Every prophet must be limited by their understanding, their language, and their perception of all things around them. To accept less than this seems to be unreasonable. Every prophet has said and done stupid things (as have all of us who share the human condition), but that does not make those insights that stand the test of time any less valid to me.

The link above is in the first paragraph. I don’t know why the color didn’t change back to black from orange afterward.

The link is to a post on my blog entitled You’ve Read this Post Before.

We’re building our theologies of the “afterlife” on a faulty understanding of the nature of time itself, because even top theoretical physicists accept that no one yet understands the nature of time.

Intelligence was not created because “creation” implies a time when something “was not” and then a time when the something “was”. It is a TEMPORAL concept. But there is no beginning to time, hence no act of creation. Rather, creation is an ongoing process. (Even the big bang tends to be seen now in most theories as a point within a larger physical structure — things evolve through the bang or Bangs are multiple occurrences.)

The best (admittedly primitive) theories we have of consciousness suggest it is a natural outgrowth of complex physical states. That suggests routes by which spirits (as collective complexes of interactive minds) can emerge into the universe earlier in history than our individual minds do, because copies and variants of us have existed at many locations in space and will recur again.

Preexistence has nothing to do with “pre” and afterlife has nothing to do with “after”.

The “fullnes” is not only stranger than be suppose, but stranger than we CAN suppose, to paraphrase Haldane.

Fullness meant truth rather than holiness.

Protestant perfectionists wanted moral sanctification, Joseph wanted a perfection of knowledge.

Joseph wrote that the Glory of God is intelligence or in other words light and truth.

Holiness was not an end in itself but the avenue to intelligence.

Joseph used intelligence to describe the glory of God. The capacity for seeing and comprehending supernaturally with the spiritual mind was the zenith of human experience.

After 90:5a, Bushman wrote : The exact meaning of this passage is elusive and interpretations differ. What does it mean that intelligence or the light of truth was not created or made? Is intelligence an independent principle like a law of nature, or does intelligence refer to individual human intelligence?

Some protestants said human spirit was created along with the rest of the universe, but the revelation suggests that spirits existed before the earth.

Bushman is an eminent Mormon scholar. But it seems that he, too, is unsure of what 90:5a means.

Does someone else want to tell me what it means. Some revelation!

I have often suspected Joseph saw things he did not have any conceptual framework to understand, and got himself (and his followers) into trouble by trying to connect the dots anyway and produced a picture that incorporated many false and destructive elements in it.

21st Century science has some possibilities open to us in understanding the relationship between the body, the mind, and the spirit that did not exist in the 19th. Some are just plain strange, but reality itself is just plain strange, as I discuss here. and in the comment thread attached to it.

As a historian, I find that knowing more about Joseph Smith’s context makes me far less judgmental of him, and far more sympathetic. For me, he’s not the bronze statue Joseph as he’s portrayed at LDS historic sites, but he is not the dark charlatan of cheap turn-of-the-twentieth century anti-Mormon literature. He is truly a religious genius by any accounting, IMO.

Religions are a lot like relationships, and when people feel burned in their experience, like a broken relationship, they often tear down the person who they felt hurt them. In one of religious studies scholar Robert Orsi’s books (“Between Heaven and Earth”), he relates how his cousin’s wife died in child birth. His cousin went straight home and smashed a statue of a saint in rage. The man had prayed to the saint, and his prayers had failed. Consequently, the cousin took his revenge on the statue, as if it were a person. What a powerful illustration of the volatility of relationships in religion! They can be full of love, hate, hope, and abuse–the best and worst of human relationships.

This is all to say that I am sympathetic to pain and hurt that some present and former members of our church have had with Joseph Smith. I understand that pain. I’ve experienced that myself. However, I want to lift up the idea that our complicated (perhaps for some estranged) relationship with Joseph Smith may blind us to how he has positively shaped our denomination. In Mouw’s terms, we verge on idolatry by not treating him fairly. Just something to consider for the new year.