What I Read This Morning:

"Mormonism is truth; and every man who embraces it feels himself at liberty to embrace every truth: consequently the shackles so superstition, bigotry, ignorance, and priestcraft, fall at once from his neck; and his eyes are opened to see the truth, and truth greatly prevails over priestcraft...
"Mormonism is truth, in other words, the doctrine of the Latter-day Saints, is truth...The first and fundamental priciple of our holy religion is that we believe that we have a right to embrace all and every item of truth without limitation or without being circumscribed or prohibited by the creeds or superstitious notions of men, or by the dominations of one another, when that truth is clearly demonstrated to our minds..."

I read this from the Joseph Smith manual (I missed the Relief Society lesson) and I was struck by a couple of things:

a) I used to know this. Like know know. I remember teaching in Armenia and being able to see the shakles that people were laboring under and I understood that a knowledge of the gospel would break them free. Would help them find purpose in their lives and structure in their families. This was a huge testimony builder for me.

b) I've been trying to teach my kids a love of learning. I hope they get it by example, but I want them to really get it. The more I learn the more I realize that everything connects eventually and that no knowledge is useless. The more you understand the world, the more you can find patterns and connections and meaning. I love the doctrine of the church emphasizes so much on learning and its role in salvation and exaltation. ("It will be a great work to learn our salvation and exaltation even beyond the grave" idea. Learning to weild to power-knowledge of Godhood? Chills. Love it. Sign me up.)

c) I wonder why this seems not to happen in practice. I had an oddly atheism-themed weekend over Thanksgiving (I blew through His Dark Materials in 36 hours [not necessarily atheistic, but I was reading it through the spin of course--have you read this? You must] then caught an article on NPR on atheism [they talked about how the saying "there are no atheist in foxholes" is really offensive to atheists"] the next day. Interesting) and one of the things that I was thinking about is how certain it is. When I start talking about religion to people who believe differently than I do, I get really insecure. There are so many things that I believe without being able to explain, and things that make sense to me but only because they're the context of a lifetime of learning/understanding. I get all defensive, and it keeps me from being able to share the really fantastic truths that I know.
And on reflection, the things I'm claiming to know seem kind of ridiculous--an all-powerful being, both loving and vengeful, who insists on exacting justice, but is willing to take his/his son's death in exchange for our sins? What? If I didn't have innumerable experiences that have convinced and reconvinced me that there's something else out there, if I didn't have a framework through which to make sense of these experiences, if I didn't just happen to flip to this lesson even though I slept through Relief Society and it was just precisely what I needed to read, how could I believe something like this?
The point being that there have been many times when my beliefs haven't been liberating, but have felt confining. They've felt like superstitions.
And it seems like culturally we're (members of the church) kind of closed-minded and bigoted at times. That is, many of the people I know don't seem like great acceptors of truth-in-every-form. Myself included of course.
So what happened? (Visions of Brigham are dancing in my head, though that's probably not fair.)

d) I've troubled some over the dearth of great LDS thinkers/writers. We have some of course, but...(maybe I'm judging unfairly)...at the dearth of LDS theology? But I think the reason why is because the tenets of the church/gospel/whatever are a jumping off point. Our job is to take what's taught us and run with it, find the paths of truth that it leads us down, and build up our salvation with God. That is collect the knowledge that will ensure our salvation through prayer and personal study...on our own. And as we learn this stuff we, individually, grow closer to God.


Anyway. Made my day. ke