Society

In Defense of Extreme Views And Political Compromise

| briansabey

It is commonly believed that the truth is always in the middle. Given any two views or any two disputants or any two accounts of an event, both sides have some of it right and some of it wrong; therefore, both sides need to move towards the center.

While this may be a good rule of thumb when it comes to human disputes—divorces, litigation, discrepancies between two people’s memories, etc., it is nonsense as a rule. It often happens that one side is simply right and the other simply wrong.

More importantly, it is utter nonsense in the realms of thought and creativity. When it comes to world views, thought systems, and artistic schools, to make compromise a rule would merely be to abandon consistency and rigor. Continue reading →

Faith and Intellectual Integrity

| briansabey

I hope this essay will be helpful for dealing with honest questions and for helping others who are dealing with honest questions related to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Many of the things I write will apply equally or almost equally to faith journeys within other religions as well.

When people leave the Church, I would suspect that their questions about doctrine and history are not usually the main issue, but in many and probably most cases, they are one of the issues. And I think such questions can be more productively dealt with in a Church culture where there is, perhaps appropriately, certain pressures to express certainty and to stand united behind all the teachings of the prophets, and where our manuals and lesson plans tend—again, perhaps appropriately—to focus on reaffirming core doctrine rather than exploring the limits of what we know. Continue reading →

Why we must resist demonization, Even of the worst fascists

| briansabey

As I begin to write about the worst Fascists (i.e., the Nazis), it occurs to me that humanity is altogether more wonderful and more terrible than we commonly imagine it, more angelic and more diabolical. The mundanity and the moral and intellectual mediocrity of most lives is not the native and inevitable condition of the average human soul, but rather an impasse between vast forces of good and evil and immense impulses towards life and towards death. From this conflict we seek refuge in numbing routine and stultifying dogma, content for the most part to experience the battle at a safe remove, transmuted into art. Our impulse towards life and effort, fierce as the Sun, is satiated, because we are thinking and acting; and our impulse towards rest and stillness, inexorable as outer space, is mollified because our thoughts and actions rotate, like the Earth itself, in the same circuit every day. Continue reading →

A Reader’s Response to Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and The Necessity of Morality Beyond Evolution

| briansabey

I recently read Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion. It is worth reading, but it was a very mixed emotional experience for me. Politically, it was interesting, insightful, and personally affirming, while philosophically it was interesting, insightful, and personally aggravating. Continue reading →

A Gentle Sense of Humor As God’s Power

| briansabey

In my reading, I’ve several times now run into the idea of a gentle sense of humor as being a godly power, linked closely to love and faith. It is an intriguing concept. Please consider the following three quotations, ordered both by length (the first is a fairly lengthy account) and by the chronology of my reading. I’ll provide some brief commentary between quotes.

***

From F. Enzio Bushe’s Yearning For the Living God

The following experience is probably one of the most sacred in my whole life. It happened in the very beginning of my service as a General Authority, after I moved to the United States. I was still very new and inexperienced and I had to rely completely on the Spirit to be able to do the many things I had to do.

On one trip, on assignment as an executive administrator, I gave a talk on welfare to a lovely group of people. I taught them in a special meeting and spoke about faith and the dimensions of faith and the importance of developing it. I quoted Matthew 17 to explain how the Lord expected his disciples to have faith and how frustrated He was when they did not have enough faith to cast out an evil spirit. I quoted that scripture in order to show our need not only to view faith as thought or feeling, but also as a power with which we can control or even change the circumstance of this world.

That evening, I began a tour of a neighboring mission and stayed in the basement of the mission home that night. I was very tired when I finally went to bed at around 11:00. I fell sound asleep as soon as I was in bed. I woke with a start when, at about 1:00 A.M., the mission president came into my room. The light was on and he was speaking to me, but I was still half asleep and did not understand what he was saying. I asked him if what he had to say could not wait until tomorrow. I could see that he was disappointed, but he nodded his head and began to leave the room.

By then, I was more awake and called him back and asked him to repeat the problem. I focused on listening to him and was surprised by what he said. He said that in the evening, a missionary had been possessed by an evil spirit. Continue reading →

The Evils of Contemporary Life And A Possible Partial Solution

| briansabey

The Evils

Contemporary life in America, while full of material blessings, is plagued by emotional and spiritual poverty, mental health issues, and loss of felt community. Among the chief contributing factors to these plagues is a loss of several kinds of meaningful connection.

  • to worthy purposes
  • to nature and food
  • to local community
  • to our bodies and the material world

Contemporary work is marked by a shallowness of purpose: we work for employers whose goal is to make money and in return they give us money. That’s it. Very often, it is not even imagined by either party to this transaction that a higher state of things is possible. Furthermore, the extreme division of labor that has taken place since industrialization means that our work is often so specialized and narrow as to be almost entirely disconnected from the rest of our lives and our larger ideals. Thus, not only the purpose of our work but also its content lacks the ability to connect us to meanings worthy of a life’s devotion: the purpose is money; the content is a super-specialized function so narrow and obscure as to be spiritually impoverished. Our careers–for those who are fortunate enough to have a career rather than a mere job or unemployment–most often lack any sense of vocation.

The complexity of contemporary economics and social life also obscures certain realities and involves us in moral compromise. Continue reading →