Nauvoo Neighbor

Conversations about the Saudi gold plates are like any conversations where there are mismatches in context. To illustrate, I have created the iceberg of this particular controversy.

I enjoy Margaret Barker’s work, but I take it with quite a few grains of salt. One of the basic assumptions of her work is that the Hebrew bible was corrupted by a group of people called the “deuteronomists.” This is derived from a theory in biblical studies, articulated in the work of Martin Noth beginning in the 1940s.

Noth imagined that a single deuteronomist was responsible for producing an ideologically slanted history from the book of Deuteronomy to 2 Kings. Later scholars ran with his idea and found “deuteronomic” influence elsewhere, eventually seeing a deuteronomist conspiracy in the time of Josiah and beyond.

Like anything in biblical studies, what started as a simple discrete theory was turned into THE GRAND EXPLANATION for huge numbers of things we see in the bible. And again, it’s a core assumption in the work of Margaret Barker.

But is it true?

“How could the recently-found gold plates reflect so much of the findings of David Butler?”

The answer is, the forger probably doesn’t know the work of David Butler. But people who are attached to the work of Margaret Barker will tend to see her narratives validated in the work of the forger.

Religion is often described as a source of violent behavior, and in some cases that may be true.

But what about for Latter-day Saints?

And why might one person interpret religious teachings in a way that condones violence, while another person with the same religious teachings interprets them in the opposite way?

We explore these questions in this presentation.

Time to learn another big word: entropy.

Entropy is the second law of thermodynamics. It’s one of the great laws of the universe. Without getting too science-y, it basically means that without some kind of an influence that brings order, things tend toward chaos, randomness, decay, and disorder. The normal state of the universe is chaos, not order. By contrast, God’s influence invites order; it brings organization to things that would otherwise exist in chaos.

What happens when our empathy is high, but our knowledge is low? or in reverse, what happens when our empathy is low and knowledge is high?

Data is not the same thing as narrative information, and narrative information is not the same as knowledge. These are very important distinctions that indicate our level of knowledge. Where we map onto this chart has immense consequences for our church experiences, our gospel conversations, our ability to relate to others, and our ability to appreciate the decisions of church leadership.

In this presentation, we explore these questions and discuss some examples of issues and influencers.