Monthly Archives: May 2011

Review of “The Case for Christ”

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I recently listened to Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ and wanted to give some thoughts on it in a few posts. First, let me give a quick book review to get things started out.

I confess, I liked the book. Strobel is a journalist and so he writes pretty well. Essentially he creates a semi-fictional story of him going around asking believing Christian scholar’s hard hitting questions about Christianity. Of course he’s actually a believing Christian himself and admits this both at the start and end of the book. He was once an atheist, but by the time he wrote this book, he’s definitely committed to Christian beliefs.

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I am Mormon, and so can You

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Everywhere online they pop up where videos are shared, especially the most popular Youtube website. A person starts talking about what they do as a mother, a surfer, a biker, a reporter, and a number of other self-descriptions. Near the end the person will pronounce they are a Mormon like some curtain has be drawn to reveal the big surprise. Most of the videos present people that wouldn’t be known if they hadn’t been introduced this way; and sometimes are quickly forgotten. A few are relatively famous, but not household names.

Related to the now unavoidable videos are a less invasive sharing of messages about Mormon membership. Latter-day Saints all over the world are invited to share their testimony in short texts that are to be read by others. They arguably might be a better way to let others into the lives of Mormons, but much harder to find. Going to lds.org didn’t help. It is easy to find the place to create an account by following Menu/Church/Sharing the Gospel Online on the front page, but it took more digging to actually read the entries.

How successful are these ads? No real statistics have been reported, or what they would mean. It depends on the purpose of the campaign. The few responses that can be tracked seem to indicate better familiarity with the format than any real Mormons. The number of mocking, counter ads, and dismissals indicate nothing has changed on the Internet. That doesn’t mean that it hasn’t succeeded offline, but what and how much has not been examined publicly. There are reasons it might not have succeeded like intended. Continue reading →

We are born to trade, and markets are moral

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Imagine you are at a garage sale. You are looking through the cast-off clothes, furniture and other junk of some other person. You find a coffee table that is perfect for your living room. You pay $40 for it, which is the asking price.

You are ecstatic. A new coffee table like this would have cost $250. You just saved $210!

It turns out the seller is also ecstatic. She didn’t need that table anymore because she never really liked it anyway. She just got $40 for something she probably would have thrown away!

It turns out that trades like this make us happy for good biological reasons. We are social creatures, and we like interacting with other people and trading things. We love it when we complete a trade that is win-win. We love it when we develop trust with our fellow human beings.

There is a new field of study that looks into this called neuroeconomics. This field is discussed in this video here and this article here. Please look at this two links before commenting on this post.

OK, you looked at those two links? Now, let’s discuss this issue.

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A Jewish Rabbi Defines Monotheism

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Another reprint from Mormon Matters.

Only months into my mission we stopped to meet a man that had grown up Mormon but had left the Church and was now attending a Method Church with his wife and family. He was very interested in his forgotten Mormon heritage and enjoyed having us stop by to talk religion.

On one of our visits he showed us a book called Who Needs God by Harold Kushner, a Jewish Rabbi. He lent me the book to peruse. Mission life does not leave a lot of time for reading books, but for the sake of having discussions with him I read through parts of the book, picking out topics that sounded interesting. To this day I still haven’t read the whole book, but enjoyed the parts I did read very much. Kushner is a very insightful man.

One passage that I read blew me away because it gave such a comprehensive definition of monotheism:

The affirmation of monotheism – that there is only one God – is a moral statement, not a mathematical deduction. If there is only one God and He demands moral behavior, then there can be such a thing as good and evil. (Technically speaking, right and wrong are matters of fact: Who stole the money? Good and bad are matters of morality: Should I take the money?) When there are many gods, as in pagan legends, the issue is not: What is good? The issue is: Which God shall I serve? Which one has the power to protect and reward me? Think, for example, of the conflicts of Homer’s Illiad, where the gods take sides. What pleases one displease another. A person offends one of the gods but is under the protection of another, stronger one. The issue is not what is right but who has the might.

The assertion that there is only one God is the assertion that issues of moral behavior are not matters of personal taste. We cannot decide by majority vote that it is all right to steal and lie, any more than we can decide that winters should be mild or cookies more nourishing than vegetables.

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What is Lovecraftianism?

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Some of you may have heard me use the term “Lovecraftianism” at times. Though people usually understand what I mean by that without an explanation, I thought I’d give a short explanation anyhow.

Lovecraftianism is Cosmic Horror

A while back, I wrote a post about horror author H.P. Lovecraft and of his “cosmic horror” stories. Lovecraft created anti-mythical / maltheistic stories where human beings not only don’t have a special relationship with reality, but that reality is actually hostile to us.

In a typical Lovecraft story an investigator will discover some intriguing detail that seems out of place, perhaps a finely carved statue of ancient origins but advanced technology. The investigator looks into this anomaly and he discovers some awful truth about reality. This often takes the form of discovering that an ancient god is going to awaken and enslave us, devour us, or breed us.

Now that the investigator knows the truth he can never be as peace again. He might commit suicide, go insane, or just live out his days knowing too much and hoping the worst does not happen while he is still alive.

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