Author: joshsabey

We are Losing Precious Members

| joshsabey

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People are leaving my church. Good people. People I know. People I like. In response to this modern exodus, I have heard three explanations from within my church community. The first two are rationalization narratives. They attempt to put the community at ease. First, there is the narrative that we are destined to be a small group of believers. The Bible never suggests “the believers” are going to be popular. In the Book of Mormon, Nephi has a vision of the modern-day church and he notes that “its numbers [are] few.” And so declining membership actually seems in line with revelation. Believers are supposed to be a small, peculiar group of persecuted faithful. This is problematic. Continue reading →

Suffering Grace: in defense of a benevolent God

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catholic-celestial-christ-37737Those who argue against the existence of a benevolent Christian deity will often site as a centerpiece of their belief the inexplicability of suffering in the world. This happened again recently in the New York Times. While there is some suffering caused by other people which can be explained by an appeal to human agency, there is also suffering (perhaps a far greater amount of suffering) caused by mindless, lifeless, natural forces. Hurricanes, volcanoes, tornadoes, tsunamis, famine, pestilence. Millions of people, in pain, just for living on the earth. These forces, they will say, since they cannot be assigned another agency, must be assigned to God, if there really is one.

To secure their position, they might add, while the devil could be a convenient scapegoat, what are we to do when a hurricane has brought rain to a farmer but killed another woman’s child? The farmer kneels in the darkened soil thanking God in the same moment the anguished woman stands at the end of the pier cursing the devil. We cannot say in one instance it is an act of the devil and in another it is the act of God. It must be one or the other. Continue reading →

Miracle

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mary magdalen at the tomb of our saviour

In the Gospel of Matthew the often repeated words, “he is risen” are preceded by the statement, “he is not here.” Then as evidence of the risen Lord, the angel invites Mary to see the absence of the Lord’s body from the tomb. But the missing body only highlights the questions already burning in her heart. The very questions which caused her arrival in the garden tomb in the first place: where did he go and where is he now?

As is often the case with Christ’s miracles, the supernatural aspect underscore the common reality: people die. And while the body is usually left behind, we are left to wonder how it could be so entirely abandoned. How an object which had once been a man has ceased to present a human being. How the formaldehyde fails to preserve key aspects, even physical aspects, of the person we knew. And it is by this common, natural reality—the incongruity of death—that Christ’s missing body moves us, and not the other way around. The loss of a friend, a father, a lover, a son. Touching a corpse, holding an embalmed hand, kissing a dead man’s lips, nothing more profound than these are required for us to have asked the question: Where did she go? Where is he now? Continue reading →

The uncharacteristic honesty of psychology concerning reparative therapy

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therapy session

On September 14, 2015 a team of professors published a paper. The paper came out after a series of exposés revealed a general unreliability in the “science of psychology.” There were a number of high-profile replication failures, a few fraud cases, and questionable research practices. People were beginning to ask whether or not psychological research and conclusions could be trusted. The team observed that the field of psychology was almost entirely liberal and that the lack of political diversity was actually leading to a lack in scientific accuracy.

The scientists who published the paper were well known and respected, many of them holding liberal sentiments themselves. Yet they believed they could show how the lack of ideological diversity was interfering with the research. And what’s more, this interference was creeping into other fields as well. The result of this creep, they worried, would not only be less reliable research but, perhaps worst of all, a lack of respect, trust, and funding for future research. Their fears are being realized as funding for the social sciences is increasingly under threat from conservatives in congress as well as the National Science Foundation—which proposed cutting its own social science budget by 11% this year. Political discussions are less and less grounded in agreed upon facts because studies can be quickly dismissed as politically motivated, which is sadly often the case.

What these scientists hoped to show is that the field of psychology has some culpability in the current state of affairs. To restore the faith of the masses, they believed psychology would need to work much harder to avoid political entanglements, to stifle ideological homogeneity, and Continue reading →

The Inevitability of Masturbation and the Honesty of Sin, Featuring Tractors

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There are few topics that mainstream liberal and conservative minds will come to such clearly divergent opinions as masturbation. Most other disagreements between the liberal and the conservative tend to be like ships passing—both right about what they affirm, both passionate, both speaking right past the other. But with masturbation the argument seem to be more straightforward. As such, it is seldom actually argued. For once people have begun to argue they will almost immediately reach an impasse. From one perspective it is permissible, enjoyable, even healthy and from the other it is sinful, self-serving, and destructive.

The facts are straightforward and mostly agreed upon. Sexual impulses are natural for most people and mostly unavoidable. Sexual impulses, if followed, can lead to very positive results, minor results, and dramatically negative results. And so some of our sexual impulses must be restrained when they will damage ourselves or others. But the line between what is good and wholesome and what is destructive is drawn on opposite sides of masturbation by the traditionally liberal and the conservative opinions.

Whether or not masturbation has negative effects or positive effects is debated but the more fundamental question is whether or not it is avoidable. There may be negative effects of drinking unfiltered water from a river, but that becomes irrelevant when you are lost in the mountains and about to perish from thirst. You’re going to drink. And you should. If masturbation is avoidable, then we must debate whether it is constructive or destructive. But if it is unavoidable, the merits become mostly irrelevant. It will happen. Continue reading →

In Defense of Thoughts and Prayers #2

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The following post is adapted from my post in December. 

By now we ought to know that below cliché is often the deepest sincerity. This was made evident to me once again after the Parkland, Florida shooting. History has repeated itself on my social media feeds. I see the same people writing the same messages I saw after the Las Vegas shooting last October. After that tragic event, my social media channels filled with people “sending thoughts and prayers.” The next day I encountered several reactions to these “cliché” responses which criticized people for their seemingly trivial and laissez-faire approach to a tragedy which took over 50 lives in Vegas. It is happening again, this time 17 lives in Florida were lost. People are sending thoughts and prayers. And other people are denouncing them for doing it. The sincerity of these complaints I believe deserves an honest evaluation of “sending thoughts and prayers” after a tragedy.

The most creative complaint against “thoughts and prayers” I have seen so far took the form of a game. By clicking on a link you became a player and were instructed to click two buttons over and over again. The buttons were labeled “Thoughts,” and “Prayers.” When the game starts, a number in the middle of the screen begins to increase exponentially indicating the number of deaths in the USA by gun violence. Ostensibly, by clicking the buttons the player is working to stop that number from rising. But, predictably, no matter how many times a player clicks one button or the other, the deaths continue to rise.

The obvious criticism is that sending thoughts and prayers is ineffective and the deeper and more subversive critique is that sending thoughts and prayers is cliché and easy—like clicking a button. Though witty, the critique falls flat in both instances. Continue reading →