Quote:
|
The very fact that Sunstone exists, and I think it is a wonderful thing--these Sunstone affairs--the very fact that it exists shows the weakness in the church, that people can't go to church and say what they think. They have to get out somewhere else to say what they think. For a long time there were these so-called church history groups meeting. And I guess there still are. They were all over the church because people wanted to go somewhere where they could say what they thought and communicate with others honestly. I am going to have to tell you a little story.
|
I always have admired Sterling McMurrin; he was a fine fellow. (My signature quotes him on Utefans.) But he's asking too much of the LDS Church, any organized religion; it's against their very nature, at a cellular level. As the Grand Inquisitor told the Savior in the Dostoyevski's "The Brothers Karamozov" (Dostoyevski was a deeply religious man deeply ambivalent about the Enlightenment, though ultimately at odds with the Orthodox Church):
"There are three forces, only three, on this earth that can overcome and capture once and for all the concience of these feeble, undisciplined, creatures, so as to give them happiness. These forces are miracle, mystery, and authority. . . . We have corrected Your work and have now founded it on miracle, mystery, and authority. And men rejoice at being led like cattle again, with the terrible gift of freedom that brought them so much suffering removed from them."
Along these same lines, here's an interesting essay I recently found on the Internet by the famous 19th century British poet and philospher Matthew Arnold, regarding the contrasting qualities of and tension occurring between Hellenism (i.e., Greek philosophy) and "Hebreaism" (by his definition embracing Christianity), the two intellectual/spiritual movements that made Western Civilization (sharing the same stated objective, i.e., man's perfection, though by radically different means):
<http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/arnold/writings/4.html>
(Warning, it's a little turgid; it gets more readable with the second paragraph.) As he notes, for sixteen hundred years Hebreaism appeared triumphant, but (and this is more clear today than in Arnold's time 140 years ago) in our modern world the tables have turned.