The "Just In Case" Philosophy

Given that we don't know that anything about life is real, it can be easy for people to have serious doubts as to whether God exists and whether our choices matter. Some people ask why we should bother wasting our lives, serving a God who may not even exist. My answer to that question is "just in case."

The way I see it, there either is a God, or there isn't. If there is no God, we can assume that there is no afterlife (almost all religions believe in both, if they believe in either), and even if there is an afterlife, it won't be filled with the eternal rewards or punishments we might expect to receive from a God. If there is no God, then righteousness would have no eternal rewards and wickedness would carry no eternal punishments. In essence, if there is no God, then what we do doesn't ultimately matter.

But what if there is a God? We haven't (and probably can't) prove the existence of God, but we haven't/can't disprove it either. If there is a God, then we can safely assume that everything matters. In that case, both sin and righteousness would have eternal consequences in addition to the temporal ones, making it of incredible importance that we keep His commandments.

To recap: If there is no God, then being righteous and being wicked would each have no eternal consequences, but if there is a God, the eternal consequences of our actions are significant. We may no be able to prove that God exists, and some people seem to be more than willing to take their chances, but I know that, without any conclusive proof one way or the other, there's a chance that God does exist and that what we do does matter. That's why I think it's wise to serve God, just in case He exists.

Hence, Faith

We're studying Rene Descartes in my philosophy class right now. He's most famous for his thought "I think; therefore, I am," but what's even more interesting is how he got to the point where it made sense for him to say that.

At some point in his life, Descartes became aware of the fact that some of the things he thought he knew turned out not to be true. This caused him to doubt some other things he thought he was sure of, and he decided to (at least temporarily) forget everything he thought he knew and see if he could find anything he could know for certain, starting completely from scratch.

This was no easy task, given how thoroughly he discarded everything that could be doubted. He decided that he couldn't rely on religion or science or even his own senses for information that was completely beyond doubt. He believed that everything he had been told and everything he was perceiving could have been just a large collection of lies and illusions.

He even questioned his own existence at one point, but he figured that if he was having all of these doubts, he must exist, because if he didn't exist, he wouldn't be able to think. Hence, ironically, his many doubts led to his first certainty: "I think; therefore, I am."

Now, I kind of get where Descartes was coming from with regards to his many doubts. Our professor opened the class by asking "How do we know that we are not dreaming right now?" and my answer is that we don't. Our senses could be deceiving us. We could all be brains in jars, receiving fabricated stimuli from a network of fraudulent machines, all designed to trick us into thinking that we're not brains in jars. Why anyone would set up such a system, I have no idea, but it would be difficult, if not impossible, to prove that we're not trapped in such a trick.

Hence, the need for faith. We may not know that the world is real any more than we know (really know) that God exists. Of course, we have seen signs and felt impressions, but those signs and impressions could, theoretically, have been falsified. It's entirely possible that we are all brains in jars right now and that it doesn't matter what we "do" in this simulation we're trapped in because nothing about this existence is real.

But we have faith that it is real and that it all does matter. We may not be able to prove that we actually have real bodies and that we actually live on a real Earth, but we have faith that we do. We trust God and our own senses enough to be confident that what we see and hear and feel in our hearts is real and that what we do on this Earth, because we trust that we are really doing things on a real Earth, will have eternal significance. We have faith that this all matters, even if we can't actually prove that any of it even exists.

Some Thoughts About Inciting Violence

I believe in personal accountability. Each person is responsible for their own actions. If someone does something, that's on them, no matter what anybody else said or did.

I also believe in freedom of speech. People should be allowed to share their thoughts and opinions.

This puts me in a tricky situation when it comes to the topic of inciting violence. I believe that it's immoral to encourage violence. In fact, I think it should probably be illegal, but I can't help wondering why I think that. If the responsibility for an action falls on the one who performed it, not the one who incited it, and if the inciter's only crime was saying certain words, then what is the moral justification of laws against inciting violence?

One person I know has argued that more than one person can share responsibility for a person's actions. The person who performed the action is responsible for their action, but so is anyone who encouraged that action. The actor may carry more responsibility than the inciter, but the inciter still carries some.

But should that be illegal? I'm wary of any law that opposes free speech because I believe that it's important for individuals to be able to openly share their opinions, especially on political topics. If any individual or party wanted to silence another, all they would need is an argument for how their opponents' ideologies could lead to violence, and they could abuse anti-incitement laws to silence their political opponents. I may be succumbing to a "slippery slope" fallacy, but I'm not certain that I am. Laws against inflammatory speech seem to be too easy to abuse.

Still, I am not okay with people openly encouraging violence. I believe that it increases the likelihood of people committing very serious crimes and sins. Crime and sin should be discouraged, not encouraged, so I feel that there should be some sort of punishment in place to disincentivize incitement.

There is still a question of what counts as "inciting violence" and what doesn't. If we can determine a clear, objective definition, that would make an anti-incitement law easier to enforce and harder to abuse. But, in the absence of a good definition, I'm almost willing to say that inciting violence (whatever that means) shouldn't be illegal.

I'm kind of on the fence about this. I should explore this topic further, and I probably will in my philosophy class, but for now, I just hope that we don't have to vote on any anti-incitement laws until I've figured out how I feel about them.

A Better Response to (and than) Fearmongering

In his General Conference talk Perfect Love Casteth Out Fear, President Dieter F. Uchtdorf spoke against fear and fearmongering. As I listened to his talk, I couldn't help thinking about what happened recently in Charlottesville and some people's responses to it. Some people are afraid or angry, and some people want others to be afraid or angry. I give it as my personal opinion that God doesn't want anyone to be either.

The love of God can help us not to be afraid. There are those with dangerous ideologies and frightening beliefs, but God has given us the best weapons to use against such people, and those weapons, not surprisingly, aren't weapons at all. The tools to use against fearmongerers are hope, love, and truth. With truth, we can correct others' misconceptions and help them find better solutions to the problems in the world. With love, we can reunify and strengthen our communities, including our national and global communities. And with hope, we can have confidence that evil and hatred will never ultimately triumph over good and love.

We must fight against evil, but in doing so, we must not adopt the hateful or violent tactics of those we fight against. We must always be careful not to absorb the evils against which we fight. And we can ward ourselves against such evils by fighting off hatred with love. I know it sounds hokey, but peace is more effective than violence, and love will always trump hate. Violence is rarely the answer. Love always is.

A "Heaven" for Those Unwilling to Change

After a good deal of thinking about it and some time spent talking about it with others, I think I've figured out at least one way it's beneficial to us for God to let us sin: It lets us be ourselves.

Granted, there's a big difference between being ourselves as we are now and being our best selves, the selves we could be, and the latter is definitely preferable. Furthermore, in terms of the extents of the blessings involved, qualifying for the Celestial Kingdom is far more beneficial than ending up in the Telestial Kingdom. But even the Telestial Kingdom isn't a terrible place to end up (apart from the opportunity cost), and qualifying for the Celestial Kingdom comes at a cost as well.

To become Celestial, we need to change. All of us are less than perfect, so to live in a perfected state, we need to be willing to change for the better, and some people aren't. Change is uncomfortable and undesirable to some people. Some people don't want to become perfect, and they probably wouldn't feel comfortable in an afterlife with people who do, so God made another place for them - a place where they could feel comfortable with being themselves.

Of course, it's entirely possible that this isn't actually a reason why God lets us commit sin. There may be another explanation for how God can allow sin to happen while "all that He does is for our eternal benefit." It's difficult to imagine an "eternal benefit" to committing sin, but if we take "eternal" to mean "lasting forever," and if we allow "comfort" to be listed as a kind of benefit, this explanation sort of works. It'd still be nice to find a better explanation, but I can be satisfied with this one for now.

But that doesn't mean that we should be satisfied with the way we are, not even "for now." We should frequently strive to improve ourselves so we can qualify for greater and greater blessings, as that would, in my opinion, be most beneficial to us. Still, there are some who feel that changing for the better is too great a price to pay, and for those who deeply, sincerely feel that way, it may be kinder for God to give them a lower kingdom to live in than to demand that they make the change.

How God Updates His Commandments

This afternoon, during a conversation with my brother, I shared a video about the Divine Command Theory of ethics, which video I've blogged about before. The video defines the Divine Command Theory as "The belief that what's moral, and what's immoral - is commanded by the divine." I subscribe to this theory, as does just about ever theist I've ever met. It basically means that God tells us what the rules of morality are. At the start of the video, the narrator listed a few of these rules, with many of his examples coming from the Law of Moses. Later in the video, he poses the question "How do we know what God commands? . . . How do we know which commands are binding and which ones God retracted somewhere along the way?" Thankfully for me and all other Latter-Day Saints, we have an answer.

All Christian religions look to the Bible for moral guidance, and most of those religions recognize that some of the commandments God gave His children were specific to particular people at particular times, with the Law of Moses being the most obvious example. To know which commandments are still binding and which commandments have been redacted, we need a version or source of the word of God that gets updated whenever God wants to update His Commandments. Thankfully, we have such a source.

Since the very beginning, God has given us prophets that relay God's word to us. These prophets have historically been God's mouthpiece when relaying information about new, revised, or redacted commandments. As long as there has been a prophet on the Earth, people willing to follow God had a person they could turn to for specific, up-to-date information on how they could do that. Ancient prophets wrote the Old and New Testaments, and they included many updates and revisions to many of the commandments that had been given before them. After the death of Christ's Apostles, there was a long period of time when the word of God wasn't being updated. No new scripture was given, and no new clarifications or revisions were made to existing commandments. (At least, no new clarifications or revisions that were sanctioned by God were made to the existing commandments.) But this period of spiritual silence, thankfully, ended.

Nowadays, we have prophets who can rely God's word, including any and all updates to His previous commandments, on a regular basis. Through modern revelation, we can know which commandments were specifically meant for others and which commandments are specifically meant for us. With modern prophets regularly relaying the updated word of God, we can know what God commands and which commands are binding and which commands have been redacted. We don't need to wonder which commandments do or do not still apply, because we get reminded about many of them (especially including the commandments we are to follow) every six months.

Some philosophers still see problems with the Divine Command Theory of ethics, and as I study it in my philosophy class, I may find some more questions or problems to work through, but so far, I haven't felt much need to reevaluate my stance on the subject of ethics. I've had answers to many of the questions that have plagued philosophers for centuries, and, not surprisingly, many of those answers have come to me through modern revelation.

Scriptural Discussions

This evening, in our family scripture study, my family paused a few times to comment on the scriptures we were reading. This actually happens somewhat frequently, though our comments are usually only a sentence long and don't often provoke a response. This time, however, our comments went further than usual. We talked about our readings, raised questions, and discussed possible answers to them. This all meant that it took us that much longer to complete our nightly chapter, but I think our discussions were well worth the time they took. They helped us understand and ponder what we were reading, rather than simply reading through it.

I think that's why it's good advice, at least in one's personal reading, to study the scriptures for a period of time rather than trying to read a given number of chapters or verses. If one focusses too much on reading a certain amount of scriptures, they may be tempted to try to get through the readings quickly, or to consider themselves "done" as soon as they've read the scriptures, whether or not they put any actual thought into them. When one instead allows themselves enough time and flexibility to focus on a particular verse or passage and ponder it for a moment, they'll get a lot more out of that passage than they would have if they had merely skimmed through it or read it just for the sake of reading it.

I'm pretty sure our family will stick to the pattern or reading one chapter from the Book of Mormon each night, but I hope that we'll continue to feel free to voice and discuss our comments and questions as we read our nightly chapter. I enjoyed the scriptural discussions we had tonight, and I hope we have more of them in the future.