I Have Cancer

 I have been ill for some time. This week, I was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer with known spread to the adrenal glands and brain. I was told my condition is "treatable, but not curable." I am interpreting this to me that, if treatment goes well, I could still live for a long time. However, it is ultimately going to be a losing battle. Until we see how treatment will go, an actual prognosis is up in the air. 

Given the uncertainty and the fact that I still have a lot I want to say, the plan is to put up as many posts about different topics as I can get banged out. There will be more reflection, a little less "pure" scholarship.

I already have two articles on abortion that only needs final edits before posting. Look for those in the next couple days. I have another project, a defense of my belief in the so-called Inspired Fiction Theory for the Book of Mormon and its meaningfulness to believers who hold to it. My friend Trevor Luke reviewed a draft and made several suggestions for improvement. I have not actually finished this project. Nevertheless, I will be posting it soon more-or-less as it is now. The essay as it is already basically says what I want to say about it. So while I'm not completely happy with it, and intend to revisit it if/when I can, I want to get that message out.

After this, I want to write primarily about what my Mormonism means to me. There will be some scholarship, but these essays are meant to be more reflective about how Mormonism has affected me and is bringing me some comfort in this time of trouble. Here are some things you can expect in the upcoming days.

I want to talk about the genius of the Israelite religion, even though that original genius has been somewhat obscured because of modern conflicts with "secular" knowledge. The genius is precisely in historicizing its mythology. That is to say, the Israelites took the myths and legends they told each other to make sense of their world and incorporated it into a history encompassing a saga that begins with Creation and leading to the Babylonian exile. Obviously by modern scientific and historical standards, we cannot judge it to be accurate history. However, I will argue asking whether the Bible is accurate history largely misses the point. In historicizing their mythology, the Israelites weren't really trying to say something about history--they were saying something about God and his relationship to humanity.

This in turn is going is lead to some reflections on the nature of Scripture itself. Historicizing mythology and the process of canonizing the result has certainly led to problems down the road. Once canonized, the point the Israelites were making got lost and believers came to see Scripture as the Word of God to humanity. This seems to be the genesis of the problems of literalism, the conflicts between creation and evolution, and so on. Also, since Scripture is now a diverse set of different writings over time that is particularly given to cherrypicking, there is the problem picking and choosing the things that still appeal while ignoring the things we don't like. Even I would just as soon leave aside the genocide, rape, cannibalism and all the other ugliness we find in Scripture and focus on the higher ideals we find in Scripture and can still inspire us to this day.

But that wouldn't really be taking Scripture seriously. The problem, I think, is that we are now conditioned to see Scripture as the Word of God containing God's record of his dealings with us. Would I would like to do is flip this around. Instead of being God's record of dealing with us, what happens if we recognize Scripture is actually humanity's record of our dealing with God? Whereas it is hard to reconcile the highs and lows of Scripture from a God's eye; recognizing Scripture as humanity's dealings with God may help us make more sense of the ugliness.

Getting closer to modern Mormonism and its effect on me, I have three topics I especially want to explore. The first is the Mormon concept of Zion. Anybody who knows me well enough knows I am a political leftist, no matter what label I choose for myself at a given time. For example, some of my political stances could make Bernie Sanders look like a raving reactionary conservative. While the basic trajectory of my life and personality perhaps made it inevitable that I would fall on the left end of the political spectrum even before I became a Mormon, it is hard to escape the possibility that I may not have become quite as liberal as I am were it not for the fact that, as a Mormon, it is my duty to do my best to help bring about Zion. So unlike Sanders, who is still working within the broad world of capitalism, it is my goal to overthrow capitalism altogether. This is at least partly due to the fact that the more I grasped the implications of Mormon Zion the more I realized that Zion is simply incompatible with capitalism. You can have one, or you can have the other, but you can't have both. 

However much waffling the modern LDS Church does around the subject, I think that the ultimate culmination of Joseph Smith's Mormonism can be encapsulated in the Snow couplet: "As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become.” For conservative Christianity, this is Smith's ultimate heresy. And indeed, it is a very radical statement. Coupled with the doctrine of eternal progression, this gives Mormonism a basically optimistic view of humanity that is lacking in much of traditional Christianity, and especially in Calvinistic forms which declare mankind is utterly depraved.

It also has implications. In the Bible, we are told, "Whoever does not love does not love God, for God is love" (1 John 4:8, NRSV). John goes so far as to say that he who declares if you do not love, you are still in the darkness (2:9) and are in fact murderers (3:19). It is fair to say that the ultimate ethic in Christianity is to love others as God loves us. But the Snow couplet actually demands a little more than this. In Mormonism, every single human being is a potential god. As such, each and every single human being needs to be looked at with a bit of the awe and wonder we ascribe to God himself. Don't get me wrong. I'm not there--not by a long shot. Hell, even the "simpler" goal of loving everyone with the love of God often proves elusive to me. But as a Mormon, that is what I strive for.

The fact that in Mormonism God is an exalted man has its own implications. Arguably restoring one of the original insights of Israelite religion, Mormonism puts God in our space/time continuum. Crucially, God did not create the world out of nothing; he worked with and organized eternally existent matter which he neither created nor can destroy. In other words, God is not omnipotent in the classic Christian sense. This too has implications, especially for the problem of evil. While I had seen hints in other places, the implication for the problem of evil was most forcefully brought to my attention reading chapter 33 of B. H. Roberts' The Truth, The Way, The Life. I will delve into this further, but the basic thought is that God must deal with two things: the intractableness of the laws of physics and the inability to interfere with man's free moral agency. 

Thus, it is quite possible that we have the best possible world, given the constraints that God himself must act under. When we add chaos theory to the mix, we also have to face the possibility that God has to be very careful about what he does. This is where it becomes very personal. Even a really small act by God can have effects that not even he cannot fully predict. Plunking an asteroid onto the dinosaurs might give room for humanity to evolve, but it certainly did not guarantee we would. So every time God performs a "miracle," this includes the risk that things could go horribly, terribly wrong in the long run. 

For this reason, I have no reasonable expectation that God will miraculously cure my cancer, and I'm not going to bother asking him to do so. I am simply not that important in the overall scheme of things and I certainly don't want God to wind up destroying life, the universe, and everything on my account. But if God is so constrained that he cannot help me with my illness, what can he do? Immanuel--God is with us. I have been thinking along these lines since I read Roberts some twenty-five years or so ago. But here, today, knowing what my likely fate is going to be, it is a thought that has become especially comforting.

So these are the kinds I of projects I have in mind in the immediate future. Let's see how far I can get with them.