Looking Back on 115 Essays and a Lifetime Besides
“A religion is not the church a man goes to but the cosmos he lives in; and if any sceptic forgets it, the maddest fanatic beating an Orange drum about the Battle of the Boyne is a better philosopher than he.”
The lion’s share of my writing here on Medium is in some way or another — whether directly or tangentially — about Mormonism, the faith tradition in which I’ve spent most of my life. …
Reappraising an Obscure Mormon Doctrine
“When Joseph Smith translated the Book of Abraham … from the words that Abraham himself wrote 4000 years ago, important information about the cosmos was revealed that had not been known before.
“Anciently, Abraham looked through a Urim and Thummim … to learn about the sun, the moon, and the stars. What he saw is in the Book of Abraham, which describes how the universe is structured: a cosmos with many stars, one above another, each with different periods of time and orders of government. Within this cosmos is ‘Kolob,’ a very important star in the eternal scheme.”
A Young Mormon Reads Watts in Provo
From 2015 to 2016, when I lived in Provo (and at one point was attending BYU), almost everyday I would walk from my apartment just off West Bulldog to campus, and stop at the Joseph F. Smith Building. I would sit at the edge of the fountain and read Alan Watts’ The Wisdom of Insecurity.
I was relatively fresh off my mission, where I had had a number of toxic experiences I wouldn’t open up about outside of private conversations for a few years more, and I had few friends. I had one sibling in Provo, who then moved back…
On Sacred Theater and Divine Therapy
“Now it is this detour through the kingdom of as-if … We bracket our religious beliefs (provisionally at least) on entering the theater, in order to be able to believe in the theatrical make-believe. This, as I read it, is an … agnostic liberty to explore all kinds of different views and attitudes without the constraints of orthodoxy, morality, or censorship. …
“Once we exit from the theater, once we suspend this poetic detour in turn, we find ourselves back in the real, lived world, with the option to believe in the gods again or to not believe. But without…
On the Messiah Who Has Always Already Come
Throughout the New Testament a certain theme persists: that tension between the Kingdom of God as a reality yet to come and the Kingdom of God as present here and now. Perhaps this is due in part to the expectations of the historical Jesus, or at least his followers, that the Messiah had arrived and would bring the Kingdom in their own time and place — only for Jesus to end in crucifixion, a rather unexpected and ignominious fate as far as most were concerned. Perhaps the Kingdom as a deferred reality, a perpetual not-yet, came from making sense of…
A Note on Myopia
“William James observed that wisdom was learning what to overlook. Prince Hamlet is the most intelligent of literary characters, but by James’s pragmatic test the doom-eager Shakespearean charismatic is anything but wise. Hamlet can overlook nothing, and so sets the pattern for all who can illuminate wisdom yet cannot themselves embody it.”
There is an intriguingly common theme in Indian philosophies of mind: that one is not most fundamentally a self but a field of awareness — a limited one, at that. …
Notes on Wholeness and Evil
“…although the attributes of Christ … undoubtedly mark him out as an embodiment of the self, looked at from the psychological angle he corresponds to only one half of the archetype. The other half appears in the Antichrist. The latter is just as much a manifestation of the self, except that he consists of its dark aspect. Both are Christian symbols, and they have the same meaning as the image of the Saviour crucified between two thieves. …
On Knowing Nothing
I would like to bear my testimony that I do not know a thing.
Our best understandings of God are idols which must be destroyed before we can encounter God.
To borrow from the first shahada of Islam’s first pillar, “lā ʾilāha ʾillā-llāh”— “there is no God but God.” When first we accept that there is no God — then we meet God.
No amount of words can encapsulate or exhaust the Word. They’re like clothes on an invisible body, flecks of paint on an invisible object of which we can’t quite make out the shape.
As Derrida would put…
Notes on Various Kinds of Mormonism
“Why then do you marvel at the resurrection of Jesus? What is marvelous is not that he arose but that he did not arise alone, that he raised many other dead ones who appeared to many in Jerusalem.”
— Gospel of Nicodemus (Acts of Pilate) 17:1 (c. 600s)
“… if you have power to seal [yourselves to one another] on earth and in heaven, then we should be crafty. The first thing you do: go and seal on earth your sons and daughters unto yourself, and yourself unto your fathers in eternal glory. And go ahead and … use a…
Trauma, Perspective, and Mormonism’s Infinite Regress of Gods
“The fear of infinity is a form of myopia that destroys the possibility of seeing the actual infinite, even though it in its highest form has created and sustains us, and in its secondary transfinite forms occurs all around us and even inhabits our minds.”
Just over six eventful years ago, I returned home from my two years in California as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It wasn’t until much later that I realized I likely had PTSD. After returning home, I would experience panic attacks when I encountered male missionaries…
Nathan Smith
Independent writer from Austin, TX writing on psychology, philosophy, literature, religion. www.nathansmithbooks.com @NateSmithSNF
