Latter-day Saint FAIR-Cast

by Zachary Wright Introduction Imagine for yourself for a moment that you’re face-to-face with a critic of the church who states “The church is lying to you about its history” or “the church is trying to cover up its past.”  When you ask them what they mean, they explain how the church has suppressed the details behind how a seer stone was used throughout the translation of the Book of Mormon.  They continue “It’s only until the advent of the internet where the church has been forced to be honest.”  What this critic does not know is that this claim is, for the most part, misinformation.  The unfortunate reality is that misinformation can be spread as simply as the example above, and it can have some devastating consequences. Now, the vast majority of this series has been dedicated to arriving at correct conclusions, and I’ve mostly talked about us using data to build our own arguments and arrive at well-reasoned conclusions.  However, besides my episode on logical fallacies, I haven’t given all that much attention to teaching how to identify bad information.  So far, all my episodes have been working under the assumption that the information I’ve been presenting is accurate.  In reality, this isn’t always the case.  Reality is often very complicated, and the manner in which data is presented can be incorrect, misleading, biased, or otherwise presented in a way that can incorrectly sway our opinion.  Critical thinkers need to be aware of how data can be presented in ways that can lead to incorrect conclusions, so that we don’t fall prey to information that can have lasting negative consequences.  To start, we’ll discuss what misinformation is, and talk about how it can be combated.  Then, we’ll talk about propaganda in a similar way, and finally, we’ll discuss how to protect yourself against bad information.  Let’s get into it. Misinformation Before we can launch into describing propaganda, we first need to understand what misinformation is.  Misinformation is described as “incorrect or misleading information” (1).  This kind of information serves critical thinkers very little good because in order to solve problems, we have to acknowledge the effects those problems have in reality.  If we don’t understand the reality of a problem, that is, how that problem affects us in the real world, then we run the risk of implementing ineffective solutions.  Keep this in mind as we proceed through the sources we analyze. Let’s jump back to the example in the introduction.  For those who don’t know what a seer stone is, the short answer is that it was a small, chocolate-colored stone that Joseph Smith used during the translation process.  This hypothetical critic made the claim that the church was actively hiding the fact that Joseph Smith used a seer stone during the translation process of the Book of Mormon (2).  If this was true, then members of the church who wanted to explain what happened would need to explain not only why Joseph used a seer stone, but also why the church was allegedly hiding the issue.  In other words, those kinds of details would need to be factored into whatever analysis we did on the church and its truth claims.  However, is it true that the church hid it?  Well, the answer is kind of complicated, but I’ve found that it’s actually pretty universally “no.”   For example, we have records of David Whitmer, a witness of the translation process, recording during his lifetime that Joseph Smith used a seer stone during the translation process (3).  We also have Emma Smith, another direct witness, indicating that he used a seer stone as well (4). This is where things get tricky though.  These are both rather late sources, which if you remember from my article on evaluating historical sources, can sometimes make things a bit more complicated than we’d like.  This led some members and leaders of the church to disbelieve the idea Joseph used a seer stone.  Joseph Fielding Smith, for example, knew that Joseph Smith had the seer stone, but didn’t believe that it was used during the Book of Mormon translation (5).  This sentiment arguably dominated the rhetoric of the time regarding the translation.  However, this certainly wasn’t the unanimous opinion in the 1900s.  We have records of historians such as Richard Lloyd Anderson, alongside apostles Neal A. Maxwell and Russell M. Nelson, who affirmed that Joseph used the seer stone in the hat during the translation a few decades later (6).  As you can see, there’s far more nuance to this issue than meets the eye. That brings us back to the topic of misinformation.  With this in mind, is it really fair to say that the church as an organization was actively trying to hide the fact that Joseph used a seer stone?  As you can see, this critic’s claim had information that was either misleading or even outrightly untrue.  We have multiple general authorities affirming that Joseph Smith used a seer stone during a portion of the Book of Mormon’s translation.  Was this detail contested?  Sure, but that’s very different from saying that the church was actively, knowingly, and deceptively lying or hiding this issue from the general membership.  Even so, we see this issue rehashed by critics of the church time and time again, despite the claim’s misleading nature. Before we move on, it’s worth noting that there is some distinction between misinformation and its more devious cousin Disinformation.  Disinformation is described as “false information deliberately and often covertly spread (as by the planting of rumors) in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth” (7).  To put it another way, misinformation is just information that is incorrect, while disinformation is the intentional use of incorrect information.  Now, I don’t like accusing people of spreading disinformation, because that would be assuming the intent of another person, which is very VERY difficult to prove with any degree of certainty.  I think that Hanlon’s razor may be useful, or at least a variant of it:  Don’t assume malintent when human frailty can account for the same behavior.   Impracticality aside, it’s an important (albeit theoretical) distinction to make, seeing as it entails that we see the purveyor of disinformation in a different light than we see the purveyor of misinformation. Propaganda Now, misinformation is definitely a problematic thing, and its presence is felt in a lot of aspects of life and is often implemented in the realm of propaganda.  Propaganda is described as “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view” (8).  Another source described propaganda as being “dissemination of information—facts, arguments, rumors, half-truths, or lies—to influence public opinion” (9).  As you can imagine, this is often an instrument in much of political discourse, but as you can imagine, propaganda can also be found in a lot of other areas of life, such as in religious discourse. If we study those definitions carefully, propaganda is focused on this idea of swaying people to agree with you, using a carefully selected concoction of facts and/or misinformation and fallacious reasoning to get people to agree with you.  Researchers seem to agree with the idea that propaganda is information that is disseminated to elicit emotional responses, often using rhetorical devices and vaguely defined terms (10).  However, as some writers have noted, there aren’t a lot of great ways to determine the difference between genuine persuasion and overt manipulation, and consequently, it’s difficult to define propaganda well (11).   For our purposes, we’ll be working off of the definitions above wherein propaganda is more manipulative, biased, and misleading, even when it contains partial truths. For example, consider this comment I saw on social media recently (source available upon request): This is an excellent example of propaganda.  It’s a claim made about the church that attempts to elicit an emotional response:  A feeling of unfairness.  It wants us to actively distrust the church, and leave behind the organization that is allegedly extorting money from us “under duress”.  However, if we take some time to unpack this claim, we find it’s stringing together points that don’t make much sense.  I don’t pay tithing because I’m under duress. I pay tithing because I love God and I want to give everything I can to him. I hope my family will do the same, but I recognize that some of them may choose not to. If they don’t want to be around me in Celestial glory, then they don’t have to be around me. I won’t do anything to force them to, and neither will the church.  Think about this for a moment: How could anyone force them? Now, more could be said on this topic from a theological perspective.  For instance, according to LDS theology, if someone I love doesn’t want to live a Celestial life, our scriptures indicate that I’ll still be able to minister to them, and consequently be around them (12).  However, this example shows how a deeper dive into propagandistic claims can expose the kind of half-truths inherent in a lot of these kinds of arguments.  By oversimplifying the issue, and targeting the emotional response of the reader, the critic employing this kind of argument may cause serious doubt to a genuine believer. Fighting Bad Information How do we avoid falling victim to misinformation and misleading propaganda?  Well, analyzing the data very much like I did now may prove to be useful.  It’s helpful to go back over the primary sources, see what different people are saying, and then draw conclusions about the data.  Drawing on the first article I wrote, a pattern of asking questions may also be useful.  Asking questions like these may be helpful: What is the cultural background of the people who are talking about X? How has discourse about X shifted over time? Is there ambiguity regarding what the sources say that would be benefitted from further research? Is the person I’m listening to omitting important information, or focusing on information, about X in a way that alters their conclusion? We can use tactics like these to analyze information regarding just about any topic, and there are definitely benefits from using these techniques when analyzing church history.  While we should always be open to being wrong, following these patterns can lead us to be wrong less often, and consequently be more able to resolve problems in a practical, powerful way. Luckily for us, critical thinking is also helpful in discerning what is true and what is not true in regards to propaganda as well.  As it is with misinformation, asking questions can prove to be useful, and having at least a cursory grasp of the discourse behind the issues at hand is just as helpful.  By knowing a thing or two about the topics being discussed, it can become easier for us to understand where the people presenting arguments are coming from, and consequently discern between bias, truth, and especially assumptions. Honestly, as someone who has spent a significant amount of time parsing through arguments for and against the truth claims of the church, I’ve found that the most prominent thing that brings people out of the church is assumptions and negative feelings.  The idea that Joseph Smith used a seer stone for portions of the Book of Mormon’s translation doesn’t necessarily bring people out of the church.  More often than not, it’s the assumption that church leaders lied about their history, and often the negative feelings that follow thereafter (13).  Manipulative propaganda thrives on assumptions, inferences, and fallacious reasoning.  To avoid being misled, think about the presuppositions you have, so that you can study them out, and not allow your emotions alone to guide your behavior and thought processes.  Figure out what presuppositions other people have so that you can parse through bias more effectively.  In this series, we’ve talked about several tools now that can help us identify good information, and differentiate it from bad information.  I hope those tools can be useful. Conclusion In conclusion, it’s valuable to us as critical thinkers to practice discerning between good and bad information.  Misinformation runs rampant in every corner of our society, and manipulative, deceptive propaganda can cause just as many problems.  Luckily for us, there are ways to combat misinformation, and to protect ourselves from those who would deceive us (intentionally or otherwise).  Critical thinkers have a plethora of tools to help them find truth, and with those tools, we can develop the confidence we need to make decisions that will help us accomplish what we need, and to solve the greater problems in today’s world.  As always, I’m of the opinion that doing so will help us become the kinds of thinkers, and believers, that God wants us to be. References: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/misinformation The reasoning behind this criticism varies significantly depending on the critic.  Mostly though, this criticism ties Joseph’s use of a seer stone to local folk magic practices, which can make people uncomfortable.  Many authors have tackled this topic more extensively than we have time to do here, but some great resources to study more about this include Richard Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling, alongside Michael Hubbard Mackay and Nicholas J. Frederick’s Joseph Smith’s Seer Stones.  Other balanced sources include analyses from Mormonr, and FAIR presentations like this one. https://archive.org/details/addresstoallbeli00whit/page/12/mode/2up https://bhroberts.org/records/0iSghu-CyqXGc/emma_smith_reports_that_joseph_used_the_urim_and_thummim_before_the_lost_pages_and_a_dark_seer_stone_afterwards https://archive.org/stream/Doctrines-of-Salvation-volume-3-joseph-fielding-smith/JFSDoctrinesofSalvationv3_djvu.txt https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Question:_What_Church_sources_discuss_either_the_use_of_the_seer_stone_or_the_stone_and_the_hat_as_part_of_the_Book_of_Mormon_translation_process%3F https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disinformation https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=propaganda https://www.britannica.com/topic/propaganda https://guides.library.jhu.edu/evaluate/propaganda-vs-misinformation https://oxfordre.com/communication/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.001.0001/acrefore-9780190228613-e-1384 D&C 76:85-87, It is for this reason that I believe that the “together” part has to do with unity just as much as (if not more than) proximity.  Families can be united in purpose and love forever, if they so choose.  No one is going to be coerced to live a certain way, neither in this world, nor in the world to come. https://leadingsaints.org/the-root-cause-for-why-members-leave-the-church-what-leaders-can-do-about-it/ Further Study: Fear Leads to the Dark Side – Navigating the Shallows of (Mis)Information – René Krywult; This video talks about much of what we talk about, and goes through examples of how to parse through claims made about LDS theology. Introduction to Propaganda; A great introduction to propaganda. Note how they indicate that propaganda in of itself is “morally neutral”, once again affirming how propaganda can be viewed and used in different ways. Finding Truth in the Misinformation Age; a BYU professor of communications outlines how to battle misinformation from a theological perspective.   Zachary Wright was born in American Fork, UT.  He served his mission speaking Spanish in North Carolina and the Dominican Republic.  He currently attends BYU studying psychology, but loves writing, and studying LDS theology and history.  His biggest desire is to help other people bring them closer to each other, and ultimately bring people closer to God. The post By Study and Faith – Episode 8: Misinformation and Propaganda appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: What Apostasy? by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about The Great Apostasy. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand. Our jumping-off point is 2 Thes 2:1-4. This is in the English Standard Version: Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered together to him, we ask you, brothers, not to be quickly shaken in mind or alarmed, either by a spirit or a spoken word, or a letter seeming to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come. Let no one deceive you in any way. For that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of destruction, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God. If you’ve ever had a conversation with someone unfamiliar with The Great Apostasy you are probably familiar with the look on their face that says something like, “I have no idea what you are talking about.” And I imagine that is rather confusing to you, Latter-day Saint friends. The signs of it seems so obvious to us it’s barely something that needs proving. You might as well ask someone to prove that air exists. But it’s different for Evangelicals. So, what are the issues? Well, first, they don’t deny that apostasy with a lower-case “a” has happened many times in history. You can see it in the Bible and in every generation since. However, they will always couch it in terms of being individual apostasy, not collective. This forces the conversation into an awkward corner because the natural response might be something like, “Oh no, it wasn’t just one person, it was the whole thing.” And now you’ve got a problem. Because it wasn’t the whole thing. You’ve just conflated 2 different ideas about apostasy. Let me explain. What does, “complete apostasy” mean? And what doesn’t it mean? Well, it can’t mean that there were no people who loved God, had the desire to serve him, and patterned their lives after Jesus Christ. We know from history that this is not true. So Evangelicals have a rough little piece of logic to work through here – and sometimes we make it harder on them by over-playing our hand. The Evangelical who knows even the basics of history can point out plenty of people who are examples of faithful believers throughout the ages. So, even being able to point out 1 counterexample seems to discredit the claim. But the claim of The Great Apostasy is not that no one loved and followed God to the best of their ability. It’s that the priesthood power was taken from the Earth. Those are 2 very different things. The Great Apostasy is an institutional situation, not an individual one. All that to say, when you’re in a conversation with an Evangelical about the apostasy try to stay out of the trap of “the apostasy means no one loved Jesus Christ at all during that time.” Second issue. Evangelicals absolutely believe in a great apostasy. But, like many times, they’re not talking about the same thing we are. They would define the great apostasy as something that will happen at some future point in time. GK Beal, an Evangelical Biblical scholar says it this way, “The point Paul appears to be making is that the visible church community, within which true saints exist, will become so apostate that it will be dominantly filled with people who profess to be Christian but really are not. The church will continue to profess to be Christian but most in it will actually not be true believers.” Dr. B. J. Oropeza, an Evangelical at Azusa Pacific University has written 3 volumes, 800 pages, on apostasy. And every single one of those pages deals with the apostasy of the individual. Not the removal of priesthood power. So, we’re on the same page that there is such a thing as a great apostasy. They just think it is a future event while we believe it is a past event. But this nuance brings up an interesting layer. Some of the pushback Evangelicals give on the concept of an apostasy (as we define it) is that God wouldn’t do that to us humans – why would he send Jesus and then let the whole thing fall apart? Well, interestingly enough they are perfectly okay with believing that is a possibility – a future possibility, but a possibility nevertheless. The only difference between their thinking on this and ours is that we think it happened quickly after the Apostles were gone, and they think it won’t happen for a long time to come. In this 2 Thes passage, we also get Paul warning the reader to not let anyone deceive you. Which is a very good and helpful thing for him to be saying – but it also sets up the Evangelical way of thinking – that apostasy an individual matter. The person who becomes apostate has been tricked or fooled out of proper belief. And it is their responsibility alone to right their ship. Apostasy happens to individuals and must be fixed by individuals. The closest they can probably get to apostasy being the removal of priesthood power is looking at the Catholic church in the middle ages – if they know much about history they can probably point to that time period and say that the whole project seems to be off the rails. But Evangelicals and Catholics have an uneasy relationship. A very typical response here would be something like, “Well, those were Catholics.” The implied message is, “they aren’t real Christians like us.” So what do you do with all of this? They see apostasy as an individual matter. And while we certainly can also see it in individuals, when we use the term The Great Apostacy, what we mean has to do with priesthood power, not individual behavior. And while they agree that a great apostasy is going to happen in the future, they don’t think its happened yet. Are we just at a stalemate? No, I don’t think so. It gets tricky because they tend to see the concept of priesthood as a burden, not a gift. They think it is an unnecessary barrier between an individual and God. All they know are “false priests who oppress.” So one path you could go down is talking about how having the priesthood restored actually helps you get closer to God, not further away. I have experienced this in my own life, I’m sure you have too. But another way to talk about this is to think about apostasy as they do. Accept their definition for a moment – that apostasy only has to do with the individual holding incorrect beliefs and has nothing to do with the lack of priesthood power. That it only happens to individuals and not all humans together. How does someone come to understand that they hold an incorrect belief? Your Evangelical friends hold incorrect beliefs – I did when I was an Evangelical. But, most good people who hold wrong beliefs really have no idea that they’re wrong. They’re not trying to be wrong, and they have nothing else to go on that might help them see that some things are off here. Some very simple questions about epistemology would come in handy here – how do they know what they know? How do they know they’re not wrong? If you know and love Evangelicals you probably already know where this goes – they point to the Bible as the source of what they believe. And I trust them when they say that. But here is the thing….the Bible doesn’t lay flat. What does that mean? It means that some passages are given more emphasis and importance than others. And this is true in a way that makes people “blind” to certain passages. They can quote and believe the ones they like, and ignore lots of other verses that add more information. The solution here? You are not going to like it….You need to know your Bible better than you do. I know. I teach Gospel Doctrine and it’s only October and I can already hear the sighs of relief that people have about getting to do Book of Mormon year next year. -And I’m excited too – but as a people, we don’t know the Bible very well, so conversations with folks who are basing literally everything off the Bible are difficult because they can outwit you. I know you’re antsy to get to the BoM but I implore you, if you have a missionary heart toward Evangelicals at all please don’t run out of energy on the New Testament yet. We’ve still got 10 weeks left of the New Testament and one of the best things you might be able to do for the Evangelials you care about, is learn the Bible better. Alright, that is that. Next week we get the wonderful phrase, “husband of one wife” and all the worries Evangelicals have about the history of polygamy in our faith. See you then. More Come, Follow Me resources here.   Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities. The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – 1 and 2 Thessalonians appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: Is this a Gnostic Church? by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about Gnosticism. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand. We are just going to jump right in with this week’s verse Col 2:8-9: See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, which are based on human tradition and the spiritual forces of the world rather than on Christ. For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity dwells in bodily form. Okay, normally I don’t exegete passages for you, that’s not what we’re doing here, but I do feel like a little guidance is helpful here in order for you to understand where we’re going. Paul’s statement here in Col 2 is kind of weird if you don’t understand what’s happening in the background. He makes this statement that you shouldn’t be deceived by human philosophy and traditions. Okay. And then if you don’t know what he’s doing it seems as if he makes a strange left turn by adding in the reminder that Christ had a body. No one would blame you if you read that passage and wondered if the pages got stuck together or something. It’s odd on the face of it. But what Paul is doing here is addressing Gnosticism. What is Gnosticism, why should you care, and what does it have to do with Evangelicals? Gnosticism is a philosophy that covers many things, and we only have time to talk about 1 part of it. The Gnostics believed that it really only matters that you get the correct knowledge in your head. Thinking correctly and having knowledge is not just the most important thing, it’s everything – to the degree that the world which exists outside of the invisible things going on in your head just don’t matter. The only things that really matter are things you can think about – things you do with your actual physical body have nothing to do with it, they certainly don’t need to be regulated, and something that’s just pointless to worry about. If thinking in your head is everything….then the things that happen outside of your head are nothing. There was a very specific version of this in Paul’s day that he’s fighting against – and that idea was that Jesus either didn’t have a body, or maybe he only appeared to have a body. In this view, Jesus had obtained enough knowledge that he was able to be body-less because of his advanced knowledge. And someone with that much knowledge shouldn’t even be bothered with a body – it distracts from the really important thing, knowledge in your mind. So when Paul says, “Hey, don’t get distracted by this philosophy, Jesus actually had a body,” he is responding to this issue. So, what does this have to do with our conversation about Evangelicals? As you know, Evangelicals reject the idea that anyone can choose to accept ordinances done on their behalf after the person has died because of their view that the afterlife is a binary between Heaven and Hell. But that’s only the first part of why they get confused about proxy ordinances. Gnosticism is the other reason why. To Evangelicals having a body is not considered a gift, it’s not something they even think about all that much. They tend toward a kind of dualism that says belief is more important than behavior. What you think in your head is more important than what you actually do with your body. Now, to be fair, most people don’t study philosophy, and probably couldn’t tell you much about Gnosticism, but you can see the impact it has on their faith in the way they don’t value doing good works in the same way that we would in our church, or they don’t think baptism is important – it’s a nice thing, but accepting baptism is not really required for entrance into Heaven. They’re happily less restrictive on clothing, language, substances, and more because as long as you’re believing the correct things, it doesn’t really matter all that much if your physical body is allowed to do other things. So even though most of them won’t know the word “gnostic” they live in a system greatly influenced by it. The theologically trained folks know what it is – and they understand that Gnosticism is a bad thing. In that world, it is a legitimate and devastating blow to call someone out for being “too gnostic.” So it’s not like the leaders and theologically educated folks are embracing the idea that your body dosn’t even matter, but to preach about that doesn’t really go very far in that world. What you wear doesn’t matter, what you say or where you go doesn’t matter, what you do doesn’t matter – as long as you say the right things. Okay, why should you care about any of this….It is a fair question for those outside our faith to ask why proxy work is how it has to be. If they can set aside the idea that there are no chances after death to believe (which is hard for them to set aside) they still get stuck on exactly why it requires a person who still has a physical body to get baptized, for example, on their behalf. Couldn’t God just accept their confession of faith after death? Why involve the people who are alive today and have bodies? This truly makes no sense to them. They might bring up the thief on the cross to whom Jesus spoke and said, “today you will be with me in paradise.” No baptism, no proxy work for that guy was required in what Jesus said. Though to be fair, Jesus was a bit busy at the moment when this conversation was taking place. So, if you’re having a conversation about proxy work with an Evangelical this concept of Gnosticism is in the background, even if either one of you know it. So, what do you do? Well, one interesting way to address this is to wonder with them: Why was it important that Jesus had a body through which he suffered greatly? Couldn’t God have just decided to forgive the sins of anyone who would come to the correct cognitive beliefs about their sin? They will probably tell you that God could have done that – but he didn’t. Why was it important to Paul that Jesus had a real body when he did his proxy work for us? The other piece that comes up here is something I want to be really careful and kind with. There is a piece of Gnosticism – and especially the kind that is at the heart of modern-day evangelicalism – that says not only is knowledge important, but MY version of knowledge is the most important. For example, the key to salvation in the Evangelical world is that each person makes a “personal profession of faith in Christ.” And that is good. We believe that too – no one can decide about Christ for you, you have to decide for yourself. But from there, the Evangelical faces some different challenges. If MY personal salvation is based on MY own thinking – then everything can be. And there’s no one to tell me otherwise. If I don’t like what my pastor teaches, I go find a pastor who teaches what I like. When I get mad at him – or when he’s too old or not cool enough – I can go find another one. No one gets the final word but me. They’re not being self-centered or egotistical about this – its a theological expression for them and they feel the great responsibility of having to decide every single thing in their own head. There is no authority. No prophet. The first time I heard the phrase, “the authority of God was taken from the Earth,” I remember being confused because I had been so indoctrinated in the idea that God really wanted us to figure everything out on our own. In the Evangelical way of thinking that’s not seen God’s authority being taken – but that the very concept of authority doesn’t matter anymore. It’s postmodernism – the author is dead, and with him the concept of authority. You yourself have to be your own authority. Shoot, today in our Western culture we don’t even like the idea of saying that someone who has spent decades studying is an “authority” when I person can spend 5 min on Google and piece together a loud opinion. Evangelicals aren’t just up against this in our culture, they’re up against it as part of their faith system. If you’re thinking ahead, you can already see how this same dilemma causes them to reject having a Prophet. They DO value prophets – they just value the ones who they can read and not see. The ones who lived so long ago they couldn’t possibly understand life today. Having a living prophet – another way to say that is to say we have a human Prophet who lives in a human body – feels much more dangerous to them than reading dead Prophets who are now disembodied. That’s a lot of philosophy for today. So I’m not going to go on too much longer. But I hope this has helped you see how these differences play out. And really, if anything, I want you to recognize the goodness of the water you’re swimming in but probably don’t even realize. Next week, I don’t remember what we’re doing, but in 2 weeks we’re talking about polygamy. So that’ll be fun. See you next time. More Come, Follow Me resources here.   Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities. The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Philippians; Colossians appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: Do Works Work? by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about works. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand. Today, is Sunday evening, October 1. I hope you had a great conference weekend. I certainly did. And I’ve got a list of talks I need to go back and listen to again. You probably do too! I will not tell you how many Cinnamon Rolls I ate, but you can probably guess. We are just going to jump right in with this week’s verse Eph 2:8-9: For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. So, I remember grappling with this verse when I was an Evangelical, probably age 16 or 17. I grew up in a non-LDS church that tried to walk a fine line between Calvinism (God chooses whom he will save, and your choices don’t matter. Even if you want to be saved, you might not be) and Arminianism (People have free will to choose God or not therefore we should Evangelize around the world. And, for what they were trying to do, they did an okay job at it. “Spend your days like an Arminianist, but spend your nights like a Calvinist” – meaning, work hard to share the gospel but also go to sleep knowing God is going to do what God is going to do. But when we would come to verses like this I was rather confused because my church taught that in order to receive this grace what you were supposed to do was pray, “the sinner’s prayer” which means asking Jesus into your heart. And that was it. Pray the prayer, that’s all you have to do, and God’s grace does the rest. But, in my 16-year-old brain, I couldn’t quite work out why that sinner’s prayer was not considered a “work.” It’s something that the person does. If it was actually true that God’s grace is all that’s needed, then why do we even need to pray the prayer? Evangelicals do have answers for this, but none of them felt very satisfying for me. Eventually, I just moved on from the question. And, this will not come as a surprise to listeners of this show, I was also taught that Latter-day Saints are trying to work their way to Heaven and if they made one small mess-up, their chances were ruined. Which is part of why I was so intrigued when I read the Book of Moses. If you haven’t heard me say it before, Moses was actually the first Latter-day Scripture I ever read. And there’s a lot contained in that little book – something I understand now way more than before – so when I talk about it I usually say something like, “I really didn’t even know what I was looking at yet.” And that’s true. I didn’t. But there is also this. Literally, by verse 4 I’m confronted with ideas about works. In vs. 4 God tells Moses that his work is vast – and that he is still not done working. He’s got more to say and more to create. Well, hmmm, this is not something that Evangelicals ever taught me. But by Moses 1:6 we see God telling Moses that he has a work to do as well, just as Jesus Christ had a work to do. Huh. If you had asked me even a few weeks earlier to guess what a verse like this would say I probably would have guessed something like God telling Moses: I have a bunch of work for you to do, and if you do it well enough you can earn your way back into my presence. But that’s not what happens in Moses 1. Even by Verse 4 we know that God is calling Moses, “son” – and presumably Moses hasn’t even done anything yet. He is assured of his sonship and then given work to do. I’m not even sure if I articulated any good questions about that at the time. So, right from the beginning, I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around this concept. And I think that most Evangelicals who are baptized into our church have to go through a version of the same puzzle. People who have been members of our faith for their whole lives often get really confused here as well. The questions Evangelicals ask here don’t really make any sense and we all talk right past each other. So, what I want to do today is try to fairly explain why Evangelicals are in the place they are on this, and hopefully some ideas on how to have a better conversation. About 6 weeks ago the magazine Christianity Today (which has long been considered the Evangelical’s magazine) published an article called, “Mormons Expect More of the Next Generation. Why Don’t We?” And the whole point of that article is basically that Evangelical kids don’t fair as well because they’re given far lower expectations – counterintuitively to some, high expectations (coupled with high levels of support) are good for kids. CT actually publishes articles like this roughly every decade. The most recent one I could find before the article in August was back in 2013. What is fascinating though is that all these articles, every decade or so, praise the works of Latter-day Saint youth – they talk about the goodness of their service and how the missionary program helps in young adult development. They talk about the humanitarian work, and all other good things our church does. But they divorce it from our beliefs. The logic goes something like this…We Evangelicals believe the Latter-day Saints are doing really good works – those works end up being meaningless because they think they’re earning salvation with them – but at least some people are getting some benefit out of them. In these articles, you get statements along the lines of, “Mormon culture is founded on a worldview requiring works in order to gain eternal life.” And, “Trying to earn God’s favor through human effort is not going to help any teenager, whether Mormon or Protestant.” One more, “Christians have a unique core that motivates our service, a core that separates our religion from others, including Mormonism. That core is grace.” Now, Latter-day Saints, I know you’re minds are full right now of verses from the Book of Mormon, or from modern Prophets, explaining that we do not believe our works save us. But no matter how much you talk about those verses, Evangelicals have not budged on this, as evidenced by the simple example of the decade-after-decade articles from Christianity Today that we are a works-based religion. Remember when we did the “Different Jesus” episode? Evangelicals have a deep worry that getting Jesus wrong, even a little bit, means that no matter how strong your faith it won’t really matter because you don’t believe in the “correct” Jesus. And that comes into play here. It’s not so much that they don’t believe in doing good. They do, and they can cite the Bible verses which support this. The problem is that because, in their view, we don’t believe in the “correct” Jesus whatever good works we do have to stand on their own as just nice things people are doing. They can’t see our works as an expression of our faith in Christ because they can’t see that we have faith in Christ. Now, it’s conference weekend, so heavily in my mind was the number of times that speakers mentioned Jesus Christ. I thought I’d keep a tally, but quickly lost my ability to keep up. The text of those talks is not available yet, so I went to last Conference, April 2023, to see how many times Jesus Christ was mentioned. There are over 500 times, and if you take out all the mentions of the name of the church (“Welcome to the annual conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) you still have well over 400 times. Elder Gary Stevenson, in that conference, talks about him the most, 25 mentions in a 14-min talk. He mentions Jesus Christ on average every 30 seconds. And in fact it’s rare to have a speaker not mention Jesus Christ multiple times. You and I all know this. But our Evangelical friends won’t accept those 400 times because to them it doesn’t matter how hard you believe or how big your faith is if it is invested in the wrong thing. And here, “the wrong thing” essentially means that we don’t accept the things written about Jesus by a committee 400 years after he was gone – the basic Trinitarian conceptualization. You don’t believe in the Trinity, the object of your belief is false, therefore your works are not a product of faith – they’re you trying to earn your way to Heaven. The only way that I really see out of this corner is to speak more specifically about what you believe regarding Jesus Christ with your Evangelical friends. “I believe in Jesus Christ,” is met with, “But you believe in the wrong Jesus.” That’s an expected reflex. But something like, “I believe Jesus Christ is the eternal Savior of the world and no one can return to God except through him,” would certainly get you some agreement and understanding with them. I’ll say one other thing about getting out of this corner. If you want to have credibility, you have to live up to what you’re saying. You actually have to be the kind of person who embodies the teachings of Jesus Christ. This is why I don’t personally participate in conversations about Christ with people I don’t know online. There is a spot for that – and if you are gifted in the area, God bless you – I think many of our missionaries are gifted this way as they knock on doors of strangers or start discussions with people they don’t know well at all. But I am not one of those people, at least in part because the biggest piece of credibility I have is the fact of who Christ has led me to be. You can’t really communicate that to someone you don’t know well. But occasionally an Evangelical friend will say something like: “I don’t believe a thing your church teaches you, but I can see that it’s working for you because you’re happier than I’ve ever seen you.” Said by a friend who has known me for more than 30 years. How you live your life and what makes you happy really actually matters. And my life is certainly not perfect, and neither am I, but my friend was right, I am happier than I’ve ever been, despite some real challenges. And if you’re like most Latter-day Saints I’ve met, you’re that way too. You conduct your life in a way that is what Jesus described as letting them, “see your good works and glorify your father who is in Heaven.” Who you are, and how you live your life – the good works that you do – actually gives you more traction with people who know you in getting them to want to listen to you about Jesus. Okay, that’s about it for today. Next week we’re going to talk about something called Gnosticism which Paul fought hard against – and why proxy work is a perfect antidote to Gnosticism. See you then. More Come, Follow Me resources here.   Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities. The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Ephesians appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: Another Gospel by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about the phrase, “another gospel”. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand. A couple of reminders for you. This last weekend FAIR hosted an online only conference called Defending the Book of Mormon. Those talks will be released on the FAIR Youtube channel in the upcoming weeks. Brent Schmidt’s talk about grace is still exploding in my head. And Stephen Smoot’s talk – not on the Book of Abraham where he is an expert – but on the difference between translation and revelation was also fantastic. And yes, you see me a bit in there too – I didn’t present anything, but got to introduce speakers and ask questions. Which, really meant I got to have all the fun of a conference without the pain of writing a paper to present. You also get to see Zach Wright and Sarah Allen doing the same thing. And…oh goodness….at one point we end up with more time than we’d planned for. A couple speakers were efficient with their time and we needed to fill some space. So you get to hear me interview Sarah – she’s the author of that 70-part response to the CES letter – and we had a great chat. Though I think it was something like, “Hey, you girls are interesting, and we’ve got some time to fill – can you just go talk and we’ll film you?” In other words, you can probably fast-forward through that section. But it was fun. Last bit of news….at FAIR we do have some fun projects cooking up for next year. Not ready to let details out yet, but lets just say that I will be busy. More to come later. Okay, we’re going to talk about that phrase, “another gospel” and our jumping off point is Gal 1:8: But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let them be under God’s curse! And this verse comes up a lot for Evangelicals when thinking about what our church teaches. So I want to dive in here and try to understand why they say that – and then take a look at how Evangelicals actually define, “the gospel” and see how much agreement there actually is between the two groups. What IS the gospel, according to Evangelicals? So, “the gospel” literally means, “the good news” and no one is disputing that. Both Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints are on the same page here. But we do differ in some areas. I think I could come up with a pretty good answer on my own, but I wanted to see what is currently being taught in their own words so I surveyed some of the most popular sites for Evangelicals and here is the criteria they’re talking about… The gospel is…”Imputed righteousness. What do we receive because we are counted righteous in Christ? The answer is fellowship with Jesus. (This will) remove obstacles to the only lasting, all-satisfying source of joy: Jesus Christ.” Latter-day Saint friends I suppose some of you are thinking, “Umm, what’s wrong with that?” We’ll unpack. Let’s start with the first one which talks about “imputed righteousness.” And here is your can of worms. What is “imputed righteousness.” It is, “Imputed righteousness is the righteousness of Jesus credited to the Christian, enabling the Christian to be justified.” This is a term that comes from Martin Luther and was a corrective to some of the Catholic practices at the time including buying indulgences with money. An “indulgence” kind of sounds like it is a free-pass to do some elicit activity without getting in trouble, but what it really means is that the person’s “sentence” in purgatory will be reduced by a certain number of years. Luther was right to fight against this practice. He’s trying to say that people don’t need to spend money to get a softer sentence in purgatory – Jesus pays the price. And I know, in theory, when you put it that way, we don’t disagree. But the idea is part of a bigger package of ideas that include believing that God is angry at all of his children and will absolutely torture them for eternity unless during their lifetime they profess faith in Christ. Luther’s phrase here, imputed righteousness, solves one problem (indulgences) but opened up another – and 500 years later, Protestants are still grappling with what it means to accept salvation that they can’t earn. This doctrine is called Sola Fide, “By faith alone” Lately – meaning the last 120 years – its turned more into “Jesus did it all – so you don’t have to do anything.” But it hasn’t always been this way. If we go back even further to Augustine – who isn’t always trying very hard to keep the apostasy at bay – but he gets it right here. He uses the term, “Infused righteousness” which for him means, “God bestows justifying righteousness upon the sinner in such a way that it becomes part of his or her person.” The implication here is that after one receives this righteousness it becomes part of them and they go on to strive to live a life of holiness. But you can see how Luther’s change – which made sense at the time when you compare it to the practices of the Catholic church – has been used to claim that Jesus’ righteousness does everything for us and we don’t have to do anything. Here it is expressed by one Evangelical pastor, “Your salvation is a free gift. You can not do anything to earn it. You can’t even ask for it because asking would be you doing part of the work. If God is going to save you, he’s going to save you. It has nothing to do with you. It is God’s work. You are the object of that work. But that’s all you are.” Augustine was closer to the truth on this one than Luther – and I’m not really a fan of Augustine. But he’s right here. John Wesley, founder of the Methodists, tries to offer a correction here to the change Luther made by coining the term, “imparted righteousness” as a way to say that salvation is through Christ alone, but it must, “empower the process of sanctification,” which Wesley also called Christian perfection. By “perfection” here he means something similar to what we mean when we say that we will become “like God.” And it’s no wonder that Joseph Smith said that the Methodists are closer to truth than some other groups. So, what is the gospel to Evangelicals? They would all affirm that its good news. That it comes through Christ alone. But they radically disagree on what comes next. Do we have to do anything after receiving salvation or not? The room is deeply divided on this. Why did I tell you all this? Why do Evangelicals think we have “another gospel”? I think you can see at this point that the versions of the gospel offered by Luther and Wesley (2 men who still influence Evangelicals to a great degree) are radically different, or at least have been taken in radically different directions. And yet, these 2 versions of the gospel do not trip the Evangelical worry about “a different gospel.” But they couldn’t be more different. They in fact opposite. The only thing they have in common is that Jesus Christ paid for salvation. In one version of the gospel you, the individual, are not required to do anything at all – and if you try you are insulting God by saying that Jesus is not enough. And in the other, Christ paves the way for salvation, but you, the individual, must change and grow in holiness as time goes on in order to reach perfection. It’s weird right. Totally different views. But Evangelicals will sometimes easily say that we Latter-day Saints have a “different gospel.” If you ask for specifics you’re more likely to get quotes from past leaders that are not part of the standard works and that are taken out of context. Or perhaps were not even recorded correctly in the first place – see the last FAIR conference and the talk by LaJean Carruth for an incredibly detailed account of how and why this is true. Why else do they think this? Because, frankly, anti-mormon propaganda has been effective. That was true in Joseph Smith’s day. There is a book – if you don’t know about this book you should – written by 3 BYU professors and came out this year called, “Marrianne Meets the Mormons.” And it’s about the church in France in the first part of the 20th century. During this time there are less than 500 members of the church in all of France. Statistically, they’re not a significant group in that culture by any means. But, the amount of literature, art, and music that uses “Mormons” as the bad guys is huge. There’s 42 Million people in France at this time – 500 of them are members of the church – but anytime a movie or book needs a bad guy, he’s very likely to be a Mormon. It’s very similar to the same stereotyping that we see today – turn on any number of television shows from the last year and you already know this. What now? So, what do we do with this? Within the Evangelical community, you can have 2 radically different versions of what the gospel is and no one cares. But when you want to talk about the gospel how Latter-day Saints do, which includes a belief in the saving power of Jesus Christ, and agree with both Augustine and Wesley that sanctification matters after salvation – all of a sudden that’s just too different. You have a number of options here. You can fight with them, though I dont recommend it. You can simply bear your testimony knowing that they can’t really refute what you believe, and that’s a good move. But on this chanel we’re really focused on how you talk about these things with the people you love – friends and family – and sometimes bearing your testimony can feel like you’re shutting down the conversation, not opening it up. At least when it’s with people you’re close to. Our leaders – Prophets, Apostles, your local leaders – have given us plenty of spiritual advice on how to manage these situations. I won’t repeat all of that you – you know it already and should listen to them. But I will offer you a piece of psychological advice. People love to feel understood. I love it. You love it. One quote says, “Being heard feels so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable.” So try to hear them before you try to get them to hear you. What does the gospel mean to them? Does admitting that there are different versions of the gospel even among Protestants make them feel anxious? Why? What’s that about for them? And similar questions will help them teach you about what they need in order to have this conversation. Maybe that’s just therapist psychobable. But if you want them to understand why you see the gospel the way you do – you’re probably going to have to put in the work and understand why they’re resistant to it. If they’re throwing a bunch of complaints that sound like they got them off some website, they probably did. Try to help them identify what their actual concerns are. And listen to them to understand them. That is the most effective way to get them to listen to you, at least from a psychological perspective. All right, next week we’re to do what is essentially part 2 of this week’s episode and talk about how Paul sees “works” in the book of Ephesians. See you then. More Come, Follow Me resources here.   Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities. The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – Galatians appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: Why do you believe in Levels of Heaven? by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about the 3 kingdoms of Heaven. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand. Quick announcement for you first: This coming weekend, Friday Sept 22 – Saturday Sept 23 is an online only conference put on by FAIR and the focus is evidence for the Book of Mormon. I am not presenting at this conference but I do get to help out a bit with introductions and questions which I am thrilled to death over because it means I get to hang out with some very smart people all day long. The Friday evening presentation is none other than Richard Bushman. On Saturday there are a number of speakers including Stephen Smoot – he’s the most up-to-date scholar on issues surrounding the Book of Abraham; a presentation by my 2 favorite Spencers – Spencer Marsh and Spencer Kraus – which I think has been jokingly titled, “Revealing the One True Spencer” but in reality is about 2 Nephi 19:1, which is rather a puzzling verse. Several good talks on archeology challenges and ancient artifacts. I’ll be there live with the speakers, but the conference is online only and you can stream it on the FAIR YouTube channel. Okay, we’re going to talk about the levels of Heaven. Our jumping-off verse is 2 Corinthians 12:2: I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows. And I’ve noticed that Latter-day Saints sometimes are confused about why Evangelicals don’t accept this idea, it’s in the Bible after all. I want to talk through how and why Evangelicals see this verse in 2 Corinthians the way they do, and then we’ll talk about some intersections with our faith and where you might go in conversation about this topic. I don’t have research to point to that backs this up, but my sense is that if you asked most Evangelicals what Paul means by “the 3rd Heaven” they wouldn’t even understand the question. It’s considered an obscure verse that they generally don’t spend a lot of time on so the average Evangelical person might not even know it’s in scripture. But, for those who do, they have a very concrete (meaning physical) explanation for it – rather than a spiritual one. Which brings up a bigger question: Why do we – why does anyone – take some verses literally and some spiritually? Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints use both techniques, but at different times and for different reasons. The cynical explanation is that the other group, the group that is opposite of you, does this at their own convenience only to fit their doctrine in. But I think it’s more complex than that. Both Latter-day Saints and Evangelicals (as well as every other denominational group or religion out there) are heavily influenced by a set of interpretative rules called hermeneutics. The hermeneutic you use – here the choices are physical or spiritual, but there are lots of others – determines how you will interpret a passage. Let me make an analogy to help you understand. In English, there is a proper order for adjectives in a sentence. An adjective is a descriptive word and if you string them together in the wrong order your sentence won’t sound right. However, if you ask almost any native English speaker to name that order, they can’t do it. I can’t do it. I had to look the order up for this talk to make sure I got it right – it’s a rule I follow, but don’t even know I’m following it. I just know it sounds right. The order is Quantity, Quality, Size, Age, Shape, Color Proper adjective (often nationality, other place of origin), and Purpose. A classic example of getting this order correct is the sentence, “I love that really big old green antique car.” If you’re a native speaker, this sounds right to your ears while, “I love that antique, green, old, big car,” just doesn’t sound right. You follow this rule without even knowing the rule exists. And hermeneutics are like this. Knowing when to read literally or physically and when to read spiritually is a rule that you follow without even knowing there is a rule. And Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints use different rules. So when they interpret something, it doesn’t sound quite right to our ears – and vice versa. What are the Evangelical rules for the interpretation of a verse like this one in 2 Cor? They interpret this verse literally by saying that the first heaven refers to the atmospheric where the birds live (and yes, this is how it’s normally phrased.). The second heaven is the area of the stars and planets. The third heaven is the dwelling place of God and Heaven. But why? So, I think the tendency here is for Latter-day Saints to claim that Evangelicals get it wrong because they don’t have the Spirit and therefore can’t interpret correctly. But that’s not a very satisfying answer and it probably breeds more us-them than is good for anyone. So let me offer a couple different ways to understand what’s happening here. First, you remember from past episodes that the Evangelical movement is not even 100 years old, and it really came of age alongside the Baby Boomers. It is very much a post-WW2 American invention. The cultural mix at the time was encouraging everyone to move into the modern world with all its conveniences. And they didn’t want to be seen as old fuddy-duddies. If you’re close to my age, our family lines probably play out in a similar fashion. My mother was born in the first wave of the baby boom, but her parents were both born in the 19-teens, and all 4 of her grandparents were born in the 1800’s. The Evangelical movement rose up with these baby boomers whose parents and grandparents seemed to be from an entirely different era. So they wanted an entirely different version of church than what their parents and grandparents had which was now out of fashion for being too fundamentalist and strict. They found what they were looking for in the Evangelical movement. The Evangelicals were a reaction to the fundamentalists who came before them. But like with all reactionary movements, the very thing they’re reacting against often gets smuggled right in any way, and in this case, we’re talking about the temptation to interpret in an overly literal way. They will say things like, “The Bible is the literal word of God.” At face value, what that sentence means is that God’s message to use is found in this book. But what that gets morphed into is something like: everything in the Bible should be taken literally. This leaves you in a weird place if you read in Luke that Jesus says he gathers us like baby chicks under his wings because the rule of “everything should be taken literally” falls apart unless you want to regard Christ as some kind of giant cosmic chicken. So what has happened with Evangelicals is that their interpretative rule is something like: in order to take scripture seriously you have to take it literally whenever possible – and when it is not possible you must find the spiritual meaning instead. In other words, if it can be literal – it should be taken literally. Evangelicals will get a little squirmy if you try to say this plainly. When they ask, “Do you take the Bible literally?” what they’re really asking is, “Do you think the Bible is actually true?” The word “literal” here is morphing in meaning – it’s okay, words do that within the context of a culture. But it leaves Evangelicals with this sense of the literal meaning has to come first. So, when they look at our verse about the third Heaven in 2 Corinthians their first impulse is to look for a literal meaning. Remember, these rules are often as invisible to people as the English rules of which order adjectives go in – everyone follows the rule, even though most people don’t know it exists. And, Evangelicals have a second interpretation rule here that reinforces the first: If another verse in the Bible mentions the same thing, it should be used to enhance the meaning of the verse in question. So, Evangelicals interpret the 1st Heaven to be where the atmosphere and the birds are and they back that up with a verse like Deut 28:12, “The Lord will open for you His good storehouse, the heavens, to give rain to your land in its season.” And they see this as a perfectly valid explanation. Paul mentions a 3rd Heaven, implying that there are 1st and 2nd Heavens. Can we interpret this literally? Yes, and we have scriptures that do so, a literal interpretation works and therefore should be used. Latter-day Saints have our own history of why things have been interpreted the way they have. And we face the same reality that Evangelicals do – many of the rules we use for interpretation are rather invisible to us, we just know what sounds right. My experience has been – and I’m sure some of you have had different experiences and I’d love to read about them in the comments – but my experience has been that the hermeneutics Latter-day Saints most often use is something called an emendatory (amendatory) hermeneutic which just means that we have been given additional information or clarity on what the Bible is talking about through either the Book of Mormon or our modern Prophets. In general, we would look at a verse like this one about the 3rd Heaven and easily be able to quote all kinds of modern revelation that help us know what “the 3rd Heaven” actually means. The challenge for Latter-day Saints comes in 2 directions. Either we’re overly quick to jump to, “this part of the Bible is clearly not translated correctly and I don’t have to do any study or work to try and tease out some meaning.” Or, we over-relate a Biblical passage to modern revelation – sometimes making connections that the Prophet himself (whichever one speaking) did not make. Latter-day Saints can also go a little too heavy on literal interpretation just like Evangelicals can simply because we’re impacted by history here too – the early half of the 20th century was dominated by more literal/fundamentalist thinking in our church too. Okay, so how do you talk about this concept with your Evangelical friends? I have 2 thoughts. First, Jesus doens’t use the phrase “levels of Heaven” or “Kingdoms of Heaven” but he does talk about varying degrees of reward in Heaven and makes it clear that certain things we do here on Earth will bring more reward, and certain things less reward. For example: Matthew 5 Jesus says there is a great reward for those who are persecuted. Meaning that the people who did not have to face persecution will not be rewarded in that way. Jesus is offering a compensatory reward for suffering faithfully for his name. In the very next chapter Jesus talks about how some folks really want to draw attention to the fact that they’re giving to the poor – Jesus tells us that these people have their reward in full already and this behavior will not get them further reward in Heaven. Romans 2 Paul tells us God will give to every man based on his deeds. In 1 Cor 3 Paul teaches that our works will be judged – some will burn up, and some will endure – those who produce works that endure will be rewarded. All this to say, pointing out that these passages (and many others) describe different degrees of reward and that might open up the conversation really nicely. My second thought on how to talk with Evangelicals about this: Read the CS Lewis book, “The Great Divorce.” It’s fiction and a rather easy read. The audio book is only about 3 hours. Lewis was not a member of our faith, and at times actually had some rather snarky things to say about our faith, but in The Great Divorce, he sees the same truth we’re talking about. Here is the basic plot: It’s set in the afterlife and people from the lower kingdoms (here represented by a large, noisy city) are given a chance to go on a bus ride to the higher kingdoms. In the book the higher kingdoms are thought of as being closer to God – the countryside is closer to God than the city – and the great mountain is where God lives but its rather steep and hard to get to. However, God reigns over all 3 kingdoms. You might think that when the people from the lower kingdom get a glimpse of the country side and its fresh air that they might awaken their desire to progress. But they don’t. They complain that the color of the grass is such a vivid green it hurts their eyes and feels “too real” when they put their feet on it. They complain that living in the countryside requires too much of them and they want to get back on the bus and go home where it’s comfortable. The point here is that the people who spent their lives preparing to live closer to God are the ones who are best able to adapt to the higher kingdoms. You can’t climb the great mountain without some training. But in the book, progression is possible if you want it. Most people don’t. Lewis never intended this as a pro-LDS book by any means – and yet he is getting at some of the very things we’re saying about 3 Heavens. I actually read this book long before I investigated the church and it was an important thing for me to have on board in my brain as I learned how to adjust to a different way of thinking about eternity. I hope this episode helps you think through some ways of how to understand your Evangelical friends and how to talk with them about the beautiful doctrine we have about Heaven in a way that they can actually hear. Next week we’re talking about the phrase, “another gospel” in Galatians. Looking forward to seeing you then. More Come, Follow Me resources here.   Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities. The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – 2 Corinthians 8–13 appeared first on FAIR.

by Zachary Wright Introduction Imagine for yourself, for a moment, that a critic of the church stumbles across some quotes about the Adam-God theory.  “Brigham Young taught this, and seeing as he was a prophet, this must be what Mormons believe!” they reason to themselves.  They post these quotes on social media, proclaiming that “Mormons believe that Adam was God the Father!  Your leaders taught it, it’s what you profess to believe!”  However, what this critic did not know is that as early as 1897, we have records of church leaders stating that Brigham “no doubt expressed his personal opinion or views upon the subject,” supporting the idea that members of the church are under no obligation to support the notion that Adam was God the Father (1).  The critic doesn’t retreat from their position though, doubling down on how members of the church believe it.  At the end of the day, their bias led them to an incorrect conclusion about what members of the church believe. For those who are well acquainted with criticisms of the church, I’m sure that you can recall with ease similar instances wherein bias led people to incorrect conclusions about our beliefs.  However, unlike most of the previous cognitive biases we’ve discussed, the bias outlined above can’t necessarily be learned by simply taking time to think about it.  It’s a little different, and has been classified by many researchers as being called The Dunning-Kruger Effect, which is what we’ll be discussing today.  Critical thinkers need to be aware of cognitive biases due to their possible impact on our daily decision-making and behavior, thus affecting our ability to arrive at conclusions and solve problems.  So today, we’re going to be going over the Dunning-Kruger effect, it’s quasi-reverse bias (often referred to as Imposter Syndrome), and afterwards we’ll talk about what we can do to combat these biases.  Let’s get into it. How Confidence Relates to Bias Now, I need to lay some groundwork for the rest of the article to make sense.  It’s understood that confidence is related to bias in a few different ways.  For example, the Overconfidence Bias is understood to be “the tendency people have to be more confident in their own abilities.” (2)  This is demonstrated in a plethora of studies, such as one wherein it was shown that younger children rate their memory recall ability more highly than their older peers.(3)  This makes sense…we talked about how dominant emotions (such as high confidence) are associated with cognitive biases in our previous episode.  As we’ll soon see, however, the connection between confidence and bias goes a little deeper than that.   So, a group of researchers set up a study where they had participants determine whether groups of dots moved left or right.  Sometimes the dots moved more noticeably in a given direction, and other times, the dots moved less noticeably in a given direction.  After the participants made decisions about what direction the groups of dots were moving, they were shown evidence that either confirmed their suspicions (when they guessed right), or went contrary to their suspicions (when they guessed wrong). They then used magnetoencephalography, which is just a fancy method of scanning brain activity, to see how areas of the brain related to confidence behaved throughout this process. At the end of the study, the researchers stated the following: As hypothesized, we found that after high confidence (vs. low confidence) decisions, accumulation of neural evidence was facilitated if it was confirmatory, but largely abolished if it was disconfirmatory…In other words, our MEG analysis reveals that high confidence leads to post-decision accumulation becoming “blind” to disconfirmatory evidence. (4) To translate that, it basically means that when the participants were super confident in their decisions, it led them to be blinded to evidence that went against their decisions.  If that sounds familiar, it should, because in our last episode this phenomena is described as being confirmation bias.  This study was super useful in being able to demonstrate how our confidence can relate to bias in ways that we may not expect, and it’s important to retain this in mind as we proceed talking about more confidence based biases. However, I do want to caution against any inference that confidence is a bad thing, or that confidence indicates weakness in a position.  As we talked about in our article about epistemology, there are ways to be epistemically confident in something that leave us less susceptible to errors.  We don’t have to associate confidence with bad ideas, and in my opinion, we shouldn’t!  As we’ll discuss more later, a lack of confidence can lead to just as many, if not more problems in the long run.  Even so, critical thinkers should be aware of how certain biases related to confidence can affect our ability to make decisions, and solve problems.  As we’ll soon see, the effects of these kinds of biases can be long-lasting and far-reaching. The Confidence Biases at Large To begin explaining more concretely how bias and confidence may be related, an excellent place to start is to explore the Dunning-Kruger Effect.  The Dunning-Kruger Effect earned its name from a pair of psychologists named David Dunning and Justin Kruger.  They published a very famous paper in 1999 wherein they tested people on their social and intellectual skills.  Later, they tested the participants again, asking them to rate themselves on how well they actually did.  What did they find?  They found that those who scored on the bottom percentile rated themselves as being much more competent than they actually were (5).  Since that time, psychologists have referred to this effect as being the Dunning-Kruger effect, and it’s been a well-studied phenomenon ever since. Those who are familiar with my previous article are familiar with the aspects that make up a cognitive bias.  While each cognitive bias is different, it usually stems from people focusing on drawing patterns, prioritizing the information that correlates with what we already know, focusing on dominant/impactful data, and ignoring seemingly irrelevant information (6).  Unfortunately for those who fall victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect, one could make a convincing argument that they are victims to all four of these heuristics in seemingly negative ways.  First, they recognize the pattern that they’ve been able to accomplish tasks such as “deductive reasoning” before.  However, there’s no guarantee that because they’ve successfully done something before, that they’ll successfully do it again.  Next, they draw on the information that they already know, prioritizing this information, seemingly at the expense of other information.  However, this leads to other problems, seeing as the information that they are seemingly missing is often important, and may complicate the simplicity of the answers they’re looking for.  This becomes increasingly apparent as time goes on, but by the time that they realize it, a lot of the effects have already had long-lasting consequences. To explain why this is, I first need to explain a common way that the Dunning-Kruger effect manifests itself.  Let’s use myself as a hypothetical example.  Arguably, I happen to be one of the few people right now doing a series on critical thinking in regards to LDS theology and history.  Let’s say that I suddenly get a lot of popularity for my discussion about critical thinking.  I suddenly gain thousands upon thousands of views on my videos, and chart a lot of internet traffic on my articles.  People start reaching out to me, asking me questions about obscure aspects of LDS history, which I may know less about.  I can tell you about the things I’ve studied (Epistemology, Evaluating sources, Logic, etc), but I’m less equipped to tell you about every single pioneer story ever recorded.  However, because I want to be successful, and because I want to make people happy, I start exploring other topics that I have less experience in.  Consequently, I begin saying more things that are wrong; but because I was right about some things, I have the confidence to keep persisting in my incorrect ideas.  However, any attempts to correct my incorrect ideas would fall on deaf ears, because I would be far too inexperienced to recognize how I was wrong.  This is the Dunning-Kruger effect in its purest form, and they (Dunning and Kruger) reported the principle in the following way: Those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. (7) In the formal business world, this idea is referred to as The Peter Principle, which indicates that managers will “prioritize current job performance in promotion decisions at the expense of other observable characteristics that better predict managerial performance.” (8)  In other words, the managers look at what the employees do, and assume that their current performance will predict how well they will perform in a position that, in reality, would be too much for them.  It’s events like this that often lead to the Dunning-Kruger effect, where the person being promoted (either formally, like in a business, or informally, such as on social media platforms), will suddenly begin to feel confident about their abilities, despite the often obvious lack of ability they may have in a given area.  The bias here is evident.  We’re recognizing patterns of our success.  We focus on the dominant and impactful ideas that agree with our own ideas.  We also ignore or downplay the issues that challenge our own ideas.  After all, if we were right before, who’s to say that we won’t be right again?  However, if we put that into syllogistic form, it falls apart rather quickly. P1:  I was able to solve/answer X problem using X method P2:  I am presented with Y problem Conclusion:  I will be able to solve Y problem using X method The premises, in this instance, do not support the conclusion, and I hope you can do some research to find out what fallacy this is ;).  Proficiency in one area of study does not guarantee proficiency in another.  I’m sure that the reader can imagine a plethora of examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect being present at work, in politics, and of course, religious discussion. Now, I certainly hope that I’ve stated things that are accurate and useful to critical thinkers, but regardless of how well-intentioned I may be, this does not change the fact that the internet as a whole is a breeding ground for the Dunning-Kruger effect in ways that have been previously unprecedented.  Normal, ordinary people with little to no formal training in a given field, are suddenly given power and influence over hundreds, if not thousands of people.  They can be proclaiming utter nonsense about a given topic, and not a single person will realize that they have no idea what they’re talking about. This is why critical thinking skills are as important as they are.  We need to be able to parse through information ourselves and recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments at play.  If we don’t, then it becomes all the easier for us to fall victim to cognitive biases, and otherwise fallacious thinking. Now, I will introduce one caveat here, just to cover my bases.  There is a bit of controversy right now regarding whether or not the Dunning-Kruger effect is actually a psychological bias.  There are some writers and researchers now who are advocating for the idea that the Dunning-Kruger effect is more statistical in nature. (9)  The question as to whether or not this is a psychological issue or a statistical issue is important to consider.  However, the authors of these articles don’t deny that these behavioral patterns exist.  Instead, they attribute it to other factors, such as the Overconfidence bias.  Whatever the underlying cause is (whether that be psychological, statistical, or otherwise), I think these patterns of behavior and thought are worth mentioning and analyzing. Flipping the script We’ve talked about how people who are low-achieving tend to rate themselves as being much more proficient than how they actually are.  However, that still leaves us with the question of how people who are proficient in their field of study view themselves.  Now, you’d initially think that people who are proficient in their fields would likewise rate themselves as being significantly better than their peers in their profession.  However, we actually find the opposite to be true.  High-achieving, competent people often rate themselves as being less competent than their peers. (11)  It’s my understanding that this doesn’t happen all the time, but one study estimated that it happens to about 70% of the population at least once in their lives. (12)  Some authors note that this is often cited in association with Dunning and Kruger, though those two psychologists never expressly talk about it in their studies. (13)  Even so, I do think that exploring this issue may prove to be useful. The imposter effect, also known as Imposter Syndrome, was initially described by Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes, wherein it described that those who are extremely competent tend to downplay their abilities, feeling like they are less competent than they actually are. (14)  While this pair of researchers initially assumed that this phenomenon was exclusive to women, most researchers accept the idea that this effect is not exclusive to women. (15)  Some authors argue that it affects women more than men, while others suggest that Imposter Syndrome simply manifests differently among men and women. (16)  Regardless, this confidence problem inherent within the imposter effect contributes to the Dunning-Kruger effect, due to how the people who are less competent end up being given a larger platform due to the Peter Principle.  As demonstrated earlier, this can lead to a lot of problems within a short period of time. The imposter effect can have some very negative effects on people and their performance. As you can imagine, it’s associated with higher rates of anxiety, depression. (17)  Those feelings are serious, and can cause problems in a variety of aspects in our lives, but something just as problematic is how the imposter effect can negatively impact critical thinkers in their quest to solve problems.  How so?  Well, let’s say that you have a brand new foreign-speaking missionary who’s afraid to speak up, because their trainer appears much more competent than them in terms of speaking, or even understanding the lesson content.  How about a bishop who resists a calling to become a stake president because he’s afraid that others will “discover his inadequacy.”  Examples of similar phenomena can be found outside of LDS culture, but you can probably already see the principle at play.  This can inhibit critical thinkers from making decisions that are genuinely going to solve problems. That prompts the question though, how do we overcome the Dunning-Kruger effect and Imposter Syndrome?  Well, I think that the ways I mentioned in the last article are worth noting.  Slowing down, looking at things from a different perspective, and getting a multitude of opinions all may help decrease the effects and longevity of these effects.  However, I think it serves us to examine this from a more theological standpoint:  Both of these problems are resolved in a similar way.  True humility is the answer here.  To explain why, we first need to explore what humility is.   Humility, in our theological context, is described as “recognizing our dependence on God.” (18)  I totally agree with that, and of course, an obvious application here is that humility would allow people to more easily admit when they don’t know something, hampering the effects of the Dunning-Kruger effect.  Why?  Because suddenly our eternal value doesn’t come from what we know, it comes from who we are.  Humility, when channeled in an appropriate way, can allow us to more easily admit when we are wrong.  If we really think about this, the imposter effect comes from basing our inherent value on the things we can do, instead of basing our value on who we are in relationship to God. What about Imposter Syndrome though?  Surely that must be different, right?  Well, when we recognize that one of the most important aspects of our identity is that we are children of God, (19) it becomes much easier to recognize that we are not better than anyone else.  However, the opposite is also true:  no one is inherently better than us.  Instead of feeling like we’re letting people down, those who are truly humble recognize that even if there are imperfections in what they do, their imperfections do not make them less than other people.  Humility, in an ironic twist, decreases the fear that comes from failure.  When we realize that our true worth comes from our inherent, unalienable relationship with God, we open the door to true, enduring happiness. Now, I’m not blind to the fact that humility exists in places outside the church.  General Christians, Atheists, as well as members of the church are all able to experience this kind of humility (though arguably for different reasons).  However, I bring this idea up for a few reasons.  First, obviously, I want to show how confidence and bias relate to each other, and likewise show a way that I think we can mitigate the effects of unhealthy confidence.  I want to show one of many ways of how looking at things from different perspectives can be useful.  This is the epitome of critical thinking:  the idea that we can bring together data of different types, analyze it, and then use it to help us solve problems.  This pattern is something that I hope everyone would try to emulate.  You don’t even need to be a member of the church to appreciate how this method of data analysis can be useful.   In conclusion, I think that there are some important things to consider when we talk about how confidence can impact bias.  First, we need to know some of the mechanics behind how bias and confidence are related.  We also need to know some documented biases that relate to confidence, and we need to know how to fix them.  Again, I want to reiterate that certainty isn’t a bad thing, but like most things, it should be employed after careful consideration and restraint.  As we do so, it’ll be easier for us to arrive at correct conclusions, and eventually become the kinds of thinkers and believers God wants us to be. References: https://catalog.churchofjesuschrist.org/assets/80389221-debe-4168-89a6-9e2bd7709a5c/0/369; The quote part comes from Joseph F. Smith, a contemporary to Brigham Young, and a future prophet and leader of the church.  While this quote was said after Brigham died, other leaders, such as Orson Pratt, publicly denounced the doctrine while Brigham was still alive.  Later, after meeting with Brigham, Pratt apologized.  Pratt continued thereon to allow Brigham to have his opinion uninhibited, but stated that he would not teach the doctrine himself (link here).  Orson was counseled by the brethren on the matter, but was never once disciplined by the church for this position.  There are also points wherein Brigham himself was less dogmatic about the Adam-God theory, and you can read more about that here. https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/overconfidence-bias  Piehlmaier D. M. (2020). Overconfidence Among Young Decision-Makers: Assessing the Effectiveness of a Video Intervention and the Role of Gender, Age, Feedback, and Repetition. Scientific reports, 10(1), 3984. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-61078-z  Rollwage, M., Loosen, A., Hauser, T.U. et al. Confidence drives a neural confirmation bias. Nat Commun 11, 2634 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16278-6  Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of personality and social psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.77.6.1121 Korteling, J. E., Brouwer, A. M., & Toet, A. (2018). A Neural Network Framework for Cognitive Bias. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 1561. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01561 https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/dunning-kruger-effect  https://economics.harvard.edu/files/economics/files/ms28914.pdf https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking/dunning-kruger-effect-probably-not-real?fbclid=IwAR13aDSHXbp-X5vsEoOOxLLsQbKNpxt77CnIqto5TllpIdoRehSOK4cRW1Q  https://dictionary.apa.org/impostor-phenomenon; see also https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0022-3514.77.6.1121  Gravois, J. (2007). You’re not fooling anyone. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 54(11), A1. Retrieved November 5, 2008 (link here, though there is a paywall to the full article) Magnus, J. R., & Peresetsky, A. A. (2022). A Statistical Explanation of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Frontiers in psychology, 13, 840180. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.840180; This is another one of those articles that tries to use statistics to explain the Dunning-Kruger effect. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/neuroscience-in-everyday-life/202308/the-history-of-imposter-syndrome Feigofsky S. (2022). Imposter Syndrome. HeartRhythm case reports, 8(12), 861–862. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrcr.2022.11.001 (if that link doesn’t work, try this one). https://online.utpb.edu/about-us/articles/psychology/exploring-imposter-syndrome-and-gender; See also https://www.forbes.com/sites/lucianapaulise/2023/03/08/75-of-women-executives-experience-imposter-syndrome-in-the-workplace/?sh=2da5b9576899;  The first talks about how women experience it more than men, the latter says otherwise. https://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2013/11/fraud; Some sources claim that this affects those who are considered demographic minorities differently than those who are not considered demographic minorities.  For example, one study suggests that for African Americans “impostor feelings are a stronger factor in mental health than perceived discrimination and possibly minority status stress” (link here).  As you can see, imposter syndrome can have repercussions that can affect a lot of discourse about minority populations. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/gs/humble-humility?lang=eng  https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/broadcasts/worldwide-devotional-for-young-adults/2022/05/12nelson?lang=eng Further Study: “Why ignorance fails to recognize itself” Featuring David Dunning; This is pretty interesting, because one of the original researchers for which the “Dunning-Kruger” effect was named, explains more about his findings.  Definitely interesting to listen to. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1989/04/beware-of-pride?lang=eng; This talk by Ezra Taft Benson shows how pride can be manifested in a few different ways, and is combatted most effectively by humility. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK585058: This gives a solid outline of the findings behind imposter syndrome, and likewise explores ways in which it manifests.   Zachary Wright was born in American Fork, UT.  He served his mission speaking Spanish in North Carolina and the Dominican Republic.  He currently attends BYU studying psychology, but loves writing, and studying LDS theology and history.  His biggest desire is to help other people bring them closer to each other, and ultimately bring people closer to God. The post By Study and Faith – Episode 7: Confidence and Bias appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: Obedient in Everything by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about obedience. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand. I do love to tell you about things that are going on just in case you don’t know. This coming weekend, Sept 15-16, is a conference in Salt Lake, at the Conference Center and it’s regarding the completion of the Joseph Smith Papers. The conference is free and you can come in person, or watch online. Each session will be focused on a different aspect of the world during the time of Joseph Smith. Which is really cool because you can think about what the social and economic forces are at play behind the scenes of the beginning of the church. So there’s a session on what it was like for women and families during that era, or what race, ethnicity, and politics were like then. There’s a session on how they handled conflict and one on finances. And lots more. If you’re into historical stuff like I am, you will be sure to enjoy it. Okay, we’re going to talk about the concept of obedience. And our jumping-off verse is 2 Corinthians 2:9 which says: Another reason I wrote you was to see if you would stand the test and be obedient in everything. So, Paul is writing to the church in Corinth. What we call 2 Cor is thought to actually be his 4th letter to them, and as you can see in the letter, things are not exactly going well. They’ve gotten themselves into some very precarious situations, and Paul is trying to help them out. But he’s also apparently a bit worried that they’re not going to listen – as evidenced by the fact that this is his 4th letter and things have gotten worse over time. So he starts out the letter with a reminder about obedience. Which leads us to an interesting question….What does the phrase, “you should be obedient in everything” bring up for Evangelicals that’s different than what it brings up for Latter-day Saints? In church we sing, “We love to obey thy command.” And that’s good. I actually really like that song. But Evangelicals get a bit weird around this sentiment and it’s not because they don’t want to obey the commands of God. They do. They interpret them a bit differently than we do, but on the whole, they are interested in obeying God. The problem, which actually is illustrated rather well in this song, is that those “commands” often come through human leaders. That song, “We Thank Thee oh God For a Prophet,” is praise directed toward God for a variety of different blessings, including the blessing of having a Prophet. We’ve touched on this briefly in the past, but there are some variations on this topic. They’re not as much based on the different denominations or groups, but on where you fall in the authority structure of that group. Here’s an example: The average pew-sitting Evangelical will likely never be in the position to promise obedience to a human leader. They do have membership agreements that they agree to when joining a certain church, and we’ll get to that in a moment. But in general, they are assuaged into obedience based on what the individual or family will get out of that obedience. For example, the church starts some new program they want everyone to participate in. The church leadership will use various marketing techniques to help the people see the need for this thing they’re offering and then willingly participate. That’s mostly what it’s like for the pew-sitting person, no matter what version of Evangelicalism they’re following. But you will see far more variety regarding how leaders in those churches are dealt with. Latter-day Saints, I think you’ve vaguely familiar with this, but I’ll go over it just to be sure. Church leadership in the Evangelical world is almost all done by paid employees. Those employees fall into 3 categories. First category, ordained pastoral staff. These are people who went to Divinity School and have been through an ordination process. This is a long-term career kind of position. They intend to spend their life serving a group of people by teaching them. When you think of someone who says, “I’m a pastor,” this is what you’re thinking of. Second category, non-ordained pastoral staff. These are folks who maybe are in the process of finishing their pastoral education or those for whom that level of education was simply out of reach. They might have a title like, “youth pastor” or “children’s pastor” I was a children’s pastor for a lot of years at a great church in California. And this is the category I was in. Sometimes people in this category are called “youth director” instead of “youth pastor” depending on the rules of the church, but they function identically. The third category are folks who have been hired because they possess a skill that the church needs in order to run – someone to work on printed materials; someone to keep the grounds; someone to keep the books, etc. Mostly these are people who could be doing the same work somewhere else, but work for a church instead. Our church hires lots and lots of people in these categories – people who make the website and LDS Tools work; people who know how to manage a warehouse, etc. But in theory, these people could take their skills and work for any other employer as well. So, in talking about obedience, Category 2 (non-ordained pastoral staff) and 3 (skilled professionals) are mostly compelled to obedience in their work environment by human resources, or an employee manual, or a board that oversees their work. But the Category 1 people, those who have a formal education and are ordained, might also have a different level of requirement for obedience. In the denomination where I was ordained the ordination service included what is called the Oath of Conformity and the Oath of Canonical Obedience which is a lot of words just to say: You promise to do what the Bishop tells you to do. But my experience is on one end of the spectrum – not every ordained leader is asked to take an oath for conformity and obedience. And in some places, the pastor almost ordains himself and decides to start a church all on his own, and he only answers to himself. So you can see, sometimes obedience is required at higher levels, but that is a tiny, tiny percentage of people. Most Evangelicals won’t even come across any kind of wording like that unless they’re paying attention to the process of how people get ordained. But what Evangelicals have been frequently asked to do is sign a membership agreement. But some interesting exceptions have popped up and there’s history here. A membership agreement is traditionally exactly what it sounds like: an individual signs something to say they agree with the doctrine of a particular church, that document probably says something about the expectation that they participate in the life of the church and that they obey the scriptures. There would probably be something about what might happen if a person becomes apostate. Eventually – think 1960s – 1980s – those begun to be seen as too legalistic, too controlling. Churches mostly moved away from specifics into something that just sort of signs the person up for membership without there being any requirements – or even more likely, they did away with membership all together. Around the year 2000, many Evangelical churches started to think about church membership differently. There was a huge resurgence of Calvinist or Reformed churches during that era. The vibe of these churches was very slick, urban, young. In the past on this show I’ve told you the history of Mars Hill Church in Seattle – which at one point was the largest church in America – before it blew up in spectacular fashion. But MH is the epitome of this time in Evangelical history. These are the folks who wanted to say – with good motives, I think – but it’s going to sound really weird to your Latter-day Saint ears….they wanted to say that God hates humans and thinks we’re disgusting worms, but the faithful response to this is to kind of take it like a man. Any softening of that was seen as weak faith. These Reformed churches revitalized the practice of church membership – and then they took it to ridiculous lengths. Instead of being a simple statement between a church and a member about their beliefs, it started to morph into a legal document or contract. What had happened was churches that were trying to practice some form of church discipline – that is keeping members accountable for their behavior – were getting sued by the people they were trying to discipline for defamation of character. Let me read you a quote from an attorney familiar with the story, When a church begins the process of exercising formal, biblical discipline, it will often receive a letter from the member’s attorney threatening to sue the church for defamation, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Many church leaders who would not back down have found themselves forced into court, subjected to days of humiliating cross-examina­tion, and shocked to see juries penalize their churches with six-figure damages awards. This trend was triggered by the Guinn case in 1984, which resulted in a $400,000 judgment against a church and its leaders, and has continued to grow for twenty-five years. So Evangelical churches have, more and more, reframed the idea of church membership. On one side they’ve completely given up the idea and said, “we just want you to come and learn and be with us – but we make no demands of obedience on you.” OR, they’ve gone the other direction and morphed their membership agreement into a legal contract, sometimes even requiring members to sign a non-disclosure agreement regarding all church issues. I’d don’t have a study to point to that says this, but my own estimate is that probably 60% of churches have very low-key membership, or none at all. There are no expectations placed on people who attend. They’re treated like customers that the staff needs to keep happy. In your town if you have some slick megachurch that goes by the name,”The Rock Church” or “The Well” or “Elevation Church” this is very likely the model they’re using – church members are customers and customer service is the highest priority. And probably 40% that are trying some kind of membership agreement, which may or may not include phrasing about obedience. The ones that do contain words about obedience are probably leaning toward the legal contract side of things. There are rare churches that have done extra sneaky things. Mars Hill in Seattle, for example, drafted their membership agreement so that in all reality, the church only had 3 members. Despite having 40,000 (or something) attending on Sundays, those people were not members. The membership contract they signed said they are members in name only, and have no right to anything – the 3 members of the church (the senior pastor and his top 2 board members) are the ultimate authority and the ones who must be obeyed above all else, and the only ones who will decide what happens, and attendees have no ability to influence that at all ever. There are other similar things. So, frankly, Evangelicals are not stupid people – they hear about stories like this and get suspicious that membership is a trick, and revert back to their hyper-independence of wanting a relationship to just be between them and God where no one else has the right to say anything about obedience. So, all that to say, the word “obedience” is really loaded for Evangelicals. It’s either become a dirty word and been eliminated except in the most basic sense of obeying scripture – or it’s been hyped up into the realm of contracts and law. It’s probably going to take another 20 years, probably more, before they can find a sensible stance on it again. Let’s briefly contrast this with what we believe in our church. We came to this Earth, in part, to prove our willingness to obey a Father that we can no longer see. It’s Abraham 3:25 “And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them.” We covenant to obey the Law of Obedience, but it’s not blind obedience. At one point in my investigation of the church I had a true fear that having a Prophet actually meant that some guy I never knew could tell me what to do, and I’d have no choice but to do it. But the Law of Obedience is not God legally forcing us to comply with his dominance, it is him inviting us to come unto him. And then we get to make any choice we want – all those choices have consequences. There are no consequence-free choices in any aspect of life. But our obedience is not compelled – it is seen as a voluntary act of faith. We see – at least on our best days – that obedience is something that leads to happiness. Evangelicals have had a rough go on this topic and that word is going to bring up a lot of division (some of which we haven’t even covered here) and it’s not a word most of them would associate with “happiness.” I highly recommend to you the Youtube channel called Temple Light where my friend Jasmine talks through all things Temple in a direct way. Her episode called, “The Law of Obedience” would be a great video to watch after this one (and she’s more efficient than I am and can make her point in 10 min where it takes me 25) But that video will help you to think about why obedience has been played out in our church the way it has. Next week we’re talking about the 3 levels of Heaven and why Evangelicals think we’re crazy to think such a thing, and how they think about it instead. See you then. More Come, Follow Me resources here.   Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities. The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – 2 Corinthians 1–7 appeared first on FAIR.

Evangelical Questions: Baptism for the Dead (Part 2) by Jennifer Roach, MDiv, LMHC Welcome back to Come Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions. My name is Jennifer Roach and today we’re going to talk about baptism for the dead. As you know we’re going through the Come Follow Me readings and addressing common questions that Evangelicals ask about our faith as we go along. Our purpose here is not to fuel debate but to help you understand where your Evangelical friends and family are coming from so that you can have better conversations with them, and perhaps even be able to offer them a bit of our faith in a way they can understand. Since we talk about Come Follow Me stuff on this channel I do want to make you aware of a new resource for next year. Dr. Grant Hardy has a new book, The Annotated Book of Mormon. And it is delicious. It’s much closer to a study Bible, but with the Book of Mormon, than I’ve seen before. It includes the entire text of the BoM but has Hardy’s notes embedded on the same page – at least in the physical book. There is a Kindle edition, but it makes the book much harder to use because you have to click about 4 times to actually see the footnotes and get back to your page. The notes are the whole point of this book. And you can just access those much easier in the physical form. I teach Gospel Doctrine in my ward and picked this up to help me prepare for next year. It’s very good. One other resources you should know about that is coming up. FAIR is hosting an online-only conference specifically focused on just the Book of Mormon. Richard Bushman will be presenting along with many others. Details are available here. Okay, We talked about baptism for the dead on a past episode in a more general way, but today we’ll get down to some specifics of why this one bothers Evangelicals so much. We’ll use 1 Cor 15:29-32 as our jumping-off point: Otherwise, what do people mean by being baptized on behalf of the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized on their behalf? Why are we in danger every hour? I protest, brothers, by my pride in you, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die every day! What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” So, Evangelicals have an interesting dilemma with this verse about baptism for the dead. Evangelicals generally have a view of the Bible called inerrancy – this means that they see the Bible as being free from error. So, here they have a verse talking about baptism for the dead, they believe the Bible is without error, but they won’t accept the idea of baptism for the dead. But they have to figure out some way to explain this verse. I’m going to lay out the most popular arguments for you as best as I can. One way they deal with this is to basically say, “Who knows?” One Evangelical leader says it this way, “The phrase ‘baptism for the dead’ is so obscure and perplexing, the meaning so uncertain, and the variety of interpretations so numerous that it seems wise to say it seems impossible to know what the phrase means.” And in one sense, that’s a fair answer – if you don’t know what something means you should say so. A slightly more sophisticated explanation goes like this: The baptism Paul is using “dead” here in a metaphorical sense. He’s not talking about actual dead people, but rather those who are “dead in sin.” Baptism for the dead is then re-cast as just regular baptism. Another possible option that they put on the table is really a rather odd one, and you have to torture the sentence structure a bit to make it work. But this argument says that “baptism for the dead” actually means “baptism because of the dead.” The idea being that those who had already died had strong testimonies and they were still inspiring currently alive people to get baptized themselves. It doesn’t really work in the structure of the argument, but it’s one of the ways they talk about this. A slight variation on this is that Paul is talking about the martyrs who bravely faced death in the 1st century and were inspiring others to be faithful to Christ. A slightly less tortured explanation says that the dead who were being baptized for had already decided to trust in Christ, they had just not been baptized yet. So after they die, their friends or family symbolically get baptized for them – but it’s more like a family member finishing a mountain hike on behalf of a loved one who died while trying to complete that hike. Everyone knows that this kind of “on behalf of” isn’t really the person finishing it – it’s just a comforting ritual for the people who are still alive. The final argument that they use is something like: there is one mention of this practice one time in the Bible so its not enough to build a doctrine on. And they’re partly right, this passage is the only time it is mentioned in the Bible. But the Bible is not the only history we have access to. 1 Cor was written about 55 AD – fast forward to 393 AD (350 years later – longer than the United States has been a country) and it’s still being practiced. No new Bible texts are being written at this time, so we don’t have that, but we do have writings of all kinds from the churches in various locations. We’ll look at one of them: Egypt. We call the Christians there Coptic Christians. The word ‘Coptic’ is derived from the Greek word that means “Egyptian.” It was Hugh Nibley who put much of this work together initially. He traces through the Coptic writings and shows dozens of Coptic writings talking about baptism for the dead. But eventually other Christians radically distance themselves from the practice. How did this all happen? In the early Christian world there are lots of competing ideas in various places and their method for deciding who was correct happened through a series of formal councils. Some of these were considered major councils – where there would have been leaders representing all the different areas where faith was being practiced. But some of them were minor councils, and not everyone attended. One such council was called, “The fourth canon of the Synod of Hippo,” it was held in 393AD and in that council, they declared, “The Eucharist shall not be given to dead bodies, nor baptism conferred upon them.” The ruling was confirmed four years later in the sixth canon of the Third Council of Carthage. However, the Coptic Christians were not represented at either council, so they didn’t feel particularly bound to the decisions being made there. Nibly complies all kinds of references to baptism for the dead in their church. Eventually, the Coptic Church split away from the Roman Church in 451, just 50 or so years after this event. It’s not the only reason they split off, but it’s in the mix. All this to say, Evangelicals use a wide variety of arguments to try to make that verse mean something other than what it means. However, if you asked most of them why they think baptism for the dead is wrong you will probably get something like: Baptism isn’t necessary, only faith is necessary. They tend to think that baptism – even of the living – is just a nice symbolic way of expressing that you belong to Christ. Kind of like finishing the hike where a deceased relative died is a nice symbolic way to help them finish their journey. Most of the time they’re not just rejecting baptism for the dead, they’re side-lining all baptism, even for the living. At best, it’s a nice thing, but it’s not required to be a Christian. At worst it’s an insult to Christ because it’s saying that something needs to be added to his work on the cross. And I think a lot of Latter-day Saints get stuck here because it’s hard to understand why they see it they way they do. I want to suggest one way to talk about why baptism is so important to our faith just straight out of the Bible. We have a lot of great verses about baptism in our other scriptures – but those are scriptures Evangelicals wont accept, so they might not get you very far. But in the Bible we get this great conversation on baptism in 1 Peter 3. Peter makes the argument that baptism is like Noah’s ark. He says, “After being made alive, [that is Christ] he went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits [understood as people who have died]— to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water, and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also—not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge of a clear conscience toward God. It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” Peter then goes on to say, just a couple verses later in Chapter 4, “For this is the reason the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead.” It’s easy for the modern-reader to make hard lines between chapters, but Paul didn’t write in chapters – those were added later. Take Peter’s argument as a whole and we get something like: Christ wanted even the dead to be saved, baptism is how this happens, and for this reason the gospel is preached to the dead. You can’t separate faith and baptism as only belonging to the living here. Your Evangelical friends or family members might not immediately jump up and accept the idea after this, but it does move the conversation into a wider collection of verses in the New Testament – which is something that helps Evangelicals feel like you are taking scripture seriously. Okay, that’s all I have for you today. Come back next week and we’ll talk some more.   More Come, Follow Me resources here.   Jennifer Roach earned a Master of Divinity from The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, and a Master of Counseling from Argosy University. Before her conversion to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints she was an ordained minister in the Anglican church. Her own experience of sexual abuse from a pastor during her teen years led her to care deeply about issues of abuse in faith communities. The post Come, Follow Me with FAIR: Faithful Answers to New Testament Questions – 1 Corinthians 14–16 appeared first on FAIR.

by Zachary Wright Introduction Someone I know, who is a very vocal LGBTQ+ advocate, once got into an argument with me about concepts behind gender.  I did everything I could to understand where they were coming from, seeing as this is a complex topic with differing perspectives.  However, they were trying to convince me (among other things) that gender is a social construct.  Having studied the issue, I pushed against their ideas, arguing that gender is more complicated than that and it certainly isn’t a mere social construct.  However, despite my best efforts, my research and perspectives fell on deaf ears.  Instead, my friend seemed to cling to the ideas of the people she agreed with.  I’ll be sure to go over LGBTQ+ perspectives another day.  However, my purpose in telling this story is to show an example of what researchers and psychologists call cognitive bias, which we’ll discuss today. A few episodes ago, I explained logical fallacies – errors during logical reasoning – that can lead to incorrect conclusions.  Today, we’ll be talking about the equivalent of that, but in regards to psychological bias that we sometimes employ.  Cognitive biases are “errors in thinking that affect people’s decision-making in virtually every situation” (1).  Unlike logical fallacies, cognitive biases are negative brain processes (usually coming from intuition) that can affect our thoughts and lead us to wrong conclusions.  In other words, logical fallacies relate to arguments in the way that cognitive biases relate to intuitive brain processes.  Critical thinkers must recognize cognitive biases in their thinking in order to more objectively analyze the data they interact with and make more informed decisions.  Today, we’ll be going over where cognitive biases come from, explore some examples of cognitive biases, and then explore some principles that can help us avoid them.  Let’s take a look. Heuristics:  The Brain’s “Easy Way Out” Before we explore examples of cognitive biases, we must first understand where they come from.  Most documented cognitive biases come from “mental shortcuts” in our minds.  Psychologists call these shortcuts “heuristics.”  One group of researchers described heuristics in the following way: A heuristic is a mental shortcut that allows an individual to make a decision, pass judgment, or solve a problem quickly and with minimal mental effort. While heuristics can reduce the burden of decision-making and free up limited cognitive resources, they can also be costly when they lead individuals to miss critical information or act on unjust biases. (2) Heuristics help us make decisions and arrive at conclusions easily and quickly.  Heuristics take information that seems familiar and draws a connection to something we’ve observed in the past.  These shortcuts often lead to good results… except when they don’t. How heuristics can sometimes be misleading can be shown in some basic examples.  For instance, consider this video below: If you’re like me, you initially see a series of dots moving around in a circle.  However, that’s not REALLY what’s going on.  It’s a series of points lighting up and growing dimmer in a specific pattern.  Our brains provide the illusion that it’s a circular-moving line of dots.  This example is one of many optical illusions that employ heuristics (3).  Another example of a heuristic is the “inattentional blindness” phenomenon.  Here’s another video example of a cognitive bias stemming from a heuristic (4). In both instances, our brains are either making connections based on information that isn’t present or ignoring information that is present.  The accepted psychological theory states these intuitive (and I use that term very deliberately in light of my previous article) heuristics came from evolutionary processes and natural selection (5).  In other words, we’ve inherited instincts from our ancestors that protected us, enhancing our chances of survival.  This detail will be important later. It almost goes without saying that this power of heuristics is nothing short of incredible, and one thing that I do want to stress here is that pattern recognition isn’t a bad thing.  I’ll be discussing how drawing inappropriate patterns can lead us to jump to conclusions, but not all heuristically-based decisions are bad ones.  One pair of researchers noted that “for many decisions, the assumptions of rational models are not met, and it is an empirical (after the fact) rather than an a priori (before the fact) issue how well cognitive heuristics function in an uncertain world” (6, parentheses added).  In other words, we often don’t know how well our heuristically-based decisions worked until after the fact.  However, they sometimes have unintended consequences that can cause problems in our thinking, as we’ll soon see. Cognitive Bias:  Bad Processes, Worse Outcomes There are multiple types of Cognitive Biases, each with observable patterns, chiefly focusing on drawing patterns, prioritizing the information that correlates with what we already know, focusing on dominant/impactful data, and ignoring seemingly irrelevant information (7).  I’ll be sure to link a more comprehensive list of cognitive biases below, as we won’t be able to discuss each one today.  However, we’ll cover some of the most important ones today, which may help outline some principles to help overcome cognitive biases. The Anchoring Bias is “the common human tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered (the “anchor”) when making decisions” (8).  When we see information and don’t critically think about it, we tend to allow that source to color how we see other sources of information.  For example, imagine someone learning from their parents that “the Mormons are just a cult.”  From then on, they cling to that information, allowing it to color how they discuss the church with the missionaries.  The problem with this kind of heuristic is evident:  It inhibits valuable analysis and thought.  It hyper-prioritizes information we already know at the expense of additional information that may relate to the issue.   The Fundamental Attribution Error is the “tendency for people to over-emphasize dispositional or personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the situational explanations.” (9).  In other words, we tend to associate certain attributes as being a part of personality rather than just being due to the surrounding circumstances.  An example of this is found in the hypothetical example of Member #1 and Member #2.  Member #2 is in a hurry and comes across as rude and impatient to Member #1.  Member #1 is offended at his impatience and then classifies Member #2 as an impatient person.  In reality, he’s in a hurry to get home to take care of his sick family.  As you can see, the situation was mostly governing Member #2’s behavior, not necessarily his personality as a whole.  Our heuristics focus on the dominant information in front of us and jump to conclusions as a result. The Availability Bias indicates “The more available and relevant information there is, the more likely the event is judged to be” (10).  Put another way, we tend to prioritize more available information, even if it doesn’t tell the complete story.  For instance, there is a lot more critical information about the church than positive information about the church in places such as social media, where people talk about bad experiences they had in the church.  That information is often more accessible, and more advertised, than information about how members of the church end up being more generous (11), more pro-social (12), and have overall higher well-being (13) than most other populations of people.  This isn’t to say that it’s a contest.  However, it goes to show that there is evidence to go against the idea that church members aren’t happy, but it’s less available, so fewer people outside the church know about it.  This bias manifests from the intuition’s dismissal of seemingly absent or irrelevant information. The Bias blind-spot Bias states “that most people believe they are less biased than their peers” (14).  In other words, we’re often able to point out other people’s biases more easily than notice our own biases.  Consider these statements (based on actual statements by critics) “You can get unbiased information about the church from books like Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer” “You can get the REAL Mormon history from *Insert critic here*” The problem with these statements comes from appealing to an idea of purity that doesn’t really exist.  There is no such thing as “unbiased” sources.  As you can see, it’s easier for people to ignore bias in favor of what they believe, because our mental heuristics tend to lean in favor of the information we already know. Confirmation Bias is characterized by “seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs” (15).  This can also be described as only looking for things that support your opinion.  Examples of this can be found in critics of the church only associating with people who agree with their assessments about church history while ignoring or dismissing organizations such as FAIR.  This, however, is problematic seeing as it once again prioritizes what people already believe at the expense of data that contradicts it.  This bias is prevalent (even among members), so watch for it. The Framing Bias “refers to the observation that the manner in which data is presented can affect decision making” (16).  The way that information is initially presented to us can affect how we process that information and can lead us to incorrect conclusions (i.e. we make a decision based on how the issue was framed).  For example, “You belong to a manipulative cult” differs greatly from “You belong to a high-demand religion.”  (Lots of high demand groups exist, whether they be secular like the Navy Seals, or religious such as nuns, etc.)  This heuristic pulls on the idea that our brains focus on dominant, impactful data.  “Cult” is a very charged word often used with a negative connotation, so hearing it leads to conclusions that may or may not be accurate.  After all, depending on how you use the word, you could describe all religions as cults. The Hindsight Bias is “the tendency, after an event has occurred, to overestimate the extent to which the outcome could have been foreseen.” (17).  This one is a little more well-known through the phrase “Hindsight is 20/20”, but its status as a cognitive bias is well-deserved.  This is often used against prophets and the mistakes they make.  It may be easier for us to say “How could Brigham Young have said X thing, isn’t it obvious that wasn’t true!?”  However, this just shows our bias…we have more information than Brigham Young did, and we’ve been able to draw patterns and make connections in ways that Brigham Young may not have been able to.  However, in such discussions, we have to remember that we are all human, we all make mistakes.  I try to be as charitable to people (past or present) as I imagine Jesus would be charitable towards me during Judgement Day. Loss/Regret Aversion Bias was put by one researcher as “an expression of fear” (18).  Fear of what?  Well, fear of regret, pain, and loss.  This can manifest itself in a few different ways.  Perhaps a member is scared to take a serious look at church history because they’re afraid of losing their testimony.  Perhaps a critic of the church is scared of regretting their decision to leave the church, and so they double down on their criticisms.  These fears, even if somewhat justified, can impede our ability to understand the world around us.  Our brains tend to focus on dominant information and – let’s be honest with ourselves – we remember our failures.  Our mistakes/failures present themselves as very dominant information in our minds (19).  Keep this in mind as you’re making decisions. The Stereotyping Bias is probably more familiar to most people.  A more technical definition of “stereotype” is “[the] category-based beliefs about a group that also involve affective–evaluative loading and behavioral tendencies” (20).  In other words, we put people with certain characteristics in a category in our minds, based on patterns we see.  For example, a critic might say something like “Mormons are raised to be bigoted and judgemental.”  Among other things, this is a stereotype placed on us by other people (21).  However, this bias comes from people’s tendency to over correlate data, that is, it’s easy for us to categorize other people into “being a certain way,” sometimes even if we don’t realize it. Finally, in a similar vein, we have the In-group Bias, which is described as the willingness of members of a group to “treat their own group superior than others” (22).  In other words, we’re willing to hold those we don’t like to a higher standard than those we do like.  For example, I’ve seen instances where critics of church tend to give the benefit of the doubt to other critics, but not with those who defend the church.  When members of the church didn’t know something, it’s because we’re “ignorant,” but you’d be hard-pressed to find a member of that same community who would call another critic “ignorant.”  You’re far more likely to find them saying that the lay-members are ignorant than you are to find them saying that a member of their own ranks is ignorant.  Again, this kind of practice goes back to how people focus on dominant information, and for many people who have left the church, there are a lot of criticisms that are dominant in their minds. Now, before I move on, I’d like to make one disclaimer:  I am not saying that those who have left the church are more susceptible to cognitive biases than those who have not left the church.  With just as much ease, I can find several instances where members of the church employ the same kinds of cognitive errors.  However, I do think that these examples of cognitive biases can demonstrate some of the ways that cognitive biases can affect how we interpret information, and consequently affect how members and non-members can be treated in negative ways.  It will always be in our best interest to avoid unnecessarily ostracizing other people.  See if you can identify cognitive biases in yourself, make note of which ones tend to cause you the most amount of trouble, and see if you can find ways to correct them.  As you’ll soon see, the first step to being able to combat cognitive biases is to identify them, and I hope that these examples can help you do that. How to improve That prompts the question:  How can we avoid cognitive biases?  There are a lot of sources out there that you can find that provide insights as to how you can prevent (or at least diminish) cognitive biases from affecting your life.  However, we won’t be able to go over all of them today, and even if I could, the ways that those practices can be applied vary from person to person.  Instead, I’ll cover a few principles that I think can help mitigate the effects of cognitive biases in our lives.  Hopefully that will provide insight as to what you can do to reduce the effect of cognitive biases, at least a little bit. Right off the bat, it’s helpful to slow down the decision making process when possible.  As mentioned before, heuristics are basically “mental shortcuts” that help us make decisions quickly without spending too much time and energy thinking about it.  However, if we don’t need to make decisions quickly, then there’s no reason to take the shortcut.  Take some time to do research, and to “study it out in your mind” (23).  By taking more time, you’ll be more likely to avoid impulsive decisions.  If you’re able to, allow your intuition to be supported by other epistemic sources such as reason. So, what should we do while we’re taking this “time out,” so to speak?  Before we can answer that, let’s take a step back for a moment.  We know that cognitive biases come from heuristics, which help us make decisions quickly.  It stands to reason, then, that in order to limit the cognitive biases we’re employing, we have to first recognize what heuristics are at play.  Asking yourself questions like “Am I focusing on some information at the expense of other information?” or “is there some kind of information that I’m missing?” can be helpful when analyzing what biases are at play.  By reviewing the presuppositions we have, it’s easier to see how our intuition may be helping us, or hurting us. It’s also important to look at the issue from different perspectives.  Being able to seek further information, as well as receive feedback, may help reduce the effects of cognitive biases (24).  When you find something that confuses you, don’t just take the critics’ word for it, look at what FAIR has to offer, or consult other experts in different areas.  Not only is there likely to be information that you didn’t know (thus helping your intuition recognize true patterns and adjust to dominant information), but it can also be nice to analyze issues from people with different perspectives (25).  It’s also easier to verify your information too, so this practice of looking at what other people have to say can be useful in fact-checking your data, which is always going to be useful for critical thinkers. Conclusion In conclusion, heuristics can be a widely versatile tool that can help us resolve problems in powerful ways.  However, just like any tool, it can be misused, and can sometimes get in the way of our ability to arrive at correct conclusions and solve problems.  Cognitive biases come in many shapes and sizes, but they don’t have to define our thought processes.  There are good ways to avoid allowing these mental shortcuts to disrupt our analyses.  It’s imperative to recognize that these cognitive biases will never truly disappear.  They will always be a part of us, and no one is impervious to their influence (26).  Again, heuristics are important…even if we could ignore them we don’t have the time or energy to function well in this modern world without them.  Instead, it serves us to be patient with ourselves as we root out what we consider to be good and bad.  As we analyze where our intuition can sometimes lead us astray, it will become easier for us as critical thinkers to solve problems, and avoid common pitfalls that inhibit good reasoning.  In short, learning how (and how not) to use heuristics can help us improve how we learn, how we use our agency, and eventually help us become the kind of thinkers and believers I think God wants us to be. References: https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/glossary/cognitive-bias https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/heuristics https://www.ics.uci.edu/~majumder/vispercep/chap4notes.pdf https://www.simplypsychology.org/inattentional-blindness.html https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-unconscious/202001/how-the-unconscious-works Gigerenzer, G., & Gaissmaier, W. (2011). Heuristic decision making. Annual review of psychology, 62, 451–482. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-120709-145346 Korteling, J. E., Brouwer, A. M., & Toet, A. (2018). A Neural Network Framework for Cognitive Bias. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 1561. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01561 https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/negotiation-skills-daily/the-drawbacks-of-goals/ https://sites.psu.edu/aspsy/2020/12/01/lesson-10-overcoming-the-fundamental-attribution-error/; a more charitable view of this cognitive bias can be found here https://www.mit.edu/~k2smith/pdf/WalkerSmithVul_2015_FAE.pdf  https://dictionary.apa.org/availability-heuristic https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/penn-research-shows-mormons-are-generous-and-active-helping-others https://www.whyy.org/wp-content/uploads/planphilly/assets_1/http-planphilly-com-sites-planphilly-com-files-cnaan_lds_giving-pdf.original.pdf https://news.gallup.com/poll/152732/religious-higher-wellbeing-across-faiths.aspx; Not that things like “happiness” are a contest.  https://www.bayes.city.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/282373/The-Bias-Blind-Spot.pdf Nickerson, R. S. (1998a). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175–220. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.2.2.175  Robinson, J. D. (2016). Using blind reviews to address biases in medical malpractice. Blinding as a Solution to Bias, 181–193. https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-802460-7.00012-7   https://dictionary.apa.org/hindsight-bias https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/science-choice/201803/what-is-loss-aversion Huang, S., Stanley, M.L. & De Brigard, F. The phenomenology of remembering our moral transgressions. Mem Cogn 48, 277–286 (2020). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-019-01009-0 ; This is especially true for moral failures. Fiske, S. T., & Tablante, C. B. (2015). Stereotyping: Processes and content. In M. Mikulincer, P. R. Shaver, E. Borgida, & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), APA handbook of personality and social psychology, Vol. 1. Attitudes and social cognition (pp. 457–507). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/14341-015 Derek Westra’s talk “Whistleblowers in the last days” goes over how the media portrays stereotypes, and sometimes falsehoods, about members of the church.  It’s accessible online for free at this link here (you’ll need to log in first). Abbink, K., & Harris, D. (2019). In-group favouritism and out-group discrimination in naturally occurring groups. PloS one, 14(9), e0221616. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0221616 D&C 9:8 Bojke L, Soares M, Claxton K, et al. Developing a reference protocol for structured expert elicitation in health-care decision-making: a mixed-methods study. Southampton (UK): NIHR Journals Library; 2021 Jun. (Health Technology Assessment, No. 25.37.) Chapter 6, Reviewing the evidence: heuristics and biases. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK571047/  https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/healthyliving/talking-through-problems  https://markmanson.net/cognitive-biases-that-hurt-relationships Further Study: Berthet, V., & de Gardelle, V. (2023). The heuristics-and-biases inventory: An open-source tool to explore individual differences in rationality. Frontiers in psychology, 14, 1145246. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1145246; This is a more comprehensive, open list of cognitive biases noted by several different authors/researchers.  Feel free to explore them at your leisure. https://www.forbes.com/sites/glebtsipursky/2023/04/15/12-strategies-to-defeat-cognitive-biases-and-boost-your-bottom-line/?sh=4c022a8650a6; Another great article on how to reduce cognitive biases that appears to be well-sourced. Kunkler, K. S., & Roy, T. (2023). Reducing the impact of cognitive bias in decision making: Practical actions for forensic science practitioners. Forensic science international. Synergy, 7, 100341. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fsisyn.2023.100341; This article discusses multiple more practical ways to reduce cognitive biases from a more technical standpoint.  While this focuses primarily on scientists, it has some useful ideas that might be translated into other aspects of life.   Zachary Wright was born in American Fork, UT.  He served his mission speaking Spanish in North Carolina and the Dominican Republic.  He currently attends BYU studying psychology, but loves writing, and studying LDS theology and history.  His biggest desire is to help other people bring them closer to each other, and ultimately bring people closer to God. The post By Study and Faith – Episode 6: Cognitive Biases appeared first on FAIR.