Notes: Renouncing War: How Mormon Theology & History Lead Us to Nonviolence

Notes to the forum seminar Renouncing War: How Mormon Theology and History Lead Us to Nonviolence, by David Pulsipher, who is teaching "US History 1820 to 1920" and "History of Peace" this semester.

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

A link to the video will be posted in this spot as soon as it it uploaded to BYU-I.

Who was on the Lord’s side, who?

(Nutshell for Non-LDS: Mormons believe that everyone alive once dwelled with God before being born. Before the world was even formed there was a war in Heaven, as John’s Revelation made famous, and this war was about whether we should be allowed to make mistakes when that would mean we would suffer, or if our lives should be so controlled that nobody would be able to sin or choose wrongly at all. Satan advocated for the latter, and the rest is mythology.)

If the War in Heaven was a war of words, an essentially missionary war, and nobody was won over from the Bad Side to the Good Side, then it had to have been the most supremely ineffective missionary effort of all time. Which means that we need to consider…

How many of us were once on Satan’s side of that war?

I'm a Mormon, and... I think that "Reign of Judges" is a horrible movie

There are a lot of problems that I have with this movie, Reign of Judges. The whitewashing, for instance.

I cannot tell you how frustrated the whitewashing in this film makes me. If for one instant the filmmakers are taking the Book of Mormon seriously as a historical document, as something that tells the stories of people that actually lived, breathed, and died, then it is an indefensible whitewash.

But there's something else that gets me, too. A few things, really, but the biggest of all is that it's promoting the idea that you have to kill in order to have peace.

Returns

Follow-up to: The Redemption of Shemesh

There are a number of things that I could point to in The Redemption of Shemesh. Shemesh is a Christ figure as easily as she is an Adam, but it is more in this latter vein that I wish to move today. The principal point of The Redemption is there in the title. It is a story of repentance.

Fiction: The Emperor's Children

"Go to, then," said the emperor, "and live in the land. The day will come when I shall call you home again, and till then you will learn and prosper."

We will still weep for Wile E. Coyote

On the Cartoon Network website there is a game where you play as Wile E. Coyote and chase the Roadrunner past many obstacles. A few years ago I came across it and wasted almost an entire night trying to catch the Roadrunner. And when I had won the game, I wanted to punch my computer: Instead of catching that blasted Roadrunner there was an animation of Wile E. Coyote failing yet again.

There are no words that exist to adequately describe how much I hate that game and, much more, that Roadrunner. 

Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner star in what is possibly the most depressing cartoon that I have ever watched. And I have seen Neon Genesis Evangelion. Wile E. Coyote always fails. It matters not how much he plans, or how much he prepares, or how brilliant his schemes are. He will fail. How adamant this fact is was made clear to me the first time that I saw him use a slingshot. It was meant to propel a rock at the Roadrunner but when released it remained as it was, taut and suspended. Wile E. Coyote stood in front of it to inspect the problem. Then it released. 

The very laws of physics work against Wile E. Coyote. But he can't do anything else but pursue the Roadrunner. 

To me, Wile E. Coyote is a potent metaphor for fallen man, and the Roadrunner that he pursues is "lasting happiness." He can't get it, no matter what he tries to do. As the slingshot incident proved to me, fallen man is physically incapable of catching his Roadrunner without outside assistance. As fallen humans we are like a man who swims against the flow of a river and wonders why he makes no progress and comes up against such opposition. 

We must rely on the grace of God to redeem us from death and provide a way for our natures to become higher-minded than they are. On our own we can do nothing for ourselves, any more than a blind can see for themselves or the deaf hear. 

In the meantime, I await the day when someone will intercede on Wile E. Coyote's behalf, and make possible his lasting happiness just as surely as the Atonement of Jesus Christ made possible ours. 

The Brand Name

Follow-up to: The Seller of Stars

"In the beginning was the brand name, and the brand name was with God, and the brand name was God." John 1:1 (PKD).

In Philip K. Dick's essay How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, he relates a tale about the translation of his book Ubik into the German language. The translator looked at the declaration "I am the word," in the context of the speaker making several statements to the effect that it was God, and concluded that what PKD was having the speaker say was "I am the brand name." PKD goes on to briefly speculate what The Gospel According to St. John would have looked like had the same man been responsible for translating that, too.

A silly anecdote but one that reminded me of the main theme that I present in The Seller of Stars: Satan's best trick is in convincing us to look no further than the Almighty Dollar and that there is nothing in this world that cannot be bought, and no man in it who will not sell his soul so long as the price is right.

These two sides of the coin are where he suckers us in. We want to believe that whatever we want is there for the taking, requiring only a fee for purchase. We also want to believe that everyone else is all-too-willing to sell their souls for a dollar, because it's easier to do it ourselves so long as we can say that we're no worse than the rest of the crowd.

The man in The Seller of Stars sold his soul for his fondest desire, whatever it may have been. He doesn't even need to be told that everyone else is doing it. He just needs the opportunity to make the purchase, and is willing to believe that his eyes- his spiritual sensitivity- is a commodity to be traded like everything else.

Edit 14-08-2013 It has been mentioned that some people have mistaken or may mistake my reference to PKD's essay as an endorsement of it as scripture, as inspired, or anything else along these lines. To reemphasize what I hope is clear to most already, I bring it up because it helped to cement in my mind the imagery of Satan wanting to convince us that, in effect, God is not God, but money is.

Symphony and Flood

Follow-up to: Song and Rain

"The Lord then answered him, and said, Thou hypocrite, doth not each one of you on the sabbath loose his ox or his ass from the stall, and lead him away to watering?" Luke 13:15

"Don't let yourself get distracted by the small stuff; cut through to the meat of what must be done" is how I could summarize the idea put forth in Song and Rain.

The Pharisees were not wholly bad folk. Despite what they may have transformed into by the time of Jesus Christ, for most of their history at least they were deeply concerned with social justice and even in His day enjoyed mainstream support among the Jewish people. It was a Pharisee, Hillel, who famously stated the maxim, "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary." The group arose out of the turmoil following the Exile, concluding that Israel had suffered so because they had neglected to properly follow the commandments of God Because of this they sought to raise the bar and fill the profane life entirely with the sacred: there was no room in a properly holy life for impure things.

Phariseeism anticipated the Church of Jesus Christ in these latter-days with this focus. Their intention was to make Israel live up to its calling as a "kingdom of priests" by laying down the temple ritual onto everyday life. The name itself derived from the Hebrew word pārûsh, meaning "set apart." Over generations they apparently degraded into straining over gnats while swallowing camels, however, and herein we see a warning sign provided us by history and the scriptures: When we forget the principle behind the law and follow the law blindly for its own sake we make are left holding a corpse. The principle is the spirit and the law is the body, and though the spirit is ennobled by a tabernacle of flesh it is nevertheless the superior partner. Without the body there is still intelligence in the spirit, but without the spirit there is only death in the body.

And of what concern of yours is this?

Follow-up to: They called him Judas, after the dagger

"For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again." 3 Nephi 14:2

But story isn't entirely about Judas, you know, even though I could say an awful lot about him. It's about all of us, "for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of  God." Judas betrayed his Savior, Peter betrayed his Savior, and so has every other soul in all of the worlds of Creation. As President Uchtdorf repeated in last year's April session of General Conference, talking of a bumper sticker that he had seen, "Don't judge me because I sin differently than you."

We have all done things that we aren't proud of. When the Son of God was in such agony as to bleed from every pore, such agony that even He, who healed the sick and raised the dead, shuddered at the thought of it and asked His Father to take, if it were possible, the experience away from him- how much of this pain was on our own account? How much does it matter that one of us was responsible for one drop, and another of us for another drop?

We don't know what their circumstances are. But we do know that we're all unfinished products, and if God has forgotten their sin then surely we have no justification in remembering it ourselves. Every time that we do so we make a mockery of the Atonement, and the greater sin may well be on our own heads.

I could do no better than to again repeat the words of President Uchtdorf again: "This topic of judging others could actually be taught in a two-word sermon. When it comes to hating, gossiping, ignoring, ridiculing, holding grudges, or wanting to cause harm, please apply the following: Stop it!"

Have a good day, folks.