Old Faith Blog

I've discovered a fantastic, thought-provoking website at LDSPhilosopher.com . I've enjoyed reading through their archives and I'm sure I will be sharing more from their site as time goes on. One of their series of posts is named "Intelligence & Agency" and I wanted to link to it from here. The series is about what the Lord means by intelligences in the scriptures. There has not been too much revealed on the topic and these guys do a pretty good job deciphering. After reading the series, I posed a question regarding the millennium and received a satisfactory answer . Here are some excerpts: Part One There are a lot of vital doctrines the Lord usually focuses on: priesthood, repentance, the second coming. Usually it seems like he chooses such doctrines because they are vital to our salvation or help us in the process of repenting and becoming like him. On the other end, there are a lot of things he has chosen to not reveal: the full process involved in creati...

The purpose of this short essay is to explain the concept of faith as I understand it. As I have exercised and studied faith, it seems to me that there are primarily two types, or levels, of faith. The first type I call initiatory faith , and the second, enduring faith . These names describe the differences in these two types of faith well. Initiatory faith, I believe, leans more heavily on hope . For as the Bible says, “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” (Heb. 11:1). Though I can't see if I will make it to work safely, I hope that I will. And because I have made it to work safely every day in the past, I have faith that I will today. It takes initiatory faith to move me to start my car in confidence. Enduring faith is developed faith. It takes action, which is initiatory faith, and time to have the perfect faith that I will arrive to work safely. Having done it hundreds of times, having seen it every day over the last few years, I can eas...

It's been almost 3 years since a short email exchange I had with the Reverend Bill Keller of LivePrayer.com . I thought this blog would be a better place for it than my Gmail archive. After writing an article for USAReligiousNews.com ( cross-published at TheChristianPost.com ) about the Mormon church, I sent him an email to start what I hoped to be a good debate. But I was disappointed, as you'll see in his reply. It seems USAReligiousNews.com has removed his article after I forwarded our exchanged to them expressing my disapproval in their publishing of his article. I will separate each email with "-----" and his words are in blue: (September 7th, 2006) Mr. Keller, This email is in response to an article you published at USA Religious News (www.usareligiousnews.com) on September 6th, 2006. You have made several statements that I believe to be inaccurate in regards to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I would like to present your article back to you...

A friend of mine, Chris Brown , has written an excellent article looking at the objectivist critique of Christianity and examines whether or not it applies to Mormonism, for LDSFreemen.com . His introduction: Many latter-day saints were drawn to ideas of laissez-faire capitalism after reading Ayn Rand’s best-selling novel Atlas Shrugged. While Rand’s views are foundational to her fiction works, it is in her non-fiction works, and particularly those of the founder of the Ayn Rand Institute Leonard Peikoff, where her philosophy—Objectivism—is delineated and developed into a more coherent framework. While Objectivism heavily criticizes Christianity as nothing more than mysticism, the more relevant discussion for this article regards whether this criticism applies to Mormonism. It is meant to answer whether the Objectivist judgment of Christianity in general, including faith and the nature of God, also applies to Mormonism. In order to answer the question it becomes necessary to understan...