The Reasonableness of Christianity Blog

TL;DR: Synopsis and takeaways from an email conversation with the Christian apologists who created a YouTube video spreading salacious and disturbing misinformation about my religious beliefs. This is my 4th and final post on what I have called "unhinged Category 2 rhetoric" against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This rhetoric consists of absurd and salacious false ("unhinged") claims about The Church and its members intended for a mainstream Christian audience (See Part 1 ). The goal seems to be to inculcate in mainstream Christians an instinctual aversion to The Church, in order to counter the missionary efforts of The Church which are seen as a problem for mainstream Christianity. Unfortunately, these attacks lead not only to an instinctual aversion to the The Church, but also to its human members. The result can be (and has been for my family) deeply un-Christian behavior toward us (see Part 3 for the story) from mainstream Christians steeped ...

  TL;DR - Rather than answering the question “Why did God create Evil?”, Latter Day Saints need to answer the question “Does God have power to vanquish Evil?”. Scholar James McLachlan argues that the solution for the Latter Day Saint is that Evil, and all that associate with it, will shrivel away and dissipate in face of the loving goodness of the Kingdom of God which will eventually fill the earth. McLachlan places emphasis on the importance of community within LDS theology, and how obedience to eternal principles will lead people to join together. This raises a concern to me that too much emphasis is placed on human agency and individual power, which diminishes God’s role in the world which He has created. "St. Michael Vanquishing Satan" by Raphael Why am I starting this off with an epic picture of St. Michel spearing Satan? You'll have to wait and see! I want to base this post off of some comments made in response to my last post. Thank you to Stephen Lyndsay for these...

TL;DR - Latter Day Saints need to answer different questions posed by the Problem of Evil due to their belief about divine omnipotence and creation.  Hi all - just a few thoughts I’ve been having during a busy term of school! I recently made the decision to pursue studying a Latter Day Saint Theodicy as my Religious Studies capstone at Lawrence, and I received a grant to do some studies out at the Maxwell Institute of Religious Scholarship in Utah at the close of this term. In preparation, I’ve been considering how Latter Day Saints think about the problem of evil differently, and in discussing this with my capstone advisor, the issue of omnipotence seems to come to the forefront; specifically, the nature of omnipotence as we attribute it to our God.  Omnipotence is a complicated issue for a thousand reasons. Could God create a rock so large that he couldn’t move? Can God create nonsense objects, such as a circular cube? Are there states of affairs that an omnipotent being can...

This the third post in a series about what I am calling Category 2 rhetoric against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - rhetoric directed toward Christians who are not members of the The Church of Jesus Christ, to discourage them from wanting to learn more about The Church. These posts were inspired by a video I came across called "How to Talk to a Mormon," introduced in the first post . The second post was the full text of an email conversation with Tim Hull, a creator of the video. Update 11/27/21: The fourth post describes the reaction of the creators of the "How to Talk to a Mormon" video to my concerns about some of the claims in the video. Category 1 rhetoric is attacks directed toward members of The Church in an attempt to shake their faith. Category 2 rhetoric is an example of what is called  poisoning the well , prophylactically discrediting and ridiculing The Church and its members in the eyes of other Christians. Poisoning the well is some...