Author Archives: Bruce Nielson

Karen Armstrong’s Case for Religious Practice: Summary

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As I mentioned in my last post, Karen Armstrong’s book The Case for God is not really a case for God per se, but instead a case for human spirituality and religious practice. It was written in part as a response to the ‘new atheists’ (i.e. militant atheists) attacks on religion.

Logos and Mythos

Armstrong argues that there are two sources of knowledge in the world. One is logos, which is rationality, and the other is mythos. Logos helped us with daily survival, but could not assist us with human grief or finding ultimate meaning. For ‘ultimate meaning’ humans turned to mythos or “myth” though back then the word was not used (as it is today) as a synonym for untruth. (p. xi, 325) Religion and Mythos are the human way of living “joyously” with realities for which are insoluble, such as mortality, grief, and pain. [1] Continue reading →

In Whom Can I Trust?: How I Lost My Faith

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Another reprint from Mormon Matters. Yes, it’s a play on words.

It’s a familiar story: I read about Mormon History and began to doubt my faith in God.

Your life lays on the floor, shattered before you. Are there any pieces worth salvaging, or is none of it worth a darn? Is there even a God? Does life have meaning?

You aren’t sure what to do or where to go from here. You want to believe in God still, because there was so much joy in it, but you can’t just will it to happen over what your brain tells you the truth is. And you feel all alone because there is no one within the LDS Church you can really talk to about your doubts in a meaningful way.

What do you do when you come to realize that you faith had been misplaced all these years? You wish you could die.

I didn’t know about the New Order Mormon community during this period of my life, so I thought I was unique and I was very alone.

Through years of prayer, fasting, giving up on prayer and fasting, returning to more prayer and fasting, and finally receiving definitive answers from God, I emerged with a new, and somewhat uncomfortable, world view.

Rational Blind Spots Continue reading →

I Have Never Been Omnipotent, But I Have Loved

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 Another reprint from Mormon Matters. I was not really satisfied with this post because I felt it left the false impression that all Christians believe one specific way about the nature of God, which isn’t true. Still, for those that this criticism does apply to – ch as the footnoted Owens and Mosser — I think it’s accurate. It’s easy to start emphasizing the parts of the nature of God that we know nothing about and to downplay the ones we actually understand to some degree.

Consider the following lists of attributes of God:

  • Omnipotent
  • Loving
  • Merciful
  • Gracious
  • Omniscient
  • Just
  • Omnipresent
  • Unchanging
  • Truthful / Cannot lie
  • No Respecter of Persons
  • Slow to Anger
  • Long-suffering / Patient
  • Infinite
  • Eternal
  • Sovereign

Continue reading →

Karen Armstrong’s Case for Religious Practice: Introduction

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I recently listened to Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God not really knowing what to expect and without any preconceived ideas about it other than the vague memory that it was in part written as a response to the militant atheists such as Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, and Hitchens. I also remembered that a friend of mine, John Dehlin, had highly recommended it on one of his blogs or podcasts.

Though the book makes no case for God whatsoever, in it I was delighted to find a semi-systematic explanation of liberal theology. Better yet, it is most likely a non-literal theist view of liberal theology though, as we’ll see, this is not entirely clear due to her obfuscation of her point of view. Continue reading →

Bloggernacle Thought: The Slippery Slope of Unbelief

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Another reprint from Mormon Matters.

I found this comment out on the bloggernacle from someone named Christopher Smith:

Most people don’t want to believe less. They want to believe more. People who do make the decision to believe less tend to be skeptical types, and not infrequently end up at the bottom of the slippery slope. This is why Whitmerites and RLDS end up as Protestants, and liberal Protestants end up as atheists, whereas fundamentalists and messianic sects continue to thrive and multiply.

Discuss.