As the political battles over the definition of marriage have continued over the last few years, I have seen an increasing number of Latter-day Saints who seem to think that Marriage Privatization, often described as “Getting the Government out of the Marriage Business”, is both a good solution and consistent with the LDS Church’s Proclamation on the Family and its desire to preserve traditional marriage.

Privatizing marriage is the idea that the government should only recognize civil unions for both heterosexual and same-sex couples and that marriage would refer only to private religious ceremonies.

But they are wrong. Marriage privatization is not a solution, it is surrender.

It is doubtful that the government can ever conceivably get out of the marriage business, regardless of what we call it.

Marriage exists because of sex and procreation. In other words it is not just a construct, but is a refection of biological realities. When God instituted marriage between Adam and Eve, it was explicitly in terms of lawful procreation (“multiply and replenish”). A child is the literal manifestation of the physical union of woman and man. They are literally one flesh embodied in the child. Women have a natural right to claim support and protection from the man with whom they have become one through a child. Children, who are born helpless, have a natural right to the care and support of their parents until they are mature enough to support themselves.

Because of biological constraints imposed by sexual reproduction, throughout history it has always been easier to correctly identify the mother of a child than to identify the father. Because it is the proper role of government to protect the natural rights of the people, government will always have an interest in protecting the rights of women to support from the father of their children, and in protecting the rights of children to the support of their parents.

A great deal of law arises out of the government’s responsibility to protect these natural rights and to enforce natural responsibilities. Until the advent of DNA testing, there was no easy way to prove paternity, and since so much of inheritance property rights and other law involve issues of paternity, it was natural for government to give preference to exclusive sexual relationships created by contract to establish legal maternity and paternity for children. Children born outside the contract were considered “illegitimate” because there was no easy way to prove who the father was.

So Civil Marriage arose out of a biological, natural, and legal necessity. As long as government must be involved in the issues of paternity (inheritance; child support; abandonment; adoption; dividing assets between divorcees; protecting parental rights related to education, discipline, and health) government will have an interest in marriage.

Additionally, because the fulfillment of natural parental responsibilities has a direct influence on the civilization of children, when the government fails to support the natural rights of children to claim support, care, and proper civilization by parents, the children become less civilized, more dependent on government, and more of a legal burden on society as a whole.

To say that government has no business in regulating and enforcing parental obligations toward their minor children, or spouses toward each other, or property rights between family members, is to advocate chaos and to deny these natural rights.

There is simply no way for the government to get out of marriage.

So, when most people advocate for marriage privatization, what they are really advocating is a semantic game that lets the gay marriage movement win while appeasing those who are concerned about marriage with a superficial language change. They take what we currently call “marriage” and re-label it a “civil union” and take what we currently call a “commitment ceremony” (which has no legal meaning) and re-label it “marriage”. And since same-sex couples can easily find someone who will be willing to perform a commitment ceremony (now labeled “marriage”), they get to claim both the extra-legal “marriage” label and the legal construct formerly known as “marriage” now labeled a “civil union”.

Marriage privatization is simply a case of calling surrender “victory” to make the losers feel better.

As the image included at the top says, “The simplest solutions are often the cleverest. They are also usually wrong.”

I hope that LDS proponents of marriage privatization will reconsider. It is impossible to construe surrender, even when it is labeled “victory”, as the kind of defense of traditional marriage that the Prophets and Apostles of the LDS church advocate.

[See: What Is Marriage? (PDF) by Sherif Girgis, Robert P. George, & Ryan T. Anderson for a more extensive academic argument for government recognition of traditional marriage]

View the full large version here (5.8 Mb, 4767 x 4767 px)

For many of you, the initial reaction to this image is probably something like “Cool! Uh…what?” So let me give an overview of what you are looking at, followed by a more in-depth explanation of the technical details.

What is Sentiment Analysis?

Computer programmers and linguists have developed algorithms which take a sentence or paragraph and try to automatically identify the feeling, or sentiment, of the words. Most commonly these algorithms try to identify polarity. Basically, polarity means whether what is being said is positive, negative, or neutral. That automated determination is called sentiment analysis. More ambitious systems go beyond polarity and try to identify specific emotions like happy, angry, or sad.

On the Internet, millions of people are constantly talking about almost everything. Google, Facebook, or Twitter can run sentiment analysis on all the posts and status updates made on their services to identify trends around specific words– not just the most frequent searches or popular topics, but trends in how people feel about those topics.

That kind of information can be extremely valuable. Without disclosing any personal information, Facebook could conceivably gather sentiment analysis of all the posts by its users on a given topic and sell the aggregate information to interested parties. That is part of the reason why Google has made a tremendous effort to get a piece of the social web and created Google+.

Technologically progressive companies, politicians, and other entities can tap into sentiment data to get an idea of how huge numbers of people on social websites feel about their products, brands, policies, or people. For instance, the LDS Church could run an ongoing sentiment analysis of all public posts on Twitter that mention words related to the church (like LDS, Mormon, Joseph Smith, BYU, or Proposition 8 ) and watch the negative or positive changes over time in relation to events, ad campaigns, or announcements.

Whether you were aware of it or not, these web companies are already using sentiment analysis in exactly this way. For instance, just last month Facebook posted a graph comparing current Republican presidential candidates based on sentiment analysis of the status updates of their users.

In Google’s 2011 Zeitgeist they also included sentiment analysis results for Republican presidential candidates, as well as many other topics.

I understand that the church is not yet using sentiment analysis of public social network posts to measure positive and negative reactions on the web, but that it is something that they are currently working on.

Sentiment Analysis of the Bible

The idea of running sentiment analysis on scripture didn’t originate with me. Sentiment analysis can be run on any selection of writing and a smart blogger at openbible.info (a site that posts a lot of great projects that apply technology to scripture) realized that just as it can be run on twitter posts, sentiment analysis can be run on verses of scripture. He used a free sentiment analysis service to analyze multiple English translations of every verse in the Bible, and then devised a stunning visualization to display the results. The post got some attention among technology geeks on Google+ where I saw it.

I contacted the author who was kind enough to freely supply me with the code he used to generate the visualization so that I could adapt it for my own purposes.

Sentiment Analysis of the Book of Mormon

To produce the sentiment analysis visualization of the Book of Mormon, I wrote a custom program that submitted every verse to the same sentiment analysis service that had been used to produce the Bible visualization. The service rated each verse as either positive or negative and returned a probability that the analysis was correct. Like the Bible image, I used the probability as a reasonable proxy for sentiment intensity.

The visualization draws a moving average of the sentiment (black is positive, red is negative) in order to see if the sentiment analysis can bring out patterns in the Book of Mormon narrative.

I had some doubts about the validity of parts of the sentiment analysis of the bible; after all the algorithms had been developed to analyze modern English language on the Internet, not the archaic Jacobean English translation of the Bible or the translation of the Book of Mormon. So I was curious to see what it would do with the Book of Mormon.

I’ll leave it to you, the reader, to decide whether the sentiment patterns identified by the program make sense, and if they provide any additional insights. So please share your observations.

Anyhow this has been a fun tangential project. I’m not sure if it really illuminates much other than being a fun, compact, geeky way to represent the whole Book of Mormon.

But now I really need to get back to my rewrite of the Scripturelog project.

Technical Details & Raw Data

Thanks to my continuing work on the Scripturelog project, I already had a convenient database of every verse in the LDS scriptural cannon to start from. Like the original bible visualization, I used the free version of the ViralHeat API to do the actual sentiment analysis of each verse. The free version of the API has a limit on the number of queries that can be made each day, but it didn’t take too long to retrieve and store the sentiment and probability for all 6,604 verses in the Book of Mormon.

I made sure that I was able to reproduce the exact bible visualization that had been posted at openbible.info to be sure I understood how the code interpreted the data. The program expected a tab delimited text file containing moving averages of 15 and 150 verses on each side of the sentiment data. I used the free Tableu Public program to produce the moving averages, and then export them into a LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet. Then I ran the PHP program on the resulting data to generate the visualization.

I then scanned through the entire Book of Mormon and wrote my own short summaries of every single chapter so that they could be displayed by the program around the sentiment visual, similar to the bible visualization.

The first draft was interesting and I was very excited about it. After a close look I noticed a couple of problems, even though it did show some fascinating and promising patterns. For instance, the last chapter of the Book of Ether looked positive, even though it is clearly one of the most bloody, terrible parts of the whole volume. On closer examination I discovered that this was an effect of the moving average. Even though the raw data indicated that the last chapter of Ether was indeed very negative, because the beginning chapters of the subsequent Book of Moroni was so extremely positive, the average masked the negativity near the transition.

The moving average is necessary to smooth out the data enough to bring out some patterns visually, so some of this kind of effect is unavoidable from chapter to chapter, but I decided that at a minimum I should run the moving averages only within the largest logical narrative divisions. I re-calculated separate moving averages for the Small Plates of Nephi (1st Nephi through Omni), Mormon’s abridgement of the Large Plates (Words of Mormon through Mormon), the Book of Ether, and finally the Book of Moroni. The Book of Moroni had so few verses that a moving average of 150 verses basically flattened the data completely, so for that book I used a much lower number of verses in the moving average.  Then I adjusted the visualization program to show these divisions and regenerated the image.

At this point I also corrected another source of error. The ViralHeat API has a limitation of 360 characters of text (including spaces and punctuation) per analysis query. In my original script I had simply truncated each verse at 360 characters. In the entire King James translation of the Old Testament, there are only 28 verses that have more than 28 characters. The New Testament only has 1 verse with more than 360 characters. So it made sense to truncate these few long verses without worrying too much about it causing a lot of error.

The Book of Mormon, in contrast, has 538 verses with more than 360 characters, including 2 that are greater than 720! So when these verses were truncated to 360 characters before being analyzed the chances were pretty high that the analysis would come back wrong because the sentences would be syntactically and semantically incomplete.

To correct this problem, I modified my original script to break long verses up into chunks smaller than 360 characters by identifying sentences and clauses that were as likely to be semantically viable. The program favored ends of sentences (periods, question marks, exclamation points) within a verse as dividing points, but failing to find those, looked for semicolons, colons, and hyphens, and failing those fell back on commas and then spaces. Then it submitted these smaller pieces for analysis and stored the results for each one. Then I averaged the resulting sentiment to produce a more accurate sentiment for the entire verse.

With the new separation of the moving average into larger narrative section and the improved sentiment analysis for longer verses, the visualization was starting to take shape.

I noticed, however, that the Book of Mormon visualization was smoother than that of the bible, with longer continuous sections of negativity instead of frequent ups and downs. I realized that the smoothing effect of a moving average of 150 verses on each side was proportionally smaller in relation to the total number of 31,102 verses in the Bible than to the 6,604 of the Book of Mormon. So I recalculated the moving average using 32 verses on each side to produce a similar smoothing effect to the Bible.  And that resulted in the image at the beginning of the post.

For anyone who wants to play with it, I am making the raw sentiment data for all of the verses of the Book of Mormon available. In the raw data the sentiment is represented as a number from 0 (negative) to 1 (positive). You can download it as a tab delimited text file here:

book-of-mormon-sentiment-raw.csv

Using the raw data, and the free Tableu Public program linked above you should be able to play around with the data and produce your own graphs without too much technical knowledge and without needing to program anything. I’d love to hear about anything interesting anyone else does with it.  Please mention my contribution or link back here in any derivative works. Thanks!

Because of this contrast, more than a few Paul supporters have demonized Romney as the functional equivalent of President Barack Obama, and many indicate that if Romney becomes the Republican candidate they will vote for a third party candidate or refuse to vote altogether. Quite a few Romney supporters, on the other hand, demonize Ron Paul as a crazy, conspiracy theorist whose views are simply too extreme to take seriously.

What most people don’t seem to realize is that, ideological differences aside, if you compare the details of what Ron Paul and Mitt Romney say they plan to actually do as President they are much more similar than the characterizations would lead you to think.

Here is a table of what Ron Paul would do as President, adapted from Ron Paul’s “Plan to Restore America” on his official website, side-by-side with the similar portions of Mitt Romney’s “Believe in America” plan on his official website:

As you can see, 70% of the individual measures that Paul and Romney are proposing are the same or very similar. The 70% in which they match consist of practical measures that can be implemented to shrink the size of government and improve the economy.

The 30% of measures which Paul proposes that Romney doesn’t consist primarily of the more drastic measures, many of which are appealing to some limited-government and libertarian conservatives. This 30% would need to be planned out in far more detail before they could be realistically implemented. Things like abolishing all foreign aid and eliminating whole federal agencies require practical phase-out transitional planning to win wider support, as well as cooperation from a congress that is sure to resist drastic changes.

Politics in the U.S. is all about coalition building. Ron Paul knows that his chances of becoming the Republican nominee are slim. But he’s playing the game to get as many delegates to the convention as he can so that his libertarian views will be assured a more influential place within the Republican coalition.

Romney would deliver most of the more practical measures that Paul supporters would get from a Ron Paul presidency and by sticking in the party, Paul guarantees that the Republicans will make concessions to appeal to his sizable faction. That means that a Romney Presidency would be smart to include Paul in some fashion. He might even get to audit the Fed and move the TSA closer to extinction.

I suspect that Ron Paul knows that he will accomplish a lot more in this way then he could by drawing away his supporters as a 3rd party candidate.

Unfortunately, some of Paul’s supporters don’t seem to be as wise as Ron Paul himself. They are so uncompromising that they are willing to sacrifice the chance to get 70% of what Paul would do and the chance to have their views wield more influence in the Republican party because they will refuse to vote for Romney if he is the nominee. And if that inflexibility results in four more years of a Democratic party controlled White House, that would be a tragic mistake.

Intraparty political contests are all about focusing on difference and ideology. Candidates need to distinguish themselves from their opponents in order to compete and attract supporters. But it is also valuable to counterbalance the difference with a realistic look at similarities. If we neglect the comparable and complementary and only look at the contrast we risk a distorted, unbalanced perception.

So vote for Ron Paul in the primary elections if you believe he is the best candidate, or if you want to see his positions have more influence.  But don’t refuse to vote for Romney, who may likely be the nominee, because he isn’t Ron Paul.  And if you are a Mitt Romney supporter, don’t demonize Ron Paul supporters.  They hope to accomplish many of the same things, and they make a positive contribution to supporting limited, constitutional government.

For the best view, and especially for printing, I recommend downloading it as a PDF document:

Timeline-Book-of-Mormon-and-Old-Testament-Prophets.pdf

The timeline has a few flaws.

For one, I am certainly not a graphic designer. I created it using LibreOffice Calc so that I could update the date ranges easily without having to re-create the graphic from scratch.

For another, the correct date ranges for some of the prophets are notoriously difficult to pin down. I’ve placed the prophets according to the best information my research could find and I’ve included a little margin of error in the date ranges. The more ancient prophets are especially fuzzy, so the ranges tend to indicate a longer period in which they may have been operating. For those prophets for whom there are multiple proposed dates with little consensus, like Joel, I have selected the date ranges that made the most sense to me based on the information I had, but marked them with a lighter background to indicate that there are other possible placements.

I am also aware that scholars believe that books like Jonah and Daniel may have been written after the Babylonian captivity and that others may have been written over a period of time by multiple authors under the same name. However, I have opted to place the prophets in the time when the events of these books are set or when the prophet to whom the writings are attributed likely lived.

Along the right side the prophets are listed in the order they appear in books of the Old Testament and Book of Mormon to make it easy to correlate the book order to the timeline. It also identifies which group of Hebrew and Christian scriptures the book comes from (Major Prophets, Minor Prophets, The Writings) and the Book of Mormon.

I hope it will be as helpful to others as you study the Book of Mormon and Old Testament as it has been to me.

First, a little background: We don’t do Santa at our house. We all make or get presents for each other. All of our children are almost as excited about the gifts they are giving as they are about what they might get. I’ve been teasing the kids all week by telling them that if I couldn’t find anything cool to give them I would just give them all coloring books. Not that coloring books would be a bad gift. But they have received a number of coloring books for birthdays and such and I know that it really isn’t something they want.

It’s Christmas Eve.

With some of our extended family we’ve shared a meal, had a nice time singing Christmas Carols around the piano, and re-enacted the story of Christ’s birth while reading the account from the New Testament.

Throughout the evening our youngest son, who will turn five years old in February, has not wanted to participate.

As I try to get him ready for bed, we have the following conversation:

Me: “Son, you need to go to bed now so you can wake up early tomorrow to open your presents.”

Son: “I’m not tired yet.”

Me: “But don’t you want to go to sleep so you can wake up early for Christmas and get your coloring book?”

Son: “I don’t want a coloring book for Christmas.”

Then he pauses, looks up into my face with a compassionate smile, and says with absolute sincerity:

“It’s okay, dad. I love you even if you only get me a coloring book.”

Then he throws his arms around me and hugs me close.

Choking up, I hug him back.

Me: “I love you too!”

Best Christmas present ever. Eat your heart out Santa!

I did get him something better than a coloring book. But he doesn’t know that yet.

“At the same time came the disciples unto Jesus, saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”

“And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of them, and said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

“Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me.”

“But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”

- Matthew Chapter 18 verses 1 through 6

The Creator of all literally became a little child. And they laid him in a manger because their was no room at the inn. And he did it because he loves us.

Merry Christmas to everyone!

I mean seriously folks, how can you continue to debate tertiary considerations like moral character, policy position, political philosophy, consistency, trustworthiness, or experience while this primary consideration is still so hotly contested? Can we really risk the chance of having another Andrew Jackson or Martin Van Buren? I mean, whoever we pick could someday end up on our money, hair and all!

Speaking of hair, isn’t it about time we had a President with facial hair again? I mean it has been nearly 100 years since we had a president with a mustache (Taft, 1913) and almost 120 years since we had a president with a full beard (Harrison, 1893)! If the president had one, then maybe BYU would start allowing students to have them too.

Whichever candidate grows a beard before the election will get my vote. Even if it is Michelle Bachmann. That’s just how important this election is.

Nearly as important, I already have a pretty good idea of which actor would play Mitt Romney in the inevitable movie, should he win. But who would play Newt Gingrich if he wins?!

[All satire aside, isn't it scary to think that a large number of citizens choose the candidate for whom they will vote based upon criteria not so different from this. If they bother to vote at all...]

Though it has received some attention in the press, most people still seem to be unaware of the pedophilia problem in Afghanistan:

“In Kandahar, population about 500,000, and other towns, dance parties are a popular, often weekly, pastime. Young boys dress up as girls, wearing makeup and bells on their feet, and dance for a dozen or more leering middle-aged men who throw money at them and then take them home. A recent State Department report called “dancing boys” a “widespread, culturally sanctioned form of male rape.”

Even though the practices are illegal in Afghanistan, they are culturally acceptable and the laws are rarely enforced.

In recent months we have found out that pedophilia is also wide-spread in Hollywood. Former child-star Corey Feldman has come forward as a victim of Hollywood pedophilia:

“I can tell you that the No. 1 problem in Hollywood was and is and always will be pedophilia. That’s the biggest problem for children in this industry… It’s the big secret.”

Feldman won’t name names at this point, but his claim is backed up by a couple of other Hollywood stars, including Alison Arngrim who was a child star on Little House on the Prairie:

“I literally heard that they were ‘passed around. The word was that they were given drugs and being used for sex. It was awful – these were kids, they weren’t 18 yet. There were all sorts of stories about everyone from their, quote, ‘set guardians’ on down that these two had been sexually abused and were totally being corrupted in every possible way.”

Hollywood condemns the sexual repression imposed by religious conservatives and in turn Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan decry the perversions of the sexual liberation pushed by Hollywood and the Great Satan. And yet both turn a blind eye to the gross sexual abuse of children perpetuated among their own.

Whited sepulchers indeed.

So here is a little supposal:

Think of a presidential candidate that you do not support.  Now put the candidate’s name into the appropriate places in the following passage:

And it came to pass that I was constrained by the Spirit that I should support [a specific candidate] for President; but I said in my heart: Never at any time have I supported a [candidate of that ideology/party/record]. And I shrunk and would that I might not support [her/him].

And the Spirit said unto me again: Behold it is the Lord’s desire that [that candidate] be President of the United States…

We spend a lot of time debating and defending our political beliefs, and comparing political candidates to our ideals. But what if, regardless of political party, or ideology, or record, or aptitude, or personality, or anything else we might use to judge our candidates, the Lord for His own reasons wants you to support a candidate different than the one you would choose?

It seems likely that most of the time He will leave it up to our best judgement. But we should also be open to the possibility that He will prompt us contrary to our reasoning. We should make sure that we consult with the Lord in prayer about who we should support in our political decisions and not rely solely on our own understanding and political philosophies.

So, continuing with the supposal:

Once the Lord has communicated his desire, how do you go about supporting the candidate? You can’t say that you honestly agree with the candidate’s positions.

You could say that he is the best person for the job, but since you don’t know the reason why the Lord wants him in office, you don’t know that for sure. Maybe she is not the best person, but the Lord wants her in office for some other reason.  All you know is that for some unknown reason, God has told you to support the election of this person.

You do not have the authority or stewardship to tell others that they should vote for the candidate because you have received a revelation that the Lord wants that candidate to be president.

And you’ve spent the last few years establishing your bonafides in a political position contrary to that of the candidate.  Now you will look like a flip-flopper, or even worse, incoherent.

So what do you do?

Before 1972, the auxiliary organizations of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including the Relief Society, the Primary, Sunday School, and the Young Men and Young Women Organizations were largely directed at the stake or ward level, and the curriculum could vary from ward to ward.  A Correlation Committee had existed since 1908, but the First Presidency of the Church under the direction of President Harold B. Lee placed all organizations, curricula, and periodicals under the direction of the priesthood and established departments to  standardize and correlate the programs of the church.

As recently as the April 2010 General Conference, President Boyd K. Packer of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles referred to this change in his talk “The Power of the Priesthood“, asserting that it is an inspired program, and quoting President Monson, who was an Apostle at the time:

Years ago we began correlation under the direction of President Harold B. Lee. At that time President Thomas S. Monson said: “Today, we are encamped against the greatest array of sin, vice, and evil ever assembled before our eyes. … The battle plan whereby we fight to save the souls of men is not our own. It [came through] the inspiration and revelation of the Lord.”

During those years of correlation, the whole operating face of the Church was changed. The entire curriculum was restructured. The objectives and relationships of the organizations one to another were redefined. The key word during those years of correlation and restructuring was priesthood.

For more information on Correlation, see these entries in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism: Correlation of the Church Administration, Curriculum .

With that background, I want to draw your attention to an interesting article posted recently on the On the Square Blog of the religious periodical First Things:

A New Translation and an Old Fight

The author, professor Geoffrey M. Vaughan, talks about a practice common among Catholics which he calls “Church Shopping” in which church members shop around for a parish which matches not only their aesthetic tastes, but their ideological views. He refers to parishes where the language and order of mass has been altered to conform to liberal cultural attitudes, such as omitting gender-specific language.

In contrast, the LDS Church’s approach of not letting members “ward shop” and instead assigning congregations by geographic location prevents, for the most part, the aggregation of members with non-mainstream views into like-minded wards. So while the Catholic Church has whole parishes where they omit gender-specific references to God, or introduce their own variations on Mass, such modifications in any LDS ward would be considered a clear case of apostasy.

However, according to the article, the Catholic Church, under Pope Benedict XVI is about to impose its own form of “Correlation”.

The Vatican has produced a new English translation of Mass and they want all parishes to discontinue their current presentation and use the new official translation and implementation instead. The new translation officially goes into effect on November 27th, the First Sunday of Advent.

This will be a test of the hierarchical priesthood authority construct of Catholicism on the parish level. The liberal parishes that have assiduously removed gender-specific language from their presentation of mass, or made other changes, will have to choose whether to submit to or flout the authority of Rome. Also at play is the fact that the members in general have not been well prepared for the impending change. Many are unaware that it is coming. So if the selection of their particular parish when “church shopping” was dependent on certain variations in the liturgy, they will be surprised if their parish submits to the new official liturgy.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out in the Catholic Church.

Some members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints like to carp and murmur about Correlation, but it really does seem to be a very effective way, along with geographically assigned wards, to prevent the kind of fragmentation and apostasy that could arise otherwise.  Of course, that is probably why some of them hate it so much. As President Monson testified, and was reaffirmed last year by President Packer, Correlation came through inspiration and revelation from the Lord and was implemented by those holding the Priesthood Keys for the direction of His church.  It protects the church from sin, vice, and apostasy.

Though I am not a prolific poet, the poetry I write is usually infused with gospel concepts and imagery. But I had never thought of poetry so directly inspired by scriptural narratives before.

As is usual for me, the time between when the idea for a poem occurs to me and when I actually write it is substantial. It has been well over a year, and I am now approaching the one year anniversary of my trip to Israel for Sukkot, the Feast of the Tabernacles.

This last Sunday, I sat down and wrote a draft of the first poem, and then honed it during the next day and a half. Hope you enjoy it.

____________________________

By the Hand of Uriah
( 2 Samuel 11 : 14 – 15 )

Just open it! one roared a goading taunt,
and then the rest in chorus joined the dare.
We face the foe alone, the king doth not,
so open up the letter that you bear.

For not a moment tempted was his eye.
Oh faithless fools! he shouted as he stood.
Though least among his mighty men am I,
with Israel’s king I stand; his word is good.

My honor tried by query of the king,
though sore I yearned to know my wife once more,
while cov’nant’s ark in tent doth dwell, such thing
I would not do and slept outside the door.

To my hand commends the king what he did write.
In vain his trust is not, as God’s my light!

____________________________

Read more of my original poetry.

I have repeatedly found that the best scholarship and writing concerning the Constitution comes from the good folks at the Claremont Institute.

Thomas G. West and Douglas A. Jeffrey, both senior fellows at the Claremont Institute, have published a booklet entitled “The Rise and Fall of Constitutional Government in America”, which I highly recommend to anyone who wants to better understand the Constitution and the dangers presented by our modern abandonment of its principles.

It is available as a free PDF document here:

The Rise and Fall of Constitutional Government in America: A Guide to Understanding the Principles of the American Founding (PDF)

“No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people, but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles”

- Virginia Bill of Rights, June 12, 1776

The Constitution does not contain its own explanation. It says how the government should function, but it does not explain why it should function that way. To understand the Constitution we have to look at the principles invoked in the Declaration of Independence and the other writings of the founders.

West and Jeffrey manage to give an excellent explanation in just over 50 pages that is easily accessible to most adults and teens, and a great resource for teachers and parents looking for a guide to teaching children about our Constitutional Republic.

Read it today and share it with your friends and family!

The new LDS manual for Mormon Women is now available in PDF format.

The official website for the book is:

http://lds.org/relief-society/daughters-in-my-kingdom

The book is unique among the church’s modern manuals in that it is the work of a single author, Sister Susan Tanner, and not written by a committee.

Even though it’s been a while, he recently rediscovered this video he shot of a couple of Mormon missionaries from West Africa singing the LDS missionary anthem, “Called to Serve” and he just put it up on YouTube.

With all of the potential pop-cultural misperceptions of Mormon missionaries resulting from the “Book of Mormon” Musical, I thought it would be useful to share a taste of real LDS missionaries in Africa.  Enjoy!

A week ago I took my kids over to BYU campus for a short while to kill some time while my wife was at the doctor. Even though we have lived in Utah Country for as long as we’ve been married, we rarely make it over to BYU campus anymore.  Our kids know some parts of campus better than others.

Last week I took them to the Joseph Smith Building. We have a special connection to the Joseph Smith Building, and I wanted my kids to experience it.

The construction of the Joseph Smith Building was completed in 1991. At that time, my family lived across the street from brother Franz Johansen, who had been a BYU professor of fine art. He was a wonderful neighbor, and a very talented artist.

Many members of the church have seen Brother Johansen’s work without knowing his name.  He created the  large relief sculpture on the outside of the Church History Museum on West Temple in Salt Lake City. The doors of the Seattle and Washington D.C. Temples are his work. His sculptures have been seen in the Museum of Art Garden at BYU.  And he created the bas relief stone panels for the Harold B. Lee Library.

I remember one time when the bishopric of our ward had him give a presentation to all of the young men about art. We all went down to campus where he showed us a slide show of all kinds of artwork, and discussed why artists study anatomy. But that’s a different story.

Brother Johansen shared his talent with our family. I remember visiting the studio in his home on various occasions where he would tell us about what he was working on. Sometimes he would invite members of my family to model for him.

Which brings us back to the Joseph Smith Building. On the north-facing exterior of the Joseph Smith Building there is another of Brother Johansen’s works. And immortalized in that relief sculpture is my sister, who modeled for Brother Johansen when he was creating it.

We stopped outside of the Joseph Smith Building last week. “Why are we here?!” whined my second daughter, who was tired of walking in the hot August sun. “I want to show you something,” I explained. “Come look at this.”

I pointed to the relief artwork on the building. “That’s your aunt Becca,” I told them. We talked about Brother Johansen and how my sister had been the model. I snapped the picture included above, and we headed back to the car.

Innumerable people pass by the Joseph Smith Building. Most hardly notice. But I always stop to look.  It looks like my sister, preserved in carbonite like Han Solo from Star Wars, and hung on the wall.

You can read more about Brother Franz Johansen and look at a few of his works of art at the website of the Springville Art Museum.

In this post, however, I want to introduce a new approach to thinking about personal apostasy by drawing what I think are compelling comparisons between apostasy and conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theories appeal to some very fundamental aspects of human nature and can wield a great deal of influence over people. I believe that a closer look at the appeal and mechanics of conspiracy theories can help illuminate some important aspects of personal apostasy from the church.

My hope is that by exposing these aspects of apostasy I can help not only those members of the church who are dealing with family or friends who have apostatized, but also give pause to those who find themselves being drawn down the path of apostasy, and raise doubts among those who are already a far distance down that path.

Ultimately this is a warning about the limits of reason and logic and the potential dangers of the rational mind.

The concept of conspiracy is deeply ingrained into our entertainment, our political discourse, and even our religion. Conspiracy theories exist among the atheistic as well as religious. They propagate among liberals as well as conservatives, and among the educated as well as the ignorant.

The Logic of Insanity

To understand conspiracy theories better, and by extension apostasy, we must first look at insanity. G.K. Chesterton’s keen observations concerning madness provide an excellent foundation upon which I hope to build. In his book Orthodoxy, Chesterton makes the following observations which, with a plea for patience from the reader, I quote at length:

“Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

“The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ’s.”

“Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable MARK of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.”
…
“Such is the madman of experience; he is commonly a reasoner, frequently a successful reasoner.”

Now, while my own experience generally validates Chesterton’s insight, I would add that insanity is not an all-consuming binary state; a person is often neither completely mad nor completely sane. Madness comes in degrees and compartments, and an otherwise sane person can succumb to this kind of insane thinking in only some aspects of his or her life, while retaining a great deal of apparent sanity in other respects. All of us experience degrees of insane thinking in one or more aspect of our lives. It’s part of being human.

Aspects of Conspiracy Theories

Let me mention briefly that there are real conspiracies. I have seen the acts of conspiring men and women myself. Both the Book of Mormon and modern prophets have affirmed the reality of secret combinations.

That said, we can recognize Chesterton’s description of insanity in the logic of conspiracy theories. There is the same “logical completeness,” the same “unanswerable” reasoning, the same “horrible clarity of detail”, the same “connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze.”

Those who subscribe to conspiracy theories are not fools. On the contrary they are commonly very intelligent, logical, “successful reasoners.” As Chesterton would say, it’s not that their theories don’t make logical sense, it’s that the conspiracy theory “explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.” I call this aspect of conspiracy theories “logical completeness”.

Human reason is very good at finding logical patterns and connecting mathematical dots. Conspiracy theories have power because they provide a sense of logical completeness and rational satisfaction; a sense of order from chaos. Those who subscribe to the conspiracy theory often take this logical completeness and the fact that their logic is at least unanswerable as evidence of the truthfulness of the theory. On the contrary, it could just as easily be the hallmark of insanity.

The second aspect of conspiracy theories that gives them power over us is what I call “gossip appeal”. Gossip carries a great deal of explanatory power and provides a narrative framework in which the actions of another can be interpreted. And because human nature often finds pleasure in discovering the dirty secrets, misdeeds, or misfortunes of others (even when the dirt is perceived more than real) gossip spreads quickly. And because gossip appears to agree with the observable facts, and often exhibits a great deal of logical completeness itself, it is very damaging and difficult to correct; the messy unintentionality of reality is often less logically satisfying than the scuttlebutt.

Conspiracy theories appeal to the same base human pleasure in sordid news as gossip does. The adherent feels compelled by the logical, explanatory power of the theory and the gossip-like discovery of the dirty secret.

Which brings us to the third aspect of conspiracy theories that give them power, which I call “perceived superiority”. Adopting a conspiracy theory has the effect of placing the believer in what they perceive to be a small group of intellectually superior people who, unlike the “sheeple” who believe the official story, have figured out “what is really going on.” It’s like qualifying for an elite club. This perception is reinforced by a like-minded community as well as the logical completeness of the theory and the gossip appeal previously discussed. It is natural for everyone to believe that they are more astute and more informed than their peers, and conspiracy theories confirm that natural bias.

These three aspects– logical completeness, gossip appeal, and perceived superiority — contribute to the power of conspiracy theories over the human mind.

The Tragedy of Bobby Fischer

I’m sure that you have already noticed at least a few similarities to apostasy. But before fleshing them out, I want to provide a couple of more concrete examples and experiences.

First, I would like to look at the sad example of Bobby Fischer.

Some of you probably became aware of chess prodigy Bobby Fischer through the 1993 film, Searching for Bobby Fischer. Fischer, who passed away in 2008, was considered one of the greatest chess players of all time. He didn’t just play chess, he had such a huge influence that he permanently changed the way other people play chess.

His genius and ability for logical thought are unquestionable. And yet, he is a perfect example of the kind of logical insanity that Chesterton described. Fischer descended into paranoia and embraced increasingly strident conspiracy theories. In last decade of his life, he was so steeped in anti-Jewish and anti-United States conspiracy theories that he denied the Jewish Holocaust, admired Hitler, actually wrote Osama Bin Laden a letter of solidarity, and regularly denounced both the Jewish people and the United States in the most vile, crude terms.

Now, Fischer’s paranoia was not completely baseless. He ended up a fugitive from the U.S. government over tax evasion and for playing a 1992 competition chess game in Yugoslavia in defiance to an embargo by executive order of President George H .W. Bush. He felt personally wronged by the U.S. and, to avoid an arrest warrant, never returned to the country.

It is a distressing and tragic story, but in order to avoid distracting from my primary theme I won’t pursue the details any more here. If you are interested, there is a lot of good information on the Wikipedia entry, as well as an excellent article in The Atlantic Monthly from December 2002.

Rather than allow him to see through the conspiracy theories, Bobby Fischer’s amazingly analytical, logical mind conspired against him to build an elaborate map of logical connections that reinforced his paranoia. When he passed away, Fischer, mostly devoid of humor, and charity, and dignity, had lost everything BUT his reason, just as Chesterton had described almost exactly 100 years beforehand.

My First Hand Experience with Conspiracy Theory

The tragedy of Bobby Fischer is an extreme example. Let me share a couple of my own experiences with the lure of conspiracy theories, paranoia, and the limits of reason.

It’s hard to explain my own experience with conspiracy theories without getting mired in the details of the conspiracy theory itself and also without offending anyone who might subscribe to it.

Many years ago, as I became more interested in politics, I was introduced to what is called the Straussian conspiracy theory. Leo Strauss was a very influential political philosopher. His students have been quite influential in conservative political thought, though their influence is often not widely noticed (which contributes to the conspiracy idea). Strauss wrote a book called Persecution and the Art of Writing in which he argued that historically philosophers have hidden their true beliefs because of fear of persecution, and that hidden behind the seemingly obvious meaning of their writing is an “esoteric text” that communicates their true thoughts to those willing to really study it. The conspiracy theory alleges that Strauss himself wrote in the same fashion and that all of his contributions to conservative thought are really a Machiavellian “noble lie” which he believed was necessary for the good of society and to maintain the power of a secret elite to which he belonged, and that his students have followed this same esoteric objective.

At first I found this theory preposterous, and argued with its advocates extensively. But just to make sure, I eventually bought a copy of Persecution and the Art of Writing and began to read it.

I still remember how it felt as the conspiracy theory took ahold of me while I read. The conspiracy was true! It carried all the exhilaration of making a terrible discovery. It all made sense! All the logical puzzle pieces fit! It took my breath away.  It was mind blowing! It was an incredibly powerful feeling, terrifying and yet empowering at the same time. I was one of only a few who had found out what was going on. I paced the room as my mind churned through the logical circle over and over again. I couldn’t find any way out of the maze of connected ideas.

Fortunately for me, I was saved by my Mormon faith. Despite the seemingly inescapable logic, as a Mormon I had been taught to test the spirits; to verify through personal revelation and not just through reason, and that I could know the truth of all things through the power of the Holy Spirit. So I prayed and asked my Heavenly Father if what I had discovered was true. And the Holy Spirit answered me and freed my mind from the logical trap, which had indeed seemed to possess my mind like an evil spirit. It did so not by refuting the logic, but by enlarging my understanding and vision and exposing the humor in the rapture to which I had momentarily been subject.

My Experience with the Lure of Apostasy

A couple of years later, I had another experience. I am familiar with many of the anti-Mormon attacks on Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, but one day I came across a post in an Internet forum where the author explained that he finally realized that the Book of Mormon was a sham when he saw irrefutable proof that Joseph Smith had made it up. He gave a link to the proof. So I clicked through to it, confident that it would be weak and easily refutable. It was an argument that I had never seen before and I will readily admit that it appeared very, very damning. As I read it a feeling gripped me that was amazingly powerful: The church was false! Joseph Smith made it all up! I had stumbled upon this terrifying, mind-blowing secret! Here was the proof and all the logical puzzle pieces fit! And I was one of only a few who had found it out. It was terrifying and intoxicating.

And it was at that moment that I recognized where I had felt those feelings and followed those thought patterns before: it was exactly the same as my experience with the Straussian conspiracy theory. The seductive logical completeness, the gossip appeal, and the lure of the perceived superiority over the blind followers who still believed in the official story were all there. And it was the recognition of that similarity, and a remembrance of Chesterton’s words concerning insanity, that pulled me out of it.

Once I was free of the spell, it was only a matter of minutes before the error of the argument became obvious to me. Had I succumbed to that spirit of apostasy that had attempted to possess my mind, I could easily see how I could have fallen into a self-reinforcing mental trap that could have been very difficult to escape, and would have made it increasingly unlikely that I would have recognized the error.

Confronting the Limitations of My Mind

More recently, these experiences, along with the help of the Holy Spirit, have help me escape additional logical traps that were damaging to my family relationships. Without going into detail, these logical maps held such sway over my mind that I could not see any way in which they could not be true. And yet, the map maze of interconnected proofs, while seemingly irrefutable, was completely false. And one day, not long ago, that logical map was shattered, not by logical refutation, but through an epiphany granted by the Holy Spirit. And that spiritual gift changed everything.

Apostasy as Conspiracy Theory

So, having established this foundation I return to what is my primary point: Apostasy is dangerously similar to being seduced by a conspiracy theory.

There are a lot of reasons why people leave the church. Some leave because they do not want to, or have been convinced that they cannot, abide by the church’s strict code of conduct. Others leave because of perceived interpersonal grievances or solidarity with others who feel wronged. But I am talking about those who apostatize for intellectual reasons. They feel that what they know or have experienced compels them to abandon their belief.

Many of those who apostatize from the church for this reason have established their own genre of writing or oral presentation which I call Apostasy Literature. The purpose of apostasy literature is to help friends, family, and others who still believe, understand why the individual no longer believes; to demonstrate that their apostasy is reasonable and logical and not in pursuit of sinful lusts or to escape responsibilities. And they are often disappointed when their well-crafted narratives and essays fail to convince others of what is so obvious to them.

In apostasy narratives they recount the process by which they came to believe that the church is not true and attempt to bring the reader along on the author’s journey of discovery. Apostasy essays are more of a laundry list of “did you know” bullet points of what the author believes are facts that disprove the truth of the church, followed sometimes by a logical explanation.

Apostasy literature often includes a brief recounting of past callings and active participation in the church which the writer believes will establish his or her authenticity as a previously active, devout, believing member: they have served as a relief society president, a bishop, stake president, a missionary, a seminary teacher; they had 100% home or visiting teaching; married in the temple; &c. This list of callings and achievements is a way of establishing a kind of credentials that they think should lend credibility to their journey.

Apostasy literature also often includes genuine sorrow at having lost their belief, and expressions of the wish that they could reclaim that belief, but they don’t see any alternative considering what they have uncovered. It is an expression of a very sincerely felt loss of innocence. They feel forced out of Eden for having partaken of the fruit of knowledge.

Conspiracy theorists produce a very similar kind of literature and with a very similar objective. The purpose of conspiracy theory literature is to help others understand why the conspiracy theorists view is reasonable and logical instead of crazy. The conspiracy theorist is also often disappointed that his or her well-crafted arguments fail to convince others when it seems so obvious. Conspiracy theory literature also employs credential citation and lamentation of a loss of innocence.

Both groups feel that they have stumbled upon a terrible secret and feel the need to raise a warning to others. The gossip appeal affords even greater power to the apostate views over their minds.

When confronted with the fact that others do not find their arguments convincing, both conspiracy theorists and apostates question the intelligence of those who continue to accept the official story. They are so enthralled to the logical completeness of their view that they can hardly comprehend how someone else could reject it without rejecting reason itself.

In Internet forums of the like-minded, conspiracy theorists and apostates employ strikingly similar language to refer to those who are not convinced by their arguments or who aren’t astute enough to see through the supposed smoke screen on their own: sheep, sheeple, robots, dupes, rubes, and other expressions that imply intellectual inferiority or mindless submission. This perceived superiority lends power to the apostate views over their minds as well.

I have little hope of refuting the logic of apostasy through reasoned argument. Apostates, like conspiracy theorists, are not fools. They are often exceptional thinkers. Like the conspiracy theorist, the logical completeness of their map of connected data points, the gossip appeal of having discovered a terrible secret, and the perceived superiority of their views make it very difficult to convince the apostate of their errors. It is likely that they will mistake the fact that their arguments are not easily answerable as proof that they are true.

I hope to introduce a seed of doubt into the minds of those plagued by apostate thoughts and those who wish they could still believe, but feel that they are forced to stop believing by what they have learned. Ask yourself:

“So what if my logic is unanswerable and logically complete? So is the logic of a madman. So what if I can recite a litany of historical facts and connect them together in a sordid logical map? So can a Truther, a Birther, and a Bircher. Reason can betray me as much as emotion. How do I know that it has not?”

Not to be misconstrued, I am not advocating that reason be abandoned. But reason is limited by the frailties of the mind. A madman is as convinced of the soundness his logic as you are of your own. Reason untempered and unchecked by humor, charity, or common sense can be a liability as much as it can be an asset.

To those who are friends or family of someone seduced by apostate ideas, I hope to help you see that you will not have much success in trying to reason them out of their views, just as you are not likely to succeed in convincing a conspiracy theorist to abandon their conspiracy through logical argument.

If Thy Head Offend Thee…

From my own experiences, I believe that reason, emotion, and spirit are not as easily compartmentalized as we often believe. The logic of conspiracy and apostasy are not divorce-able from the frailty of the mind or of humanity. The temptations of gossip appeal, of uncovering a deception, of perceived superiority, and the preference for logical completeness over the unexplained or unknown lend emotional power to reason. Ideas can possess your mind like an evil spirit.

This is one of the dangers of “Mormon Intellectualism.” An over-emphasis on reason can leave people open to a combination of “logical completeness and spiritual contraction.” A blindness to the spiritual and emotional dimensions of ideas can leave people open to spiritual deception. This is also why reading faithless and anti-Mormon literature can be dangerous. It can subtly subject the reader to the spirit and emotions that accompany it, which can amplify the feeling of and appearance of logical compulsion. The appeal of logical completeness is emotional.

Chesterton explicitly compared the logic of insanity to the kind of thinking in academia in which he observed the same “combination of an expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted common sense.”

Take for instance modern Biblical studies or Mormon Studies. Scholars construct hypothetical explanatory narratives based on observable facts and historical records, and then confusing logical completeness with truth, talk about them as if they were proven. And the next thing you know they are telling you the “real” motivations of the author of the Gospel of Mark or that Joseph Smith was a philanderer with as much confidence as if it were unassailable fact. They presume to read the minds and hearts of men and women long dead when they cannot so much as read the mind or heart of the living person standing next to them.

Reality is messy. People do unexpected and illogical things. Beware the theory that explains too much, connects every dot, or attributes motivations to every action. Sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar.

Of course, I recognize that many of these same criticisms and comparisons to conspiracy thinking can be turned around and pointed back at the believer. Fair enough. As I said earlier, all of us experience degrees of insane thinking. And just because ideas exhibit many of the qualities of a conspiracy theory does not automatically mean that they are false. My comparison of apostasy to conspiracy theory is intended less as an weapon than as a tool for self-checking introspection and a source of empathy toward those stuck in the kind of logical ruts to which we are all susceptible.

My point is that reason and logic are not a trump card. Those who do not find apostate logic as convincing as its preachers are not necessarily mindless followers, sheeple, or the “morg.” Spiritual and emotional dimensions to reason are as much a part of the apostate’s argument as the believer’s.

Let me end with this passage from Chesterton:

“A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or faith. The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle… Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher; it is casting out a devil….

“If thy HEAD offend thee, cut it off; for it is better, not merely to enter the Kingdom of Heaven as a child, but to enter it as an imbecile, rather than with your whole intellect to be cast into hell…”