Apples and Oranges

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This is a bit of my episode with Dr. Nace Howell on the nature of Mormonism. Hear the whole episode below. Enjoy.

Penjammin: So if you don't mind, can we go through some of these points here? Because like you said, this little tweet here is remarkably typical. It's almost a feat, an accomplishment.

Nace: Absolutely. Yep.

. . .

Penjammin: Okay. He starts off as a lifelong member [of the LDS], so he's got some some cred there. But he also claims to be a Christian. [By the way, that's] lifelong member of the “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”. To me, that's also PR.

Nace: Absolutely. Yeah.

Penjammin: Just like, “No, no, no, no, we're not a different church. This is what you should call us.” It reminds me of the trans talk. “Use my pronouns; affirm my ideology with your own language.” And so “Don't call us Mormons. Call us this.” Eh. I want to talk how I want to talk, but we'll be respectful, you know?

Okay. Here's the first bullet point. (It's got, like, a lot of points.) But the first one is that “Jesus Christ is the only begotten Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary.” And he cites Luke. Okay, so what's wrong with that, Nace?

Nace: Yeah. So I would say, like in general, all of these are based on a fundamentally different Jesus. So, what's going on here is you know, they'll say that Jesus existed before the creation, and he was with the father before the creation of the world, according to, say, that second one there, John 1:1-3. And they'll say that he's the only way. They'll say, like Acts 4:12, he's the only way to salvation. They'll say that he rose from the dead. Like I said, these are typical arguments. But the problem is that this sounds a lot like what Christians believe, but it is fundamentally different. And that fundamental difference is because the Mormon Jesus is a created being. So when they're talking about their Jesus, he is fundamentally different from the Jesus that we know as Christians…

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Heads up: Due to a goof on my end, the audio came out in need of some help, but after much time and effort, the episode is saved! Some warble is noticeable, but it is now an enjoyable listen. *takes bow*

Penjammin grew up in a labyrinthine cavern. Later he ran with the wolves and lived every moment marinated in the sweet scent of his game, until pirates landed and… See About for full story, and get his eletter at penjams.com/subscribe.

Pushy Puritans Don’t Get a Pass

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“You shouldn’t force your morality onto others.” Yep. I ran across that today. Some responses to that idea leave much to be desired. They reveal an eagerness to use the state to mold the behavior of strangers in ways that have nothing to do with justice. I’m not sold on that. I’d want to respond differently. But how?

First, forcing morality is strange way to put it. People don’t literally force it like force-feeding medicine. So I’d ask what they mean. In return, I would probably get a few examples of government-forced behavioral conformity. Eventually the other person would concede that they have no problem with legislating against things like murder and theft even though such things are also present in various moral systems. They’re just against forcing conformity to things that are only features of (arbitrary) moral systems. For example, they would object to the Amish getting in power and imposing their voluntary abstinence from electricity, which seems quite reasonable.

So, I’d want to restate the claim in clearer language and get confirmation that the clearer formulation truly IS what they meant. (No Cathy Newman maneuvers here.) Maybe it would be something like this:

Conformity to moral ideas that are beyond the basic honoring of natural rights should not be compelled under threat of force, especially by the government.

Once we get a clear picture of the idea, there are options. For one, we could just drop the matter. After all, there’s a time to every purpose. This topic might just be getting in the way of more important ones. Alternatively, we could agree with them. It is not obvious that government should be big enough to enforce such things, or that doing so would be within its just purview (if it has one).

The author I read today went a different way. He thinks the opposition to forced moral behavior is self-defeating, that it fails in the same manner as when someone says, “I never use words.” But, I don't see how. There’s no force involved in merely saying morality shouldn’t be forced. Furthermore, people seem to have a natural right to go peaceably about their business, and if that’s correct, then a moral against violating that right would in the same category as the other morals that can be enforced (Thou shalt not murder, Thou shalt not steal, etc.). So where is the contradiction?

That’s where I am with it, anyway. I welcome your feedback, and if you like my stuff, please subscribe below.

Penjammin grew up in a labyrinthine cavern. Later he ran with the wolves and lived every moment marinated in the sweet scent of his game, until pirates landed and… See About for full story, and get his eletter at penjams.com/subscribe.

When Lies Lash Out

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They say, Where goods don’t cross borders, guns do. I’d like to propose a corollary: When words aren't exchanged, bullets are. Bullets may be exchanged anyway, but the absence of dialogue makes it more likely. Now, a hardened hater might not respond to reason, but what about before he got into that condition? Maybe. Who knows what an extra ounce of prevention might have done?

Things build. Merely annoying misunderstandings can get quite ugly, especially should the conflict serve the interests of others, like identity politicians. So, I'm losing patience. I'm losing it with those who don’t appreciate the practice of commending and defending their most important ideas and values. And I am growing in appreciation of reasoned conversation unto truth, or dialectic. That simple childlike wonder could do so much good in the world (with grown-up acumen), that amazes me.

Merely inconvenient anti-intellectualism is one thing. One time, I politely made a theoretical comment at a new bible study, and the pastor's wife dismissed it (and me) as being “all head and no heart” (Lady, you just met me. How much heart is that? 🙂 ) But things seem more than personally inconvenient now, and the antipathy enrages me today. Why? The propaganda that fosters all the heinous violence on the news is so very thin! What happened to thinking for ourselves? People have lost interest I guess, and with it, skill. Also, they don’t see anyone caring, so why should they? It’s not a thing, to them.

Public school doesn’t help. “Think for yourself, oh, but not anything that's not on this card of acceptable secular-liberal belief.” Also of no help: the whole pseudo-polite aversion to ever talking politics and religion. It just makes us bad at such talk, which reinforces the aversion. (The state of that art is abysmal.)

So, the young are vulnerable to lies, and the lies foster violence… and all that is fostered by the neglect of those responsible for them. Now, I don’t mean to excuse the violent. It’s more that, as with transitioned kids, many passive parents are culpably not helping.

There's nothing new under the sun. Lies lash out, or people lash out with them. It happened to Socrates, Jesus, Solzhenitsyn, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and on 9/11. It's all over the news, and it's happened to many of us. It just seems like a good time to remember that the pen is mightier than the plane. The planes haven't stopped. Neither should the pens.

Penjammin grew up in a labyrinthine cavern. Later he ran with the wolves and lived every moment marinated in the sweet scent of his game, until pirates landed and… See About for full story, and get his eletter at penjams.com/subscribe.

Subjective Professory

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This is a bit of my episode with The Subjective Professor in which we talk subjective professory and agreeable discourse. Hear the whole episode below. Enjoy.

The Subjective Professor: And my guiding principle was avoiding hypocrisy because Jesus didn't like it so much. So.

Penjammin: [laughs] I've heard that. I've heard he wasn't a fan. You know, maybe.

The Subjective Professor: Yeah. As soon as I saw something was hypocritical, I just said, okay, moving on. Just sort of examining people's presuppositions or their assumptions and then seeing what they wanted to do with it then allowed me to say Oh okay, well, that's one way of doing it. But then, at the same time, being open minded with what might be better. So that's pretty much where the whole subjective professor thing came from.

Penjammin: Maybe this is an exercise in subjective philosophy, or professory. The hypocritical. People will say “that's hypocritical,” but often there's different intentions with the word. There's double standard, there's fakeness. There's a combination of both.

The Subjective Professor: Right, right.

Penjammin: Probably, just off the top of my head, I think I'm missing one. But, how do you intend it when we're talking about like –

The Subjective Professor: Right. So I looked up hypocrisy in the dictionary, and the definition that's there says pretending to have moral values that they don't actually have.

Penjammin: Right.

The Subjective Professor: And I thought that was describing something, but it really wasn't getting to the heart of the matter. And to me, I made the conclusion that it was simply…

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Penjammin grew up in a labyrinthine cavern. Later he ran with the wolves and lived every moment marinated in the sweet scent of his game, until pirates landed and… See About for full story, and get his eletter at penjams.com/subscribe.

Silence and Starsong

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This is a bit of my episode with Joseph Knowles in which we talk his efforts to inspire wonder and awe through stories of high strangeness. Hear the whole episode below. Enjoy.

Penjammin: So what we're really talking about is Silence and Starsong. Most people aren't going to hear that and know exactly what I'm talking about. Would you please fix that for us? What is Science Starsong, and what's distinctive about it, too?

Joseph: Sure. Silence and Starsong is a fiction magazine of which I am the editor. Our tagline is inspiring wonder and awe through stories of high strangeness. And even that itself might not mean a lot to a lot of people, but it's kind of latching on to something that C.S. Lewis talked about. It's a little bit inspired by his space trilogy books.

This April will be the two-year anniversary of our first print magazine issue, and we publish short stories in a variety of genres. So we have a lot of science fiction and fantasy, a healthy dose of stories you probably just have to call horror stories, one or two that might fall under the broad label of fairy tales. We have a couple of Westerns and a number that you just have to call “That's just kind of weird. That's just a weird story.”

Penjammin: Well, there's the high strangeness part, bringing that to bear. They're doing the heavy lifting on that one, I guess.

Silence and Starsong, what's that from?

Joseph: Well, the idea for doing a magazine to begin with came up in a group chat of online friends. And every now and then we would joke back and forth “There's another idea for my novel” or “There's another idea for my story collection.” And one day somebody said why don't we just actually do thi? Amongst amongst a few of us, we could we could put together a little anthology.

And from there it kind of grew to: Well, why don't we just throw the idea out there and see if anybody else is interested? So we had to come up with a name, and . . .

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Penjammin grew up in a labyrinthine cavern. Later he ran with the wolves and lived every moment marinated in the sweet scent of his game, until pirates landed and… See About for full story, and get his eletter at penjams.com/subscribe.