Super subjectivity

Yikes that was too long. Moved to vonmorganstone my blog graveyard. Where I always put things that I think I am going to revise but am not getting around to it. I have written almost two hundred articles in the past six months so I just don't find the time to spruce up the crazy stuff I come up with here.

But this has always been something I wanted to write up. I have always had a problem with 'I feel good about it.' Not that I am picking on the Church. I don't think that it is necessarily a church problem, but has evolved separately as many of the cultural Mormon things have.

"I feel good about it" seems to have roots in our view that personal revelation is a window that's open to us if we want to use it. The burning in the B thing has been a big key to missionary conversion and is used as a metaphor for the bigger question of knowing whether something is right, though I am not sure it really works that way. Just because the Moroni promise exists about the BofM doesn't mean people can in more broad ways go around just knowing things without actual evidence.

But that doesn't stop them, and it really encourages a sense of antiintellectualism on the one hand and a claim to superiority on the other that tends to offend people kind of bad. There was a teacher I had at BYU that went inactive because of this. Like of course I have a red phone to God so that I can just always know whether something is true or not, are you still working on that, what a pedestrian you must be in the gospel.

So anyway I tend to go off on this without a lot of structure, but once people abandon things like actual reason and evidence to base their beliefs on and decisions instead use a mystical epistemology like feeling good about something or elevating various impressions they might have one way or the other it can result in some fairly serious self justification.

Justification of fairly silly things on the one hand of basically just people spending their lives doing just what they want to do and that's all to people skating by with some pretty serious sin. There is very little that can't be excused if the only thing people are concerned about is how they feel about things, which tends to in many cases just fine about sin, unfortunately.

A few examples. I think there was a story about someone in the family who was in the Bishopric and someone told them that they felt inspired to invest their ten percent tithing that year instead because he figured that God would have given the money back to him anyway. We tend to think that God is always worried about the mineutia of our finances, I suppose.

Also there was that lovely story about that guy in our ward in Wymount Terrace who stole Slade's motorcycle. Actually it wasn't stolen but technically it wasn't being watched like we thought it was over the summer so someone appropriated it legally under the abandonment laws. The GUY KNEW IT WAS SLADE'S BIKE AND THAT WE WERE JUST AWAY FOR THE SUMMER so he appropriated it like it had been abandoned.

This was a guy IN OUR WARD who knew that this was Slade's bike and that we were coming back but he said that because he talked to the Bishop about it and that he was within his legal rights to claim our property as his own BECAUSE HE FELT OK ABOUT IT.

Sometimes it is really a wonder that anyone ever leaves Utah County a believing member of the church with that kind of thing going on. Seriously he felt ok about taking our bike because legally he was within his rights. And he threw in that he felt ok about it because HE NEEDED A WAY TO GET TO WORK AND HE FELT THAT GOD WAS TELLING HIM THAT HE COULD DO THIS FOR HIS OWN FINANCIAL NEEDS. Apparently God cared more about him getting to work than protecting the only vehicle that Slade ever owned before he was twenty two years old from legally protected theft.

We were even more horrified when we realized that everybody in the entire ward knew about it too, you could tell by the looks on their faces as they walked by when we had the cop called there as if the cop could have done anything in the face of that. They watched him take the bike file for an abandoned title, strip the nice paint job that Slade had done and paint it with pink florescent house paint (that we couldn't figure out why he did, because it wasn't like we wouldn't recognize it but it certainly was no improvement).

When people are only concerned about how they feel about things there is really no limits to how low they will sink and still feel fine about it. GOOD even. There is sometimes the idea that there will be something like guilt or a conscience if we are really doing something wrong and we can just go ahead and sky's the limit do what we want to do but we know how rare that is in other people to all of a sudden become burdened with guilt at their behavior so they should't be too confident it will kick in in their own case. In fact it won't; guilt is a myth. The whole point of the natural man thing in the Book of Mormon is to remind us that we don't always come naturally to feeling the right way about good and evil, it is acquired and requires requesting a chance of heart. And it won't be acquired if we just stick to whether we feel ok about things the way it happens naturally.