And more on the subject

                 In the last several years as I’ve played in Facebook, dipping into discussion boards, and in particular, discussions that concern religion, I’ve been—not surprised, really—but almost puzzled by some of the attitudes I’ve found there.  I love answering questions about LDS beliefs and I like honest discussion, but I don’t like arguments and debates, especially when the person on the other side of them seems to have this rabidly passionate need to blow me and mine out of the water.

                 I have no need to blow anybody else out of the water – unless, of course, they’re advocating child pornography or slavery or genocide or legalizing damaging stuff.  Even then, I would take no triumph in trumping their arguments (which you never really can do with rabid folks), no pleasure in achieving a rhetorical smack down (which I am not equipped to do anyway).  But to go after somebody’s personal beliefs like you thought you had some heavenly mandate to destroy them?  I just think that’s weird.

                 I also don’t understand the tension between science and religion.  I’ve said that before.  Then again, when you consider that religionists are always in each other’s faces, and that scientists are always in each other’s faces, I suppose it’s no surprise that the two groups, mixed, would create a certain amount of havoc just naturally.

                 Two of the points I’ve heard/read over and over in the religious discussions are these:

1) You can prove the Bible but you can’t prove the Book of Mormon and

2) Whichever LDS prophet they’re attacking can’t be a prophet because look: he didn’t see THIS coming in the future – or whatever.

                 My answers to these things are fairly simple:

1) Poppycock.

2) Prophets are not fortune tellers.

                 I say Poppycock because you can’t prove the Bible.  I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean.  Are we referring to video footage?  Legal documents?  Photographs?  Of the flood?  Of Daniel in the Lions’ Den?  Of the writing on the wall?  Of Moses on the mountain?  Of Christ healing the blind?  How do you prove these things?  And anyone who does any delving into the history of the origins of the Bible finds a magnificent mess of shoddy record keeping, politics, philosophy and debate.  In the end, you pretty much have to take the bible on faith, believing that God steered the pertinent documents through that mess to survive, neatly printed and nestled in our bookshelves, which is how we take the Book of Mormon (along with the Bible).  People who live in glass houses shouldn’t run around without their clothes on.

                 And the prophets thing.  Do I believe in prophets?  Might as well ask me if I believe in the scriptures.  My answer is yes.  Yes, I do.  I believe in Abraham and Moses and Deborah and—yes, I believe that God is real and that he chooses certain people to deliver messages for him, messages significant of the time and place and circumstance.  In many cases (most?) the prophet of authority is also the religious leader of the people who believe in God.  Does this seem outlandish to me, believing in a powerful being I can’t see or hear, and expecting messages from him to come from just some person who claims authority?  Well – yeah, I suppose it could seem that way.  And yet, following my inner compass, I find this as likely as any number of tiny to great miracles we take for granted as normal every day we live.

                 Does it make sense to me that after thousands of years of prophets interfacing people and God that suddenly, the heavens would simply go silent?  Like we’re so smart and techno and civilized and educated now, we don’t need such messages?  Like the old folks of history were children, needing parenting – but we’re the grown-ups of history and don’t need it?  Or like God went away.  Or like he thinks we’re perfect now?

                 Sure.  Right.  That makes perfect sense.

                 So here is a modern day person who believes in a modern day prophet explaining her understanding of what a prophet actually is.  Prophet=job.  Like teacher=job.  Or engineer, or president, or father=job.  A man is, more or less, engaged for the job.  And what is the job?  It is to lead, to course correct, to advise, to teach—and to pass on instruction from God, who still remembers we’re here.  A prophet is, then, the authorized representative of God, the official mouthpiece, the ambassador, the guy with the notarized creds.

                 We LDS haven’t done much Red Sea trekking lately – well, wait.  I guess leaving ancestral homes, crossing the ocean and walking across the continent of the US back in the 1800s would certainly count as that.  But very lately, the journey hasn’t been physical – but it’s been ethical, philosophical, spiritual.  As real a trek as Moses’, only in a mental dimension.  Would I want to do that walk alone?

In our Gospel Principles lesson manual it’s explained like this:

A prophet is a man called by God to be his representative on earth. When a prophet speaks for God, it is as if God were speaking. A prophet is also a special witness for Christ, testifying of His divinity and teaching His gospel. A prophet teaches truth and interprets the word of God. He calls the unrighteous to repentance. He receives revelations and directions from the Lord for our benefit. He may [my emphasis] see into the future and foretell coming events so that the world may be warned. [This is IF it suits the purposes of God.]

A prophet may come from various stations in life. He may be young or old, highly educated or unschooled. He may be a farmer, a lawyer, or a teacher. Ancient prophets wore tunics and carried staffs. Modern prophets wear suits and carry briefcases [that was my favorite part]. What, then, identifies a true prophet? A true prophet is always chosen by God and called through proper priesthood authority.

                 Now.  About science and religion?  Is everything in the Bible to be taken literally?  Did Noah’s flood cover the whole earth?  Was it only a locally catastrophic phenomenon? Answer: I don’t know.  What difference does it make?  If the story was physically true, world-wide, local, metaphorical – what’s the diff?  If it’s in the Bible because God wanted it there, and if there’s a lesson to it, then it’s important.  Can it be proved?  Meh.

                 This is one of my favorite things, a little passage from one of the discourses of Brigham Young, the trekking prophet from our early days, and the engineer of Salt Lake City:

                 Our religion will not clash with or contradict the facts of science in any particular. You may take geology, for instance, and it is true science; not that I would say for a moment that all the conclusions and deductions of its professors are true, but its leading principles are; they are facts—they are eternal; and to assert that the Lord made this earth out of nothing is preposterous and impossible [see Abraham 3:24; D&C 131:7]. God never made something out of nothing; it is not in the economy or law by which the worlds were, are, or will exist. There is an eternity before us, and it is full of matter; and if we but understand enough of the Lord and his ways we would say that he took of this matter and organized this earth from it. How long it has been organized it is not for me to say, and I do not care anything about it. … If we understood the process of creation there would be no mystery about it, it would be all reasonable and plain, for there is no mystery except to the ignorant. This we know by what we have learned naturally since we have had a being on the earth (DBY, 258–59).

                 If it’s truth we’re after, shouldn’t we look everywhere for it?  Why would religious souls be afraid of science, and science afraid of religion?  Does it not make sense that the God who created a world that runs like a well-oiled machine (when allowed to) did it by scientific means?  Would anything else make sense at all?  Religion is NOT magic.  Religion is supposed to be the study of God, godliness, the nature of man, the purpose of existence, the truth of the nature of EVERYTHING.

                 And to that end, while we do respect all prophets from all times, the prophet who is called for our time and our culture and our world is the one who trumps them all.  And he will not contradict any of the others in the basics of the gospel, but may in the application of the principles of the gospel – like, our young women are advised to be modest in this day and time; that does not indicate that their hems should be exactly what Brigham’s young women were instructed to wear.   Or as Rachel said over the pulpit today, God’s revelation to Adam did not instruct Noah how to build the ark.

                 Running out of steam again.  This stuff has just been on my mind.  Mostly because Rachel gave a stunning talk about it today in church.  Lovely.

                 So anyway, there you are.  Then end of the Sabbath day, the end of my religious diatribe.  Brought to you by my barn full of horses, the rain and hope for a better world.

                 Let the church say, “Amen.”