Truth and truth (part 1?)

So, in a relatively older article about my not believing the prophets are infallible (geez, that’s not a shocker: Mormons don’t believe in prophetic infallibility ANYWAY), I have been having a great discussion with Mormon Heretic (I think he’s more Mormon than Heretic, but that’s ok with me!) regarding the potential culpability of the church for some of its past actions. MH has also written on his blog a great historical analysis of the relationship between Sidney Rigdon, the church, and Joseph Smith, which I admittedly haven’t gotten through all of the articles in the series (I actually have gotten a life and now it is filled with interviews and pre-interview dinners each night of the week as well as preparationi for fencing club nationals). However, I did read the final article in the series, because it related to the discussion we were having and the discussion I’ll try to have now.

Really, I think this is good thing to discuss, because it was a major part of my process of analyzing my place in the church. While I certainly appreciate John Dehlin and others who write about how members can stay in the church with alternative beliefs, for me, my calculation of advantages and disadvantages didn’t necessarily lead me to ask a question like, “If I can’t accept the church as True, can I accept it as good? If yes, stay, if no, leave.” In some way, I see the church as some entity that proposes to provide Truth…and if it doesn’t provide Truth (but maybe only smaller “truths” [small ts]), then it’s not special. It’s not special in the same way that most human organizations are.

I realized that this was only a problem for me if I presumed that there should be some kind of Truth. And I think this might be a hangup of many people who find out unfortunate things about the church. It might seem that if you find out some prophet was in some scandal or another prophet was racist that this shatters this “implied” idea of “infallibility” that you might have given them. Even though Prophets aren’t infallible, according to official doctrine. The Church, so to speak, works through imperfect men.

So, I guess the idea behind the particular interpretation was to assume that the Church is True, but the people are not. So sometimes, the people can wreck havoc, but the Church (or at the very least, the Gospel), should always withstand. And in my article before, I talked about how this seemed like a silly standard.

So in all this confusion, it seems unreliable to take a broad stance that there is this true church and that we have the tools to discern its truth, especially when we then have to make all of these exceptions for fallible, imperfect leaders.

It seems a lot like saying, “Socialism is a perfect system, but it has never been implemented correctly.” (In fact, that’s what people say, don’t they? The gospel is a perfect system and the church is true, but it’s people, man, who suss it all up.)

And this is kinda where I want to begin. I’ve been trying to elaborate in the comments of my Infallibility post, but I don’t think I truly was getting too far, and in any case, I think it would be better to make a new post for it.

Truth, in my mind, is a great and large and ambitious proposition. Things that are True with a big T are unshakeable, metaphysical, pervading. They are the Way Things Are and the Way Things Will Be. We might misinterpret and run away from Truth, but Truth cannot be destroyed.

So when someone has faith in the gospel, I think they have faith that this is True. They have faith that Mercy and Justice, the Atonement, etc., are Laws of the universe that actually exist in the same way material laws exist. So, we can fight it, but it’ll still be that way.

I think that if one accepts this kind of Truth, then testing this worldview has some stringent tests. And Mormonism provides some of that kind of context. For example, in Mormonism, the Gospel is unshakeable. Even after an Apostasy, there were still tools (that are theoretically universally available to whoever will ask) to receive the revelation to get the truth Gospel. This also powers the idea that the Gospel will be true regardless of people who botch things up.

In my mind, if this were so, then we should expect to see and experience more. We should expect to see that those in the Gospel have this massive and overpowering advantage over those who don’t (kinda like those who work with the laws of the universe have a massive and overpowering advantage over those who try to work against them). We shouldn’t see all kinds of confounding variables and confounding ideas, and all sorts of legitimate areas for doubt (and we shouldn’t have to ‘buy’ confusing explanations for all of these confounding variables…at best, we should recognize that we do not really have the full Truth). So, while the church allows for a pluralism of thought (there may be other groups that have part of the truth), in the end, because of certain mutual exclusivity issues, there can only be One True Thing. And it seems like, we don’t really have it yet.

However, this all is only problematic with Truth, the big overarcing thing.

I also think…that we have something delineated as truth. Small t truth is something that is somewhat mutable and can be resisted, but it still forms a part of our experience. It’s because there is a lot of constructed meaning in the world (ooh, constructivism was something in a recent poll I saw). For example, the English language is a seemingly pervasive part of everyone who reads this blog’s experience, but it is not Truth (oh man, with all the abuses it does to its own grammar, no wonder). We need not expect English to be perfect, so when it isn’t, there isn’t any problem. We don’t have a crisis of faith when something that is merely true happens to be worse than we expected, because we didn’t have any over-human expectations.

When we deal with companies, and we deal with pragmatics, then we start getting into small t true. We might say that what is “effective” is “good,” and then we will see that effective organizations do better in general. But this isn’t a Truth of the universe…this is just where society is at and how we respond to these constructed ideas.

Small t truth doesn’t have such an onus on it. And that’s kinda what I was getting at in my Infallibility post. Even though we might like Google very much, we don’t pretend that it is Truth or that it has Truth. And yet, when people choose religions, they do think that they have found something greater than mere truth…they think they have found Truth.

However, because Google doesn’t have this onus on it, it also doesn’t reap fantastic spoils. No one (or at least, hopefully no one) dedicates their lives to Google. They might stick around as long as it is “good” and “effective” and “desirable,” but Google isn’t the benchmark. On the other hand, many people will see the church as precisely that benchmark…and even when they are unhappy or living unwell, they might assume that it is a problem with them and not, say, the organization. Or not, say, the model. Because if we accept the model as True, it is True like gravity and we can’t fight that. We can at best work with it and create airplanes.

…wow, I really hate writing long posts, so I’ll split this up into a few posts and put this as a tentative (part 1).