The Reasonableness of Christianity Blog

  I am transferring my writing to Substack, under the title “ Reasonableness .” I’m hoping that Substack makes blogging simpler. I never put in the time to learn the blog tech and tools. Finding that the subscribe button no longer works, I am opting to shift to a simpler platform rather than try to figure out what went wrong. Also, I find myself reading other blogs on Substack pretty regularly, so this could make sense. We will see how it goes.   The down-side is that my blogging is usually done on my phone on the go, and Substack doesn’t have a mobile writing app that I’m aware of. So if I end up here again, that might be why. 

I recently started listening to Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate on audiobook, after  Arnold Kling  referenced it positively in his Substack. I had heard good things about it and Steven Pinker in the past and thought I’d give it a try. I got about 10% through, really not even out of the  background material when I had to give it up.  From what I understand the main point of the book is valuable - a defense of intrinsic human nature, and an explanation of why rationalist social engineering schemes like communism tend to fail so miserably. They try to reimagine humanity without accounting for our stubborn and intrinsic nature. From the intro, it seems like the book is a rebuttal to philosophers and psychologists like Rousseau and the behaviorists of the 20th century. Pinker says there is something intrinsic within humanity that can’t just be overwritten by force, by society, by training, or by social engineering in a quest for utopia. I think he has a positive spin on i...

When these extremists argued ‘either-or,’ the Western tradition answered ‘both!’ I have been re-reading Carroll Quigley’s forgotten masterpiece of historical and sociological analysis,  Evolution of Civilizations . As I was reading it struck me that Quigley’s description of Western ideology strongly agrees with the conclusion of Edwin Brown Firmage’s theological study of government which I wrote about in a recent post . In an Ensign article from 1976 Firmage described a political tension between individualism and communalism, also reflected in the philosophical debate between universalism and nominalism through the ages. Firmage’s conclusion is that LDS theology points not to one extreme or other, but to a synthesis of the two: “Man’s goal is seen as being the perfection of his individuality in the image of his Heavenly Father, until he is able to enjoy a celestial community.”  Carroll Quigley characterizes the essential Western ideology - the way of thinking that drove ...

I had a conversation with my mother about my time serving as bishop in my ward, and my father wrote up a post about one point from our conversation on his blog Arise from the Dust .  One of the responsibilities of a bishop or branch president is to seek inspiration for callings, invitations to ward members to serve in one of a number of vital roles. The bishop has a bishopric (two counselors, executive secretary, and ward clerk) with whom he can consult, and the ultimate responsibility for seeking inspiration falls on the shoulders of the bishop. I found it helpful in many cases to open up the scope of the council process to include the presidents of the primary (children’s organization), young women, and Relief Society (women's organization). Getting those three inspired leaders together in a room was extremely productive and brought new ideas, perspectives, and solutions I wouldn’t have thought of on my own. As President Nelson said, “ good inspiration is based upon good informat...

One fun thing I discovered recently is that the theological and philosophical musings of Enlightenment hero and devout but free-thinking Christian John Locke have striking parallels with the positions later taken by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In a previous essay I identified nine points in which Locke’s reasoning moved him away from mainstream protestant Christianity and in the direction of what would later become the LDS camp: rejection of original sin, rejection of salvation by faith alone, openness to modern revelation, the suggestion that the soul might be material, openness to polygamy in certain circumstances, rejection of the creeds, and most especially rejection of the Trinity (but belief in Father, Son, and Holy Ghost). Locke searched for truth through a diligent study of the Bible and through reasoning from that foundation. Some of his conclusions of course represent a very serious divergence from the creeds and contemporary Protestant doctrines, but rem...

… at the young age of three!  Family life gives abundant opportunities for service and growth, often in unplanned and unexpected ways. Miles’s younger sister Cecily is 11 months old and does not yet have his sophisticated understanding of physics or cause-and-effect. She has a few times scooted over to the top of the stairs to perch precariously at the edge. We have learned to respond quickly when we hear Miles call out his warning “Look, Cecily!” when he thinks she is in danger.  He has always had that protective nature, but today his man card status became official. My wife and I were getting ready for the day in the bathroom, when we heard Cecily making noises from what sounded like the top of the upstairs landing. Knowing her curiosity about the stairs we darted out of the bathroom to check on her, me with shaving cream still on my face. In fact, Cecily was trying to get to the stairs, about one foot away. But between Cecily and the stairs was Miles, lying sideways and mak...

An essay I wrote on The Closing of the American Mind just posted today at VogelinView . Thanks to Paul Krause and the VV. Here’s an excerpt: The Closing of the American Mind is erudite and witty but its message is apalling. Dressed up to look like conservatism on the outside, it is far from it on the inside – like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. … [Bloom] had me nodding along for about the first third of the book [a cultural critique of liberal modernity], but then where the conservative writer would call for a return to family values and moral decency, Allan Bloom takes the reader on a very different moral journey… Feel free to share thoughts or feedback in the comments here. I was made aware that my subscribe function here at TROCB might not be working. If you are interested in subscribing but get an error, send me an email at stephen.m.lindsay@gmail.com, and I’ll let you know when I have it working. 

I put some posts up on Medium , continuing my research on Locke and Strauss, focusing on Locke’s natural law theory. I called his ideas of Christian natural law and liberalism the Lockean Twins. The two provide checks and balances against each other in a society - wisdom balancing freedom, and a tendency to err on the side of freedom to balance human fallibility in achieving and agreeing upon the wisdom. But natural law considerations have been stripped from positive law and public administration in the 20th century. The result has been a loss of common sense and an increase in absurdity. Here, I will follow those posts up with some sketchy thoughts on what might be done. I have some relevant long-term predictions on the future in a previous post, but in the present I contemplate a more activist approach. I am not sure whether I am being absurd or serious, maybe both. Writing this gives me a feeling like what the old Marxist cultural theorists must have felt in their scheming against ...

The 20th century saw a little-understood but radical transformation of political and legal philosophy in the United States. From the Founding until the 20th century, the political philosophy of John Locke was highly influential, especially what I call the Lockean twins of Christian natural law and classical liberalism. The two provided checks and balances on each other, with the societal ideals of virtue and freedom as guiding stars. This system had its flaws, as with any human innovation, but resulted in tremendous social and economic growth in the United States, making it the most prosperous and thriving nation in history. The natural law or common sense approach which sought the good was attacked and eroded in the postmodern 20th century, with a complete non-democratic overhaul of legal philosophy and interpretation in the 1960s that replaced common sense natural law and "the good" with radical viewpoint neutrality. Today, secular liberalism unchecked by natural law has mo...

 (Cross-posted at Medium ) We are starting a period of descent from the exalted heights of peak Western Civilization. Andrew Potter’s  On Decline gives a rationalist’s perspective on civilization and decline with a conflicted attitude toward the West’s great civilizing force, Christianity. He wants the kind of civilization made possible only by Christianity, but without the religion itself. I call this conflict the Rationalist’s Conundrum. Voltaire recognized the problem. It’s what animated Nietzsche’s madman, and what made one of Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov. I picked up a copy of Andrew Potter’s book because the title was catchy and a feeling of decline is sort of in the air around us. As Roger Scruton quipped in in  Culture Counts  (2007), “Announcing its own demise has been … an enduring mark of Western civilization.” Putting aside Spengler, Toynbee, Carrol Quigley, Mancur Olson, and many others, the most recent conversation on decline was kicked off by Tyle...

Ok, so I will admit that I followed the link at Marginal Revolution to the ChatGPT AI language model and played around for a few minutes. It seems like the model has a hard-coded relativistic philosophy of truth - or at least of religion - and it is also hard-coded to deny that it could be biased toward any philosophy at all, which is obviously absurd. I use the word “hard-coded” incorrectly, I’m sure, having no knowledge of how the model actually works. I suppose there aren’t any larger lessons to be learned from this, other than the fact that it is useful to be aware of the philosophies that subconsciously influence our way of thinking. And it helps to be aware of one’s own biases. These feats are obviously not possible for this language model. We started with some conversation about baseball and then I turned to religion.  Me:  Do all members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints go to Heaven when they die? ChatGPT:  Members of the Church of Jesus Christ...