living God.

“Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, for he is risen.”[^5]

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In the July 1906 Improvement Era, B. H. Roberts wrote presciently of the need for disciples who are capable of managing such tensions.

He begins by quoting Josiah Royce:

Disciples and partisans, in the world of religious and of philosophical opinion, are of two sorts. There are, first, the disciples pure and simple,—people who fall under the spell of a person or of a doctrine, and whose whole intellectual life thenceforth consists in their partisanship. They expound, and defend, and ward off foes, and live and die faithful to the one formula. Such disciples may be indispensable at first in helping a new teaching to get a popular hearing, but in the long run they rather hinder than help the wholesome growth of the very ideas that they defend: for great ideas live by growing, and a doctrine that has merely to be preached, over and over, in the same terms, cannot possibly be the whole truth. No [one] ought to be merely a faithful disciple of [anyone else]. Yes, no [one] ought to be a mere disciple even of oneself. We live spiritually by outliving our formulas, and by thus enriching our sense of their deeper meaning. Now the disciples of the first sort do not live in this larger and more spiritual sense. They repeat. And true life is never mere repetition.

On the other hand, there are disciples of a second sort. They are [people] who have been attracted to a new doctrine by the fact that it gave expression, in a novel way, to some large and deep interest which had already grown up in themselves, and which had already come, more or less independently, to their own consciousness. They thus bring to the new teaching, from the first, their own personal contribution. The truth that they gain is changed as it enters their souls. The seed that the sower strews upon their fields springs up in their soil, and bears fruit,—thirty, sixty, an hundred fold. They return to their master his own with usury. Such [individuals] are the disciples that it is worthwhile for a master to have. Disciples of the first sort often become, as Schopenhauer said, mere magnifying mirrors wherein one sees enlarged, all the defects of a doctrine. Disciples of the second sort co-operate in the works of the Spirit; and even if they always remain rather disciples than originators, they help to lead the thought that they accept to a truer expression. They force it beyond its earlier and cruder stages of development.

Roberts comments on this passage:

I believe “Mormonism” affords opportunity for disciples of the second sort; nay, that its crying need is for such disciples. It calls for thoughtful disciples who will not be content with merely repeating some of its truths, but will develop its truths; and enlarge it by that development. Not half—not one-hundredth part—not a thousandth part of that which Joseph Smith revealed to the Church has yet been unfolded, either to the Church or to the world. The work of the expounder has scarcely begun. The Prophet planted by teaching the germ-truths of the great dispensation of the fulness of times. The watering and the weeding is going on, and God is giving the increase, and will give it more abundantly in the future as more intelligent discipleship shall obtain. The disciples of “Mormonism,” growing discontented with the necessarily primitive methods which have hitherto prevailed in sustaining the doctrine, will yet take profounder and broader views of the great doctrines committed to the Church; and, departing from mere repetition, will cast them in new formulas; co-operating in the works of the Spirit, until they help to give to the truths received a more forceful expression, and carry it beyond the earlier and cruder stages of its development.[^6]

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The Mormon Transhumanist Association seeks to cultivate disciples of the second sort.

We believe in confronting paradigm tensions with courage and compassion, recognizing the lasting value in our theological and cultural inheritance while yet being unafraid to examine and reconsider areas of weakness. We reject fundamentalism, neo-orthodoxy, cynicism, and complacency. We are running out of alternatives as the paradigm tension increases. May we respond prophetically to the challenges of our times and meet "the passionate attacks" of idolatrous faith with a more compelling alternative that is true and faithful to the best in Mormonism.

To the Jews, a Stumblingblock, and to the Greeks, Foolishness

Fri, 03 Apr 2015 00:00:00 GMT

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This was presented at MTAConf 2015

Although most religious people anticipate some kind of eventual salvation and victory over death, it’s not uncommon for many of them to hesitate when the prospect is actually within reach. When grand overarching redemption narratives remain in the distant future, they are safe; they provide comfort in trials without interfering too much with our daily lives. The surprising near-term apocalyptic predictions of transhumanists, however, can be disturbing. They threaten the tidily sewn-up redemption narratives, perhaps especially for some Mormons, whose non-metaphysical universe is compatible enough with transhumanist visions of the future to give them pause. Many people react to these visions with both awe and disappointment, sometimes at the same time. There’s a feeling of “whoa, that’s crazy,” and “wait, is that all there is?”, sort of like the red-headed man who is at first astounded at Sherlock Holmes’ ability to divine intimate details of his personal history but who, after having it all explained to him says, “I thought at first that you had done something clever, but I see that there was nothing in it after all” (“The Red-Headed League,” Arthur Conan Doyle).

At our 2014 MTA conference, our Mormon guest speaker, Adam Miller, shared his reservations about transhumanism with a vivid metaphor. Outing himself as perhaps the most reluctant resurrectionist in all Mormondom, Miller used the pop culture vampire as a metaphor for radical life extension. “For the vampire, the extension of life itself inevitably becomes something to be suffered. Every cable TV vampire worth their salt, finds their existential crisis heightened, rather than ameliorated by their quasi-immortality.” Miller made the important point that physical renewal without a corresponding spiritual transformation (which is what, presumably, Miller assumes transhumanist salvation to be) would only serve to increase our boredom and brokenness. Like many religious people, Miller seems reluctant to accept transhumanist salvation as legitimate, for perhaps good reasons, depending on which transhumanists one is listening to.

I’d like to address these kinds of concerns today. They arise, I believe, both from lack of imagination on the part of many religionists and from lack of ethical awareness on the part of many transhumanists. This is also an area where I feel the Mormon Transhumanist Association can provide some much-needed thought leadership.

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It can sometimes be alienating to be a religious transhumanist.

The apostle Paul seemed to describe our predicament well when he said that his message was "unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks, foolishness" (1 Cor. 1:23). On the one hand, many futurists, technologists and transhumanists are strongly secular and see little or no benefit in the religious perspectives that we articulate. On the other hand, the ways we frame these perspectives is often viewed with suspicion by other religious people.

One of our primary goals as an organization is to try to bridge the gap between the sublime and the secular. We want to get strangers talking to each other and finding more common ground with one another. Come to a meetup of Mormon Transhumanists and you’ll find some strange combinations. Devoutly religious people rub shoulders with skeptics and atheists, and everyone seems to still be friends! Conversations tend to be enthusiastic and respectful. Who are these people?!

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Why do we care about bridging this gap?

We feel that both sides of this divide need each other in important ways. Ours is an age in which much technological progress seems to be carried out by secularists. According to a recent survey published in *Sociology of Religion*, the rate of atheism and agnosticism in the academy is roughly ten times higher than in the general population of the United States. There is a perception that many secularists have a disdain for religious people and a lack of respect for tradition. This perception, warranted or not, makes it a lot harder for society to successfully navigate many of the existential risks in our future. Scientists and technologists are distrusted at times when their opinions are increasingly important, and this distrust can often lead to reduced funding for scientific research.

Mormon transhumanism attempts to syncretize and valorize traditional practices while holding our minds open to new possibilities. Having been raised, for the most part, in traditional backgrounds, we see the value in these traditions while we also recognize some of their limitations. We want to respect and preserve tradition, to the extent it remains beneficial.

We have also personally observed that many secular groups connected with transhumanism have struggled with internal contention and disagreement that has hampered their progress. Our Mormon upbringing has given us an exceptional capacity for cooperation that helps us to overcome these fractious tendencies and get things done. The Mormon Transhumanist Association, partly as a result of these qualities, is currently the largest advocacy network for the ethical use of technology and religion and one of the largest transhumanist organizations.

So Mormonism bolsters these two qualities among transhumanists, among others: it promotes a more respectful and less disdainful attitude towards those people and groups whose cooperation will be critical towards the future success of our civilization, and it understands how to organize effectively.

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In addition to these pragmatic qualities, Mormon theology is remarkably compatible with a secular worldview in ways that are often surprising to those who are less familiar with it.

Mormon scripture teaches that "there is no such thing as immaterial matter," but that all spiritual phenomena must ultimately be measurable and observable in some way. Properly speaking, there is no metaphysics in Mormon cosmology—all phenomena, even those that appear to us to be miraculous, must have some natural explanation, and even God is bound by law. Mormons also view God as a progressing being who previously lived in a state very similar to the one we're experiencing now. These and other beliefs have the potential to make Mormonism much more coherent and palatable to secular audiences, although I believe our culture hasn't historically attempted to reach these audiences as well as we could. On more than one occasion I've seen die-hard atheists become quite surprised and taken aback by some of these ideas.

Many secular transhumanist visions of the future fail to address important ethical challenges that religion has explored more seriously. For example, Ray Kurzweil, in his bestselling book The Singularity Is Near, describes a hedonistic future in which people will be able to have sex in virtual worlds with simulations of their favorite celebrities. Christian pastor and transhumanist Chris Benek rescues this narrative by pointing out that any intimate relationship worth having requires both parties to be sentient, and once a being is sentient, we are morally obligated to obtain its consent for all our interactions with it, and to interact with it in ways that are conducive to its well-being.

This brings up the concept of mind uploading. Some secular transhumanist visions of the future have spoken of the body as a burden and a nuisance that we will eventually discard when it becomes possible to upload our consciousness directly into a computer. Mormon theology, on the other hand, values embodiment highly and claims that only when our consciousness is united with a body can we receive “a fullness of joy.” Indeed, artificial intelligence researchers are discovering how essential embodiment is to all aspects of learning. While we may eventually gain the ability to upload our minds to another computational substrate, that substrate had better be as rich as what we are currently experiencing, or it will lack essential aspects of living. For all relevant intents and purposes, successfully uploaded minds will be embodied still.

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I've touched on some of the ways religious transhumanism can complement and inform secular audiences.

I'd like to spend the rest of my time addressing some concerns we often hear from religious audiences, both Mormon and non.

As I said earlier, Adam Miller raised the concern that mere immortality would be insufficient to overcome our natural brokenness and propensity to sin, and could in fact exacerbate some of the problems of our present existence. I agree with him, and I feel that his calling attention to this deficiency is a good example of how secular transhumanism sometimes overlooks or downplays certain ethical challenges. Merely living indefinitely would not satisfy us if the nature of our lives did not also adapt to our new condition.

Mormonism distinguishes between immortality (overcoming death) and “eternal life,” which is defined as overcoming sin, or achieving a state of godlike compassion and benevolence. Mormon transhumanists believe that such eternal life is both something we should strive toward as we contemplate any physical healing or enhancement, and something that we should use all tools at our disposal to try to achieve, including science and technology.

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Another concern that is often expressed by religious people is the worry that we are “playing god,” that is, that there are certain ‘lines in the sand’ that are the purview of God alone, and that we are not to cross.

I believe that this reflects a misunderstanding of our relationship with God. Jesus repeatedly described our relationship with him and God as one of intimate communion and interconnectivity. He prayed that we "might be one in him, even as he is one with the father," and described himself as a vine on which his disciples were the branches. Paul taught further that we are members of the body of Christ and that, as we serve in our several capacities, we become the means through which the salvation of Christ is administered. In this sense, "playing god" is exactly what we are called to do as the servants of God. We are called to be God's eyes, ears, hands and feet, and to be the means through which God's salvation is administered. Mormonism goes further to claim that our divine destiny, our most noble aspiration, is to become like our heavenly parents—gods.

This, of course, doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible to pursue desired futures in detrimental ways—just that the appropriateness of certain technological advances depends greatly on the context and the motivations of those involved. Whether or not “playing god” is a virtue or a vice depends entirely on the type of god we are “playing.” Do we use our power to exalt ourselves to the exclusion of others, or to exalt our fellows alongside ourselves? Do we strive to emulate the noblest qualities we can conceive of in our heavenly parents, or do we selfishly lord our authority over others? Mormonism teaches that “power and influence …” can only be maintained “by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned” (D&C 121:41). This is the model that Mormon Transhumanists strive to emulate.

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Futurists, technologists and secularists stand to benefit greatly from the contributions of this merry band of oddballs, as do the traditionally religious. In speaking of our work, we often use the “Jim Bridger” analogy. When the pioneers and settlers migrated westward, they didn’t blaze their own trails; instead, they followed the trails that others had blazed, like the trapper Jim Bridger. As we seek to identify and map this terrain, our hope is that this reconnaissance work may be of future benefit to our brothers and sisters both in and out of the Church.

Religion as Social Technology

Wed, 29 Jan 2014 00:00:00 GMT

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What if religion is not the relic of a pre-scientific age that many suppose it to be, but rather one of humanity’s oldest and most powerful technologies—a social technology, deeply rooted in our evolutionary past, that we continue to deploy, often without realizing it? This essay argues that religion, properly understood, is far more pervasive and enduring than conventional accounts suggest, and that recognizing it as a form of social technology can help us appreciate both its value and its persistence.

During the past two centuries, social theorists have contributed to what has come to be called the “secularization thesis.” This thesis identifies three main trends. First, progress in science and technology promotes a “disenchanted” view of the world, in which an ever-increasing number of events can be causally explained without recourse to theology or metaphysics. Second, as governing structures adapt to scientific advances, churches and other religious organizations lose their control over law, politics, public welfare, education, and science, restricting themselves to pastoral functions and rendering religion a largely private matter. Third, the increased prosperity brought on by industrialization and the rise of the welfare state reduce the need for reliance on a “higher” power to cope with life’s inherent risks.

This hypothesis is now showing signs of age. Sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas explains that “among the expert community of sociologists, the [secularization] thesis has been a subject of controversy for more than two decades,” and that “there is even talk of the ‘end of secularization theory.’”^[1] While global data still provides some support for secularization, Habermas argues that the theory’s weakness lies in “rash inferences that betray an imprecise use of the concepts of ‘secularization’ and ‘modernization.’”

Habermas calls his revised framework “postsecularism.” He points out that the European model of secularization has been the exception rather than the rule. The United States, for instance, remains home to vibrant religious communities and a high proportion of religiously active citizens—while simultaneously serving as the spearhead of modernization. It was once seen as an unusual holdout against the secularization trend, but wider perspectives on other cultures and world religions now suggest that it exemplifies the norm. Although American churches have largely lost control over governmental functions, they continue to exert powerful “soft” influence by encouraging their congregants to be politically active and by clear messaging on issues of importance to them. And from a global perspective, religion—especially fundamentalism—is actually on the rise.

Two conclusions follow from postsecularism. First, religion has been misunderstood. And second—perhaps most importantly—religion is not going away anytime soon, so we had better try to understand it.

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What Is Religion?

Religion has been notoriously difficult to define. We tend to think of it as the church on the corner—as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or Judaism. But we forget that religion existed long before the popular denominations of today. In many instances, religion has been characterized too narrowly.

Renowned anthropologist Clifford Geertz offered a more expansive definition: religion is “a system of symbols that, when enacted by human beings, establishes powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations that make sense in terms of an idea of a general order of existence.”[^2] One may notice that this description applies to a surprisingly broad range of human activities, some of which may not traditionally be associated with religion at all. We shall explore this thought further.

In his magnum opus Religion in Human Evolution, sociologist Robert Bellah illustrates this broader conception of religion by drawing on a wide array of biological, archaeological, and anthropological research.[^3] He demonstrates that religion was not merely an important phase of our evolutionary development, but is actually one of the “conserved core processes” that contributes to our ongoing survival—part of our very nature. He traces its emergence in our evolutionary predecessors and identifies several necessary components that preceded it.

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Empathy

One of the first components Bellah emphasizes is empathy. Primatologist Frans de Waal theorizes that empathy probably began with the parental care required in mammals, who are born before they are functionally mature. As de Waal writes in The Age of Empathy:

During 200 million years of mammalian evolution, females sensitive to their offspring outreproduced those who were cold and distant. . . . Empathy is part of a heritage as ancient as the mammalian line. . . . The capacity arose long ago with motor mimicry and emotional contagion, after which evolution added layer after layer, until our ancestors not only felt what others felt, but understood what others might want or need.[^4]

Anthropologist Sarah Hrdy argues that this empathy was amplified by cooperative breeding, when our ancestors began depending on tribal support in raising their children.[^5]

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Play and Possible Worlds

Another critical component is what Bellah calls “relaxed selection”—the idea that when genetic controls under the pressure of natural selection are relaxed, the interplay between conserved structures and innovative variations may be enhanced. Parental care among mammals shelters newborns from direct selective pressures and allows things like play to develop, which, over the long term, can yield benefits that eclipse even direct adaptations.

Gordon Burghardt identifies several essential features of animal play: it has no immediate purpose other than relieving boredom; it is pleasurable in itself; it borrows behaviors from everyday life (fighting, chasing, wrestling) but strips them of their ordinary aims; it is performed repeatedly but not rigidly; and it occurs when an animal is well-fed, healthy, and free from stress—in a “relaxed field.”[^6]

What makes play especially significant for human development is “pretend” play, which children engage in before they can even speak. Developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik describes this as the creation of “possible worlds.” When she says that “human beings don’t live in the real world,” she means not that we do this all the time, but that we spend a great deal of time in “dreams and plans, fictions and hypotheses”—the products of hope and imagination.[^7]

Bellah reminds us that the opposite of play is not seriousness. Play can be very serious. He quotes Freud: “Every playing child behaves like a poet, in that he creates a world of his own. . . . The antithesis of play is reality, not seriousness.”[^8] But then Bellah presses further: “If the child is a poet, is poetry not real? Is King Lear not real? Far more real than an unfortunate domestic breakdown reported in the daily paper?” He concludes: “Possible worlds, multiple realities, have consequences we could not live without.”[^9]

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From Play to Ritual to Religion

This brings us to a critical juncture in Bellah’s argument:

"Ritual is the primordial form of serious play in human evolutionary history. . . . Religion . . . is something that grows out of ritual in a variety of ways that never leave ritual entirely behind."

Bellah stresses that human culture develops incrementally. While it may advance to new phases, it always retains elements of the previous ones. He identifies three broad phases: mimetic (in which primitive humans communicate primarily by mimicking and gesture), mythic (in which language enables narrative), and theoretic (in which old narratives are questioned and reorganized, old rituals and myths replaced with new ones).[^9]

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The Power of Myth

Among these phases, myth—or narrative—deserves special attention. Myth literally means “story,” especially, in the context of religion, stories about transcendent human experiences. Contrary to the popular understanding of the word, myths are not untrue. They may be based on historical events—and often are. But their power is not derived from their historicity. It comes from their being compelling motivational narratives that remain relevant long after the historical incidents that inspired them have faded. Even myths that are obviously fable still contain overarching moral truths that help to order a people’s worldview.

Myths are symbols that point us beyond our present everyday concerns toward an overarching purpose. They bring meaning to our lives. And as human beings, we crave meaning—we want it so badly that we create it where it wasn’t before. The most compelling created meanings are the ones that tend to endure the longest.

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Religion in Secular Clothing

This insight leads to a crucial observation: in many instances, the secular narrative has taken on religious functions. Despite undergoing rapid change, religion today is alive and well—and shows up in some unexpected places.

Religion blogger Nathaniel Givens provides a vivid example:

One prominent and oft-cited example of this is the secular religion of environmentalism. The degree to which the green movement recapitulates all the high notes of Christianity is so brazen that it is ripe for parody. We all existed in a state of natural bliss and union with nature until the serpent of modern technology entered and we partook of the forbidden fruit of industrialization, thus causing us to be expelled from Eden. . . . It’s basically Christianity without Christ.[^10]

Givens is careful to add that none of this calls into question the science of anthropogenic climate change. The point is that the issue has social weight not primarily because of the science—practically no one understands complex climate models—but because of the narrative. As he puts it: “We are disaffected. . . . Something is missing, and we need a narrative to plug the hole. Environmentalism fits the profile. Whether or not it is factually true is beside the point.”

Givens shares another example from the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre: rather than turning to religion to assuage grief, twenty-first-century newspapers extensively covered plans to study the killer’s DNA. Scientifically, this was meaningless—“as relevant as reading entrails or casting bones, and that’s precisely the point: science is increasingly being cast to fill the role that religion once filled.”[^10]

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When Science Becomes Religion

This tendency extends to science’s most celebrated popularizers. Mary Midgley identifies two frequent pitfalls scientists fall into when discussing the broader implications of their discoveries: “cosmic optimism” and “cosmic pessimism.”[^11] Robert Bellah shares examples of both.

As an instance of cosmic optimism, consider Eric Chaisson in Cosmic Evolution, calling for what amounts to a new universal creation myth—a “powerful and true myth” grounded in scientific discovery, which “people of all cultures can readily understand and adopt.”[^12] Bellah responds with sympathy but also criticism: Chaisson “is, in fact, calling for a new church to go with his new religion.” The problem is the implicit claim that this myth is uniquely true, which “leads perilously close to the implication that all the other religions are false.” Chaisson would have avoided this error, Bellah argues, had he acknowledged that “myth is not science. Myth can be true, but it is a different kind of truth from the truth of science and must be judged by different criteria.”[^13]

At the other extreme stands Jacques Monod’s cosmic pessimism, in which humanity must “wake out of his millenary dream and discover his total solitude, his fundamental isolation.”[^14] Bellah notes that Monod, “although a distinguished scientist and one of the founders of molecular biology,” has entered “the world of metaphysical speculation” and constructed, as Midgley puts it, “a drama in which Sartrean man appears as the lonely hero challenging an alien and meaningless universe.”[^15]

Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson offer more recent examples. Sagan tells us, “We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself.”[^16] Tyson proclaims that “we’re all connected, to each other biologically, to the earth chemically, and to the rest of the universe atomically.”[^17] These are breathtaking and inspiring narratives. But let us be clear: in these moments, these scientists are not engaged in science. They are making meaning. This does not diminish the value of what they are doing—far from it. But we stand to benefit from a clearer and more open acknowledgment of where science ends and meaning-making begins.

Nietzsche made a similar observation about philosophers in Beyond Good and Evil, noting that they “all pose as though their real opinions had been discovered and attained through the self-evolving of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic,” when in fact they are defending prejudices “which they dub ‘truths’—and VERY far from having the conscience which bravely admits this to itself.”[^18]

Bellah concludes his discussion on an ecumenical note:

I also believe that, in spite of our differences, we do not need to fall into culture wars in which we denounce and anathematize those with whom we disagree. This is a big universe; there is room for all of us.[^19]

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Let us return to Geertz’s definition of religion as “a system of symbols that, when enacted by human beings, establishes powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations.”[^20] This definition calls to mind William James’s landmark essay, “The Will to Believe”:

The capacity of the strenuous mood lies so deep down among our natural human possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical or traditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postulate one simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest. . . . Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life’s evils, is set free in those who have religious faith. For this reason the strenuous type of character will on the battle-field of human history always outwear the easy-going type, and religion will drive irreligion to the wall.[^21]

Religion, according to Geertz, Bellah, and James, is whatever narratives and shared rituals are capable of provoking this strenuous mood—this impulse that inspires human beings to collective action toward desired goals and outcomes. In this sense, religion can be understood as a social technology: one that comes from so far back in our evolutionary past that we are often not used to thinking about it that way. But by recognizing it for what it is, we can draw clearer distinctions between religious and scientific modalities, better understand the value and pervasiveness of religion, and perhaps learn to use it more effectively—whether or not we call it religion at all.

Jürgen Habermas, “Notes on a Post-Secular Society,” Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik (April 2008). English translation published at signandsight.com, June 18, 2008. Originally delivered as a lecture at the Nexus Institute, University of Tilburg, Netherlands, March 15, 2007. ↩︎

Demythologizing Mormonism

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT

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Ulysses — Fernando Pessoa

O mytho é o nada que é tudo.
O mesmo sol que abre os céus
É um mytho brilhante e mudo—
O corpo morto de Deus,
Vivo e desnudo.

Este, que aqui aportou,
Foi por não ser existindo.
Sem existir nos bastou.
Por não ter vindo foi vindo
E nos creou.

Assim a lenda se escorre
A entrar na realidade.
E a fecundal-a decorre.
Em baixo, a vida, metade
De nada, morre.

Ulysses[^1]

Myth is the nothing that is all.
The same sun that opens the skies
Is a bright myth that, silent, calls—
The dead body of God that lies,
Living, before all.

This man, who here disembarked,
Began, by not being, to be.
Absence was a good enough start.
Without life, he ultimately
Our life did impart.

Thus does the legend endeavor
To seep into reality,
Sowing seeds whithersoever.
Everyday life loses meaning
From its source severed.[^2]

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Thus begins the epic set of poems entitled Mensagem (“Message”) by Fernando Pessoa, a Portuguese poet and author regarded by Harold Bloom as one of the founders of the “Western Canon” and one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century.[^3] Through one of his many “heteronyms,” or alternate identities through which he often wrote, Pessoa lamented that he “belong[ed] to a generation of Portuguese who, after the Indies were discovered, found themselves out of a job.”[^4] Pessoa felt nostalgia for the industrious zeal displayed by his people during the Age of Discovery and deplored their subsequent languor and lack of ambition. Mensagem was an effort to rekindle that zeal by resurrecting the ancient symbols of Portuguese dominance. The title of this poem is “Ulysses,” the Latin name for the protagonist of Homer’s Odyssey, who, according to legend, founded the city of Lisbon.[^5] Pessoa displays keen insight into the nature of myth. It doesn’t just explain the world; it creates it. Although he wasn’t a ‘real’ person, this legendary figure, “by not being,” nonetheless provided the identity through which the Portuguese nation rose to become a superpower.

Like the ancient symbols of Portugal, the symbols of Mormonism are also in a state of flux. The Mormon Church is facing increased levels of disaffection^[1] and public scrutiny,^[2] in addition to increasing tension between its doctrinal paradigms and those of the larger culture. This essay seeks to explain this process and explore ways that Mormonism can adapt to the sea change it is presently experiencing. I wish to express my gratitude to Richard Holloway for his lectures at Gresham College on “The Myths of Christianity,” from which I borrow heavily.^[3]

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It is not uncommon for people to assume that the course of history has been one of steady and gradual progress. Thomas Kuhn argued otherwise in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.^[4] He described the process of scientific discovery as one of periods of relative peace and stability interrupted occasionally by dramatic upheavals in the prevalent scientific paradigm.

During the peaceful periods, scientists agree on the basic operating principles of the subjects of their research, but persistent unexplained phenomena push them towards further discoveries. Sometimes the existing theories can be made to work or slightly altered to explain things, and sometimes certain problems are shelved and neglected for a time. But when a discovery is clearly demonstrated to be more useful at solving previously unexplained or insufficiently understood problems, it succeeds in replacing the established paradigm.

For example, the Ptolemaic view of the heavens was replaced by the Copernican view, which in turn gave way to Newtonian physics and more recently to Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Each successive paradigm was accepted because it was able to answer both new and previously-resolved problems more adequately than its predecessor. It would be wrong to say that the previous paradigms were false, but their scope of usefulness was more limited in comparison to their successors. They worked for a while until, often quite suddenly, they no longer did.^[5]

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The same conception of progress can be applied to human knowledge in general. As we look back through history, we notice, perhaps disturbingly, that rather than being something fixed and eternal, most of what people thought of as “true” was contingent upon time and circumstances. This is a difficult notion for many. In fact, it is a problem that philosophers have argued over since at least the time of ancient Greece.

William James observed that one can classify people in general, and philosophers in particular, into two camps or temperaments—the rationalist and the empiricist.^[6] The rationalist temperament believes that there is a perfect external reality that we must conform to, that truth is static and eternal and can be arrived at through proper thinking or through revelation from agencies who are already in possession of it. Hence, it is often associated with religious authority. The empiricist temperament, on the other hand, tends to be skeptical of ideology, preferring instead to acquire truth through experiential observation.

James sought to achieve a cease-fire of sorts between the two camps by proposing that rationalist theories should not be dismissed out of hand, but should instead be subjected to empirical analysis. According to this philosophy, which he called “pragmatism,” assertions are “true” to the extent they hold up under empirical scrutiny, but they always retain some degree of tentativeness because they could be modified by new experience. Far from being against religion, James actually pointed out that religious beliefs and traditions can often be demonstrated to confer benefits on their followers, and that such benefits can be sufficient justification for religious faith. Truth, according to James, is “what works,” or what seems to provide the most effective explanations and solutions to our present challenges.^[7]

It is important to clarify that pragmatism is not the same as relativism. As individual subjective experiences are shared and corroborated, they attain a type of objectivity within a human context or frame of reference. But we can never break out of our human frame of reference to gain some sort of unfiltered access to the “really real.” This recognition is one of pragmatism’s significant contributions. Even rationalists tend to behave pragmatically in their everyday lives, although they may believe in absolute truth.

For example, if you are of a rationalist bent you probably profess a belief in “objective standards” or “eternal truths” that remain in force regardless of what people choose to do, and that we must comply with if we desire to live happy and successful lives. “But then,” as Holloway puts it, “anomalous things begin to happen. The objective standards may indeed still stand where they did, but we keep moving.”^[8]

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Religions often appeal to authoritative texts such as the Bible to support the ongoing relevance of these objective standards. Holloway uses the example of changing societal standards regarding the treatment of women. In some passages, the Bible appears to be depicting a standard for the treatment of women that is based on the historical context of biological necessity, including menstruation, pain in childbirth, and lesser physical strength. In the Fall narrative of Eve’s betrayal in the garden one can clearly discern a primitive culture’s attempt to explain the difficulties inherent in womanhood: “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”^[9]

This explanatory paradigm was accepted for many millennia, but as civilization advanced, the paradigm of biological necessity gave way to other more relevant paradigms. Most people today agree that women should not be completely constrained by their biology and the primitive gender roles that emerged around it. Many other similar paradigm shifts have also occurred over the years.

So what happens to the churches and other groups who either do not understand or refuse to accept the tentative nature of truth? Members of these groups often experience significant discomfort, because, although they have embraced many aspects of the new paradigm, their underlying belief system is still opposed to it. Mormons, for example, are clearly influenced by a larger culture that embraces gender equality (or at least attempts to do so), but it has not fully penetrated their religious lives, where complementarianism and patriarchy still predominate.

Mormons do experience some degree of respite from tension due to the fact that Joseph Smith’s founding revelations brought many traditional Christian doctrines up-to-date, so to speak, with the contemporary cultural paradigm of the 1800s, so there is less water under the bridge, or less time for paradigm shifts to have occurred since the Church’s founding than there is for mainstream Christianity.^[10] Despite the Church’s relatively short history, however, the tectonic shifts that have occurred in the larger culture since the Church’s founding clearly reveal significant paradigm tensions in Mormonism, which we shall visit later in greater detail.

Those who face this discomfort have a few different options. Two common choices are the retreat to fundamentalism or the retreat to secularism. To retreat to fundamentalism is to join a culturally isolated community that is more firmly rooted in a previous paradigm. To retreat to secularism is to embrace the present paradigm (while it lasts) and discard all relics of the old. Either of these choices involve significant anxiety and loss, including alienation from loved ones who are unable to understand or tolerate the choice. And there is, of course, still no guarantee that such choices will permanently ease the tension, for the disruption of paradigms is ongoing. I would add, parenthetically, that it is not just confined to religion. The accelerating pace of technological change will in turn lead to increasingly rapid paradigm shifts throughout all levels of society.

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The paradigm tension experienced by those who choose to stay within the faith group is what theologian Paul Tillich called the dishonesty of the “unbroken myth.”^[11] For an adequate understanding of this term we must first go through a brief summary of Tillich’s theology.

In Dynamics of Faith, Tillich describes faith as “the state of being ultimately concerned,”^[12] pointing out that almost everyone has faith in this sense, because nearly everyone has an ultimate concern. Tillich explains further that the history of faith has consisted of repeatedly misplaced ultimacy, such as in the case of nationalism, where the subject can be temporarily consumed by devotion to the fatherland but eventually becomes disillusioned by the finite object’s failure to live up to expectations one has of an ultimate concern. The subject emerges bitterly disappointed and recalcitrant even to the nation’s legitimate claims. The difference between true faith and idolatrous faith is that “in true faith the ultimate concern is a concern about the truly ultimate; while in idolatrous faith preliminary, finite realities are elevated to the rank of ultimacy.”^[13]

Tillich asserts that humanity must express its ultimate concern symbolically.^[14] Symbols are multivalent; they can be understood on many levels. They also participate in that to which they point. For example, the flag symbolizes the nation for which it stands. Olympic athletes and returning expatriates wrap themselves in it, and an attack on it is an affront to those who belong to the group it represents.^[15] Symbols grant us unique access to certain levels of reality. A picture, a poem, a play or a piece of music teach us things that cannot be learned in any other way. They resonate with aspects of our own nature and, in so doing, reveal us to ourselves.^[16] Tillich also adds that symbols “cannot be produced intentionally [nor] invented”:

Like living beings, they grow and they die. They grow when the situation is ripe for them, and they die when the situation changes. The symbol of the “king” grew in a special period of history, and it died in most parts of the world in our period. Symbols do not grow because people are longing for them, and they do not die because of scientific or practical criticism. They die because they can no longer produce response in the group where they originally found expression.^[17]

After explaining these basic characteristics, Tillich clarifies that the reason one’s ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically is because “everything which is a matter of unconditional concern is made into a god.”

If the nation is someone’s ultimate concern, the name of the nation becomes a sacred name and the nation receives divine qualities which far surpass the reality of the being and functioning of the nation. The nation then stands for and symbolizes the true ultimate, but in an idolatrous way. Success as ultimate concern is not the natural desire of actualizing potentialities, but is readiness to sacrifice all other values of life for the sake of a position of power and social predominance. The anxiety about not being a success is an idolatrous form of the anxiety about divine condemnation. Success is grace; lack of success, ultimate judgment. In this way concepts designating ordinary realities become idolatrous symbols of ultimate concern.^[18]

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Whereas religious symbols take on a variety of forms, “myths” (literally “stories about the gods”) are a special subset of the symbols of faith in the form of “stories about divine-human encounters.”^[19] Myths are not untrue. They often are based on historical events. But their strength is not derived from their historicity. It comes from their being powerful motivational narratives that will still be relevant long after the historical incidents that led to their emergence. The nature of myth is often misunderstood. Langdon Gilkey claimed that “the conventional modern understanding of myth as untrue fable makes the secular mind not only unable to understand religion, but also blind to its own mythic elements.”^[20]

Faith is always accompanied by myths, and these myths by nature undergo constant attack, criticism and transcendence, since they draw from common experience and everyday life. By placing the ultimate concern within time and space, myth imposes a finitude on the divine that weakens its ultimacy.^[21] This inherent instability in myth inevitably leads to conflicts which, if not managed successfully, can lead to transference of one’s ultimate concern or to idolatry, which is misplaced ultimacy. The ongoing process of criticism to which myth is always subject is called demythologization.^[22] It is the “self-conscious act of reflection on how myths operate.”^[23] Richard Holloway explains:

To demythologise the myth of Adam and Eve, for instance, is not to abandon it as a uselessly primitive way of speaking about abstract matters. It is to understand it as a myth, a narrative way of speaking about abstractions, which is valued for that very reason. The myth is seen as a powerful metaphor for real human experience. It is kept not because it is bad history, but because it is good poetry, because it provides us with a powerful shorthand for complex human experiences of alienation and regret.^[24]

It is important to emphasize that the process of demythologization does not arbitrarily favor one paradigm over another. BYU professor James Faulconer criticized this hermeneutic by saying that if one claims that myths must be broken, one is acknowledging the supremacy of secularism.^[25] The problem is not one of favoritism but of perspective. When civilization has moved irreversibly beyond the paradigm in which a myth was originally received, the only way that it can continue to be adequately understood, valued and thereby made useful is for it to be translated into the target paradigm, which is what is meant by breaking it. And of course, this target paradigm is not standing still either. It is also making way for new paradigms.

Faulconer also claims that this process of translation often results in assuming a given text has a purpose that is quite different from what its authors actually intended.^[26] While a better understanding of the original cultural paradigm is certainly helpful when breaking myths, it is not strictly necessary for original authorial intentions to correspond with a demythologized interpretation. It is sufficient that the interpretation is in some way beneficial and motivational to those who receive it, even if it differs substantially from the originally intended meaning. The most important consideration is that the myths as interpreted today continue to motivate us toward the object of our ultimate concern. If a myth is completely incapable of doing this, then it will inevitably fall into disuse and be superseded by another.

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Demythologization is good if it is understood to be recognizing myth for what it is, but not if it means removing myth altogether. Sometimes the temptation when faced with unstable symbols or myths is to discard them. This doesn’t work because they are the basic fabric of our lives, the symbols of our ultimate concern, the language of faith. One myth may be replaced with another but myth itself endures.^[27] Churches that attempt to downplay or eliminate myth from their services tend to get boring catechisms and pep rallies instead of robust faith. This approach is ultimately unsustainable. When this happens, Tillich explains, “the infinite passion which characterizes a genuine faith evaporates and is replaced by a clever calculation which is unable to withstand the passionate attacks of an idolatrous faith.”^[28]

This phenomenon is not unfamiliar to Mormonism. Mormon historian Benjamin Park recently discussed how the organizational structure of LDS Church manuals may be weakening the symbolic nature of scripture:

The basic assumption behind this organizational structure, in which topics are prioritized over context, is that the canon of truth is consistent and self-referential, the language and doctrine remain unvarying, and the particular verses comprised in the Doctrine and Covenants are best understood in a vacuum. . . . The problem is that this format often—if not always—leads to superficial prooftexting in support of manufactured messages; they produce more of a catechism than a scriptural study. Most importantly, it overlooks the dynamic nature of the revelations themselves. . .^[29]

We cannot eliminate myths, but we also should not confine them to their literal meaning, insist on the importance of their historicity, or assign to them any final status. To do so is to mistake the symbol for the thing it points to, to replace the ultimate with a human construct—an idol. We need to constantly ponder on how myths work, what they teach us, how they used to be taught and whether or not those teachings are still beneficial, what new ways they might be applied to our present context, and so forth. A story that is demythologized but retained is what Tillich calls a “broken myth,” or a myth that is understood as such. Holloway insists that “Christianity denies by its very nature any unbroken myth, because its presupposition is the first commandment: the affirmation of the ultimate as ultimate and the rejection of any kind of idolatry.”^[30]

By breaking a myth, we release its power. We give it motivational force for our own day. Insisting on literal interpretations and outmoded symbols only causes a religion to be more marginalized and retrench further into defensive fundamentalism. Demythologization, however, is always resisted by those in authority over the myth:

To challenge or criticise the myth of which they are the official guardians not only threatens the guardians’ authority, it threatens the peace and security of the people who have submitted themselves to the systems they control.

This is why the people who challenge religion’s claim to be a carrier of objective knowledge rather than the poet of symbol and metaphor are invariably denounced as faithless apostates.

The irony here is that these prophetic challenges to the misuse of myth and symbol are usually made by people who have a radical fear of idolatry and who would rather be accused of, or even fall into, atheism than submit to the worship of human constructs, which is what the failure to recognise the real status of myth amounts to.^[31]

Those who resist the breaking of a myth also apply to it the standards of their present paradigm, only without realizing it. Faulconer explains, “. . . secularists are not the only ones to assume that the Bible story of creation is a case of primitive science. Some religious people also make that assumption, especially those who consider themselves literalists. Ironically, when people argue for creation science or for what is usually called a literal reading of the Bible, they are agreeing with the secular understanding of things.”^[32] Tillich describes this resistance in eloquent detail:

The resistance against demythologization expresses itself in “literalism.” The symbols and myths are understood in their immediate meaning. The material, taken from nature and history, is used in its proper sense. The character of the symbol to point beyond itself to something else is disregarded. Creation is taken as a magic act which happened once upon a time. The fall of Adam is localized on a special geographical point and attributed to a human individual. The virgin birth of the Messiah is understood in biological terms, resurrection and ascension as physical events, the second coming of the Christ as a telluric, or cosmic, catastrophe. The presupposition of such literalism is that God is a being, acting in time and space, dwelling in a special place, affecting the course of events and being affected by them like any other being in the universe. Literalism deprives God of his ultimacy and, religiously speaking, of his majesty. It draws him down to the level of that which is not ultimate, the finite and conditional. . . . Faith, if it takes its symbols literally, becomes idolatrous! It calls something ultimate which is less than ultimate. Faith, conscious of the symbolic character of its symbols, gives God the honor which is due him.^[33]

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Tillich’s criticism almost seems to be custom-tailored to Mormonism, which claims a fully-embodied finitist god, a historical Adam and even names the geographical location of the Garden of Eden! We may as well throw in a reference to Kolob for good measure. But I shall attempt to demonstrate that Tillich’s view need not conflict with the essentials of Mormon theology, and that there are areas where we desperately need the myth-breaking Tillich prescribes.

Before that, however, let us first examine some important details Tillich gives about this literalism or resistance to myth-breaking. He explains that literalism generally falls into two categories, the natural and the reactive:

The natural stage of literalism is that in which the mythical and the literal are indistinguishable. The primitive period of individuals and groups consists in the inability to separate the creations of symbolic imagination from the facts which can be verified through observation and experiment. This stage has a full right of its own and should not be disturbed, either in individuals or in groups, up to the moment when one’s questioning mind breaks the natural acceptance of the mythological visions as literal. If, however, this moment has come, two ways are possible. The one is to replace the unbroken by the broken myth. It is the objectively demanded way, although it is impossible for many people who prefer the repression of their questions to the uncertainty which appears with the breaking of the myth. They are forced into the second stage of literalism, the conscious one, which is aware of the questions but represses them, half consciously, half unconsciously. The tool of repression is usually an acknowledged authority with sacred qualities like the Church or the Bible, to which one owes unconditional surrender. This stage is still justifiable, if the questioning power is very weak and can easily be answered. It is unjustifiable if a mature mind is broken in its personal center by political or psychological methods, split in its unity, and hurt in its integrity. The enemy of a critical theology is not natural literalism but conscious literalism with repression of and aggression toward autonomous thought.^[34]

This distinction between natural and reactive literalism is especially important. It is both unwise and uncharitable to break a symbol prematurely in a fit of iconoclasm. On the other hand, it is not only uncharitable but “unrighteous dominion” to use ecclesiastical authority to repress those who arrive honestly and sincerely at this stage of spiritual growth, and (in keeping with Smith’s revelations) such unrighteous dominion inevitably results in a weakening of spiritual authority.^[35] In Mormonism one can observe both stages of literalism, but the reactive variety currently seems to be in the ascendant.

While reactive literalism is unfortunate, it is understandable. Those who resort to these measures do so, according to Holloway, because they fear that breaking a myth will cause it to lose its power, when in fact it does just the opposite.^[36] Furthermore, the needs of those in the natural and reactive stages are often opposed to one another, and church authorities must strike a difficult balance between them. Tillich argues that this conflict of interest is especially difficult for certain types of churches to deal with. Those of the “sacramental” variety, such as Catholicism, which consider their sacraments and authority figures as holy in themselves, tend to be unable to cope, whereas Protestantism as a reaction against these excesses, is better suited to accepting broken myths.^[37] Being a hybrid with trappings of both sacramentalism and Protestantism, it is difficult to predict how Mormonism will fare as it undergoes this difficult transition.

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It is interesting to note that the aspects of Mormonism that many outsiders find most absurd are also some of the highly physical and specific assertions that Tillich takes issue with. And in its current public relations campaigns, the Church seems to be de-emphasizing many of these vestiges of physicalism somewhat already. One does not often hear about the Garden of Eden being located in Jackson County, Missouri, or Kolob (the planet from which God is said to govern the universe) at Church, despite what you might hear in a certain well-known Broadway musical. But there are of course some highly literalistic teachings that continue to get air time in Sunday school.

More than anything else, Tillich’s conception of God seems at odds with that of Mormonism. Tillich claimed that the traditional theistic notion of God was no longer credible, but that this “did not imply the collapse of the reality of God; rather, the modern mind must be encouraged to think of the ‘God above God,’ that is, of what is above and beyond the limits of our imagination.”^[38] Tillich’s insight is that our understanding of God will always be imperfect and prone to error due to our human limitations, and that it is bound to improve and progress as time goes on. Tillich also understood that any attempt to describe God in terms that humans can relate to inevitably conveys less than all God is, and that such an understanding, being a product of beings with finite capacities, will eventually become idolatrous and need upgrading. For Tillich, God is not the being we’ve already found but always the being we have yet to fully discover, the object of our ultimate concern, which implies something that will always be beyond our reach.

While Joseph Smith’s visions were certainly manifestations of God, it would be incorrect to assume that they conveyed an exhaustive or comprehensive understanding to him. Near the end of his life, Smith taught further that the god of our universe was an infinite and constantly progressing being who came from an endless family or divine community of other individuals like him.^[39] Wilford Woodruff, the fourth president of the Mormon Church, taught that “if there was a point where man in his progression could not proceed any further, the very idea would throw a gloom over every intelligent and reflecting mind.”^[40] Mormon First Presidency member George Q. Cannon taught that not only is progression eternal at the individual level, but that there is an endless hierarchy of progressive intelligences who participate in one another’s salvation: “There are different degrees of glory. Some attain to a more exalted glory. They must help those who are lower to rise up to their plane. Then there is another degree below them, and they must labor to lift those who are lower than they. . . progressing from one degree of glory to another, without end, because there is no end to eternity.”^[41]

If, as Joseph Smith declared in his revelation on the degrees of glory, we will one day be “[made] equal” with God,^[42] then we could find ourselves in a situation where, as equals, God may no longer be the appropriate object of our worship. To the extent such worship or emulation results in a cessation of progress, it is damnation, according to the Mormon understanding of that term. And yet even at this far-flung stage, there will still be something beyond us toward which we will strive, an ultimate concern that will be the appropriate and inevitable object of our faith. This is the god Tillich describes, a being or community of beings whose properties are constantly emerging and evolving as humanity’s awareness improves.

Lincoln Cannon, President of the Mormon Transhumanist Association, described such a god in his retelling of Joseph Smith’s King Follett discourse at the inaugural conference of the Mormon Transhumanist Association in 2012: “Love posthumanity with all your heart and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment, and the second is like it: love humanity as yourself, not as being human, but rather as becoming posthuman.”^[43] No matter where we are, posthumanity will always be our most noble projections of our future, one that Mormonism claims has already been attained by other gods before us—the results, as far as we can discern them, of faith exercised in our ultimate concern.

While these explorations of the relationship between Tillich’s conception of God and that of Mormonism are far from exhaustive, hopefully they at least convey the notion that there is more possibility for harmonization and mutual benefit than might at first appear. It is interesting to note that Mormonism’s concept of eternal progression for both humanity and god fits well with Tillich’s description of an evolving ultimate concern.

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Lastly, let us briefly examine some opportunities for demythologization in a Mormon context. One successful and pragmatic approach is something Grant Hardy refers to as “bracketing” in his recent book, Understanding the Book of Mormon. Many prior commentaries and analyses have focused on the Book of Mormon either for its moral lessons or as a proof text for arguments for or against its historicity. Hardy observes, on the other hand, that the book “is a much more interesting text—rewarding sustained critical attention—than has generally been acknowledged by either Mormons or non-Mormons.”^[44] He argues that we should set aside apologetics and attempt to study the text itself from a narrative perspective, from which many interesting insights can be gleaned. Once again, the emphasis on historicity and literalism has caused us to neglect some of our valuable myths.

The Book of Mormon itself contains some interesting examples of demythologization. Nephi says that his people do not understand the ways of the Jews and that he must therefore translate Isaiah’s words for them, that he must liken them unto their situation rather than explaining their original context. He says that he “did liken all scriptures unto [his people].”^[45] Alma the Younger focuses on a symbolic/mythological interpretation of Lehi’s journey: “And now I say, is there not a type in this thing? For just as surely as this director did bring our fathers, by following its course, to the promised land, shall the words of Christ, if we follow their course, carry us beyond this vale of sorrow into a far better land of promise.”^[46]

Some Church doctrines don’t fit comfortably with evolutionary biology, especially the theory of common descent. While a significant number of faithful Mormons believe in evolution—even some famous leaders of the Church—it is an uncomfortable subject that is rarely discussed at church.^[47] A recent survey by the Pew Forum indicates that approximately 22% or roughly one in five Mormons believes that “humanity evolved from lower life forms,” while the US national average for accepting common descent is 48%.^[48] Specifically, a number of statements from Church general authorities establish a historical Adam as the father of the human race. Some more disputed statements even claim that there was no death on the earth before Adam’s Fall.^[49] As recently as 1998, the Church’s Ensign magazine contained an article positing a literalistic belief in a global flood and a historical Tower of Babel as normative for orthodox Mormons.^[50]

Despite these statements, Mormons continue to straddle both paradigms surprisingly well. Brigham Young University, privately owned by the Church, has a thriving biology program in its College of Life Sciences that has lately made a number of notable discoveries, including contributions to Alzheimer’s research^[51] and the discovery of “re-evolution” in insects.^[52] Of course, none of this research would be possible without a strong foundation in evolutionary theory, including common descent.

Yet many Mormons who aren’t closely involved with the science believe that common descent is incompatible with the faith. This attitude, along with a general suspicion of the sciences that is often expressed in church culture, has caused many members, especially youth, to perceive the Church as against science and to feel the necessity of choosing between their faith tradition and the vast body of evidence for evolution that they encounter during their higher education.

Fortunately there are ample opportunities for breaking this myth, both statements from general authorities and from the scriptural canon. Without repudiating a historical Adam, the First Presidency did officially acknowledge in 1908 the possibility that Adam could have evolved from lower species.^[53] Furthermore, the creation story from the Pearl of Great Price specifically supports a figurative interpretation of Adam as a group of people, perhaps the entire human race: “Worlds without number have I created; . . . and the first man of all men have I called Adam, which is many.”^[54] The temple endowment ceremony is also a highly symbolic ritual that teaches all participants to put themselves in the place of Adam and Eve. In this symbolic interpretation, Adam becomes every man, and Eve every woman, helping the myth to once again become relevant to our present day challenges and concerns.

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One area of Mormon teachings that is difficult for many people to relate to is the Church’s belief in the importance of sacraments (“ordinances” in Mormon parlance) and temple work. The solution provided by Smith’s revelation on proxy work for the dead, and indeed the whole emphasis on ordinances as essential for salvation, can be reasonably viewed as an accommodation for a highly legalistic culture in the grips of sacramentalism, in which almost everyone believed that souls who did not go through certain rituals before death would be cast off forever by a just God. But for today’s potential converts these arguments fall flat. Many modern observers feel that no god worthy of worship would maintain such arbitrary and capricious requirements for salvation, even if an accommodation can be made for those who died without them. Given widespread consensus that these justifications are morally deficient, breaking the myth would mean not abandoning these practices but recognizing other benefits in them than the ones we usually emphasize, such as their symbolic character, the making and renewal of commitments, a stronger sense of communal belonging, esotericism, greater appreciation of one’s ancestral heritage, and stronger intergenerational ties, among others.

Another area of rich opportunity are the Church’s foundational myths, including Joseph Smith’s first vision. While many have focused on whether or not it actually happened, few have sought to explore its symbolism and meaning and its foundational relationship to the Mormon religion and culture. A recent article by Stephen C. Taysom is a great starting point for a more thorough analysis of some of these questions.^[55] Among other interesting perspectives he shares are these remarks from late Church Historian, Leonard Arrington:

I was never preoccupied with the question of the historicity of the First Vision. . . . I am prepared to accept [it] as historical or metaphorical, as symbolical or as precisely what happened. That [it conveys] religious truth is the essential issue, and of this I have never had any doubt.^[56]

How might a demythologized church missionary program look? In addition to teaching more symbolic interpretations of scripture and ritual to potential converts, more emphasis could be made on the pragmatic benefits of church participation, including communal support and transcendent worship. Rather than focusing on Book of Mormon historicity and exclusive priesthood authority, missionaries could emphasize the potential for personal growth, discipline and fulfillment that comes from being a part of the Mormon community. In other words, the program would focus on applying the symbols to our present needs rather than focusing solely on past interpretations. Missionaries could also devote a larger portion of their efforts towards humanitarian work, with the option of serving an exclusively humanitarian mission for those who either do not feel comfortable proselytizing or feel another calling. This option would have the additional benefit of giving opportunities for fulfillment and service to those who value their faith tradition but feel unable to accept some of its more literalistic claims.

A Church that is more open to symbolic interpretations would also be willing to broaden the range of acceptable expressions of faith. Members currently feel a great deal of cultural pressure to express only certainty in public settings, and doubt is highly stigmatized, which in turn contributes to disaffection. Increased openness and acceptance of differences would also significantly enhance Mormon worship services with a broader range of inspirational art forms and music.

Demythologizing often works best when we choose to emphasize symbolic interpretations without strongly and openly repudiating literalism. For those who are ready to accept the broken myth, the allusions will be clear, while those who are still in a phase of natural literalism will be less likely to stumble.

These are just a few examples. Though a good deal of trailblazing is still left to be done, the field of Mormon studies can already be said to have largely moved away from apologetics and debates over historicity to the richer fields of symbol, metaphor and narrative. But this awareness must reach beyond the academy and into the mainstream Church if it hopes to revitalize the faith of its members today.

Peggy Fletcher Stack, “Mormons tackling tough questions in their history,” The Salt Lake Tribune, February 3, 2012. Accessed January 14, 2013. ↩︎
Matthew Bowman, “Is This the Mormon Moment?” Time Magazine, September 27, 2012. Accessed January 14, 2013. ↩︎
Richard Holloway, “The Myths of Christianity,” available at http://homepages.which.net/~radical.faith/holloway/index.htm (accessed 13 Jan 2013). ↩︎
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). ↩︎
Richard Holloway, “The Broken Myth,” http://homepages.which.net/~radical.faith/holloway/myths 1a.htm (accessed 13 Jan 2013). ↩︎
William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, Lecture I (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), digitized by the Gutenberg project. ↩︎
Ibid, Lecture II. ↩︎
Holloway, Ibid. ↩︎
Genesis 3:16. ↩︎
In fact, the standard response of many Mormons to tensions with the Christian canon is to claim that Smith experienced privileged access to eternal truth that clarified the meaning of scripture, and any apparent discrepancy between his revelations and the Bible is the result of transmissional errors or apostasy. But the limitations of this defense become apparent when one considers that significant changes in doctrine and practice that have occurred within the Church itself since its founding, which weakens the argument that Smith’s revelation was somehow eternal or immutable (See Charles R. Harrell, This Is My Doctrine: The Development of Mormon Theology, Sandy: Greg Kofford Books, 2011). The assertion is further weakened by the Church’s own ninth article of faith, which embraces ongoing revelation and doctrinal progression, and by some of Joseph Smith’s own teachings on how revelation is adapted to the circumstances of its audience (see Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1977, p. 256). The orthodox response is that superficial practices may change but core doctrines remain constant. Harrell’s study of LDS doctrinal development nonetheless presents a compelling counter-argument to this claim also. ↩︎
Paul Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith (New York: HarperCollins), Kindle edition, 58. ↩︎
Ibid, 1. ↩︎
Ibid, 12–13. ↩︎
Ibid, 47. ↩︎
Ibid, 48. ↩︎
Ibid, 48–49. ↩︎
Ibid, 49. ↩︎
Ibid, 50–51. ↩︎
Ibid, 56. ↩︎
Gary Dorrien, “Langdon Gilkey’s Myth-Creative Liberal Theology: Synthesizing Tillich, Niebuhr, Schleiermacher, Ricoeur, Eliade, and Whitehead,” in Mormonism in Dialogue with Contemporary Christian Theologies, ed. David Lamont Paulsen and Donald W. Musser (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2007), 376. ↩︎
Tillich, 56. ↩︎
Ibid, 57. ↩︎
Holloway, Ibid. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
James E. Faulconer, “Response to Professor Dorrien,” in Mormonism in Dialogue with Contemporary Christian Theologies, ed. David Lamont Paulsen and Donald W. Musser (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2007). ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Tillich, 57. ↩︎
Ibid, 138. ↩︎
Benjamin Park, “Organizing the Doctrine and Covenants Lessons: Or, Why the Topical Approach Doesn’t Work,” By Common Consent Blog, January 7, 2013. Accessed on January 15, 2013. ↩︎
Holloway, Ibid. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Faulconer, Ibid, 408. ↩︎
Tillich, Ibid, 59–60. ↩︎
Tillich, Ibid, 60. ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants 121:39. ↩︎
Holloway, Ibid. ↩︎
Ibid, 68. ↩︎
Peter J. Gomes, Introduction of The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich. ↩︎
Joseph Smith, “The King Follett Discourse,” Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1977), 342. ↩︎
Journal of Discourses 6:120. ↩︎
D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1997). ↩︎
D&C 76:95. ↩︎
Lincoln Cannon, “The Consolation: An Interpretive Variation on the King Follett Sermon of Joseph Smith,” Google Docs. Accessed on January 19, 2013. Emphasis added. ↩︎
Grant Hardy, Introduction, Understanding the Book of Mormon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), Kindle edition, Location 211. ↩︎
1 Nephi 19:23. ↩︎
Alma 37:43–45. ↩︎
Duane E. Jeffrey, “Seers, Savants and Evolution: the Uncomfortable Interface,” in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Issue #8, Autumn-Winter 1973. Accessed online at Dialogue Journal on January 20, 2013. ↩︎
The Pew Forum, “Religious Differences on the Question of Evolution,” Pew Research. Last accessed on January 20, 2013. ↩︎
Jeffrey, Ibid. ↩︎
Donald W. Parry, “The Flood and the Tower of Babel,” in The Ensign, January 1998. Accessed online at LDS.org on May 20, 2013. ↩︎
Kauwe et al, “TREM2 Variants in Alzheimer’s Disease,” in The New England Journal of Medicine, January 10, 2013. Accessed online at NEJM on January 20, 2013. ↩︎
Whiting, Bradler and Maxwell, “Loss and recovery of wings in stick insects,” in Nature, January 16, 2003. Accessed online at PubMed on January 20, 2013. ↩︎
Jeffrey, Ibid. ↩︎
Moses 1:33–34, The Pearl of Great Price. Emphasis added. ↩︎
Stephen C. Taysom, “Approaching the First Vision Saga,” Sunstone Magazine, October 2011 issue, Sunstone. Accessed on January 19, 2013. ↩︎
Leonard J. Arrington, “Why I Am a Believer,” in Philip L. Barlow, ed., A Thoughtful Faith: Essays on Belief by Mormon Scholars (Centerville, UT: Canon Press, 1986), 230. ↩︎