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The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and You—beside—

The Brain is deeper than the sea—
For—hold them—Blue to Blue—
The one the other will absorb—
As Sponges—Buckets—do—

The Brain is just the weight of God—
For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—
And they will differ—if they do—
As Syllable from Sound— 

Emily Dickinson

I'm not sure what she means in the last stanza, but I really like her imagery. :)

4

Sometimes events happen in life which truly change us. When we look back, we see life before [fill in life-altering event here] and life after [fill in life-altering event here]. Perhaps it's a marriage, the birth of a child, the endurance of a threatening disease, or the biggest challenge of your life.

Mine was depression.

I consider healing from this dark, debilitating disease to be my greatest accomplishment. I did not do it alone. When I think back to the fear, trauma, and despair which resided inside me, and compare that small, sad person to who I am today, I am amazed at the power of the Atonement of Jesus Christ and its ability to save. He restored my life, spirituality, and happiness.

The purpose of this blog is to share what I believe and know to be true with anyone who cares to read it. I plan to share experiences from my biggest challenge as a common topic in my posts. I don't feel satisfied with what I have done with the experiences I have had thus far. I pray my words will help those who suffer from depression, know someone who is, or simply need a little encouragement.

3

Yesterday was a close call. A bit too close.

I was driving home from work, singing along to the radio, when I reached a stoplight near the freeway. I waited for the light to turn green, and nonchalantly accelerated into the intersection as soon as it did. Time seemed to slow down as something caught my peripheral vision. I looked to my left and hesitated slightly due to the shock of a pick-up truck, which was just getting off of the freeway and ignoring their red light, streaking toward me at a very fast speed. As soon as my brain registered the danger, I bolted out of the intersection. I heard their tires squeal as the other car slid right past the back of my car and realized I had almost been t-boned and possibly killed in a serious car accident.

http://www.floridatoday.com/content/blogs/jparker/2009/10/1028-cartoon-red-light-invasion.shtml

As I drove the rest of the way home, I considered what had just happened. What a blessing my car didn't stall! What if I had driven through the intersection just moments later, and was now disabled or no longer alive? After this experience, I felt the most protected that I have been my entire life, besides perhaps surviving the dangerous adventure of living in Honduras, which is known as the country with the highest murder rate.

There was a time on my mission when my companion and I were running to catch a bus to take us back to our apartment at the end of a long day. She was several yards ahead of me, as we ran at the edge of the road. In the distance ahead I saw a man, who was very drunk, stagger our way. The glint of a machete came from his hand. (Machetes are very commonly used in Honduras, sometimes to cut the lawn or manage vines,

My dear friends Hermana Judd and Meese living it up on a P-day

do household chores like shucking corn,

and sometimes, I imagine, to kill.) I gasped as I saw his machete swing toward my companion as she ran past him. The small buffer between them was enough that she came away unscathed.

We are bombarded daily by danger heading toward us, whether it be a careless driver, the machete of a drunkard, pornography, dishonesty, gossip, or any other sin. We must allow God to protect us from these dangers by keeping His commandments. The Spirit can prompt us and help us stay safe. Experiences like this remind me that my purpose is not yet fulfilled on the earth. I am so grateful for the protection received from striving to live the gospel of Jesus Christ.

2

This was a paper I wrote for my Philosophy class during summer term. This is actually the 2nd to last draft... I'm not sure if I saved the very last one. The topic? If God can know everything, even the future, even everything we will do, doesn't that limit our will?

 I don't know if I really came up with an answer, but my professor seemed to like the paper.

Philosophy 110

To do or Forced to Do? That is the Question...

        There is a perplexing problem which has been repeatedly addressed for generations without a clear, solid explanation. If we claim to have free will and the power to act for ourselves, is not this power diminished or even obliterated by the existence of an omniscient Higher Power, God, who knows what choices we will make before we actually make them? And if this is so, could not this Supreme Being be influencing our decisions, until they are not our decisions at all, but rather actions determined by power outside of our will? Thus introduces the problem coined as the “determinism—free will controversy.” Determinism asserts that all events, even human action, are determined by causes outside of the will. Free will, on the other hand, claims that agents are free to choose for themselves, without being intercepted by restraints. Therefore, the controversy can be seen in the statement: “…some take determinism to undermine human freedom and dignity” (Earman 1986:1).
        There is a general consensus in Christianity that God is transcendent, and therefore is not bound to all the restraints we are, as mere human beings. If I assume that this transcendence includes being unbound by time, could not God see the future without determining it? The principle of revelation, or seeing events in our future and past, allows God to know us better than we know ourselves. This does not necessarily mean that we are stripped of the freedom to choose. Rather, assuming God is omniscient and can therefore know and see all, I merely argue that he also knows and sees all that we will do.
        An undesirable consequence of believing that determinism hijacks our free will is the apathy that follows. In the early third century, BC, the Stoics, who created the concept of determinism, claimed what is now known as the “Lazy Argument” which stated, “if determinism was true, there was no point in doing anything whatever” (Kenny 2010:156). Part of this concept of determinism was an inevitable fate, where what was determined must necessarily happen. Believing that determinism and fate usurps our freedom to choose can destroy all sense of human responsibility.
        I find it difficult to believe in the validity of the “Lazy Argument.” Without human responsibility, there is no purpose to life, except to be mere puppets, or pawns in a game played by God, enslaved by the choices he forces upon us. As we make countless decisions, miniscule and great alike, we choose for ourselves paths in life which help us progress to become what we want to become. God is all-powerful, but that does not mean that man possesses no power at all.
        A contemporary of the Stoics, a man named Chrysippus, responded to them by making a distinction between simple and complex facts. Simple facts are inevitable regardless of our actions, but complex facts require our participation in order for them to come to pass. To use an example that the Stoics commonly used in the context of a patient on his sickbed,

“If it is fated that you will recover from this illness, then whether or not you call a doctor you will recover; likewise, if it is fated that you will not recover from this illness, then whether or not you call a doctor you will not recover. One or the other is your fate: so there is no point in calling a doctor.”

          
Chrysippus argued that there is a point in calling a doctor. He believed that the history of the world is connected, or all events are “co-fated” with each other. Therefore, your actions in calling the doctor may change the outcome, as this is a complex fact. His theory restores some human responsibility.         

New ideas about determinism and free will were developed throughout the following generations. Augustine of Hippo, a religious philosopher and bishop in the late fourth century, AD, adopted a notion of God’s foreknowledge similar to what is now called the “perception model.” He allows room for us to maintain some power in our will, and therefore some responsibility, despite an all-knowing God. “…the very reason why a man is undoubtedly responsible for his own sin, when he sins, is because he whose foreknowledge cannot be deceived foresaw, not the man’s fate or fortune … but that the man himself would be responsible for his own sin. No man sins unless it is his choice to sin; and his choice not to sin, that too, God foresaw” (Ostler 2001:141). Therefore, Augustine leaves room for choice, even though God can foresee all.

Augustine was also the first to discuss a concept similar to that of determinism, known as predestination. If predestination is true, the ultimate outcome of each of us is already determined. Before we are even born, we are bound to be saved or damned. Again, this view diminishes the role of human responsibility. With our final destinations determined, our choices would make no difference with regards to our eternal consequences.

        The concept of predestination was later adopted and made more notorious by John Calvin in the sixteenth century. Calvin’s logic of God’s foreknowledge, related by Boettner (1960:42), states, “If future events are foreknown to God, they cannot by any possibility take a turn contrary to His knowledge.... Common sense tells us that no event can be foreknown unless by some means... it has been predetermined.”
        This reformed view of predestination combats the argument that predestination (or determinism) and free will cannot coexist. In a comparison symbolic of our relationship of God, Boettner continues,

A father often knows how his son will act under given circumstances and by controlling [the circumstances] he determines beforehand the course of action which the son follows, yet the son acts freely. If he plans that the son shall be a doctor, he gives him encouragement along that line, persuades him to read certain books, to attend certain schools, and so presents the outside inducements that his plan works out. In the same manner and to an infinitely greater extent God controls our actions so that they are certain although we act freely. His decree does not produce the event, but only renders its occurrence certain; and the same decree which determines the certainty of the action at the same time determines the freedom of the agent in the act (1960:212).

          
When explained in such terms that are easy for us to understand, such as this father/son scenario, we can see the Calvinistic point of view that God is very much in control of our futures, without damaging our free will in any way. Because we are his children and he knows us perfectly, he can predict what we are going to do. And as he predicts our behavior, he helps set up everything around us so we can accomplish our temporal and spiritual goals. When we understand the nature of God in this way, it is a possibility that that predestination and free will can coexist.
        About a hundred years after Augustine of Hippo’s claims of predestination, and well before John Calvin’s time, Boethius also allowed for the coexistence of an Omniscient God and man’s free will.  

“Since God has an ever present eternal state, his knowledge remains in the simplicity of its own present and, embracing infinite lengths of past and future, views with its own simple comprehension of all things as if they were taking place in the present. If you will weigh the foresight with which God discerns all things, you will rightly esteem it to be the knowledge of a never fading instant rather than a foreknowledge of the future” (Ostler 2001:149).

     
Boethius understood the phenomenon as God being outside of time, unlimited in every way. His seeing our future is not really a foreseeing, but is like our seeing of the present.
        Another concept which bridges the determinism—free will gap is that of “compatibilism,” a doctrine founded by Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century:

“…my action is preceded and caused by my willing, which is preceded and caused by my deliberation, which is preceded and caused by a series of motions outside my control which terminates ultimately in the primal causation by God. My action is free, because the event which immediately precedes it is an act of will; it is necessitated, because it comes at the end of a series each of whose items is a necessary consequence of its predecessor” (Kenny 2010:665-6).

    
Immanuel Kant continued this conversation as one who also believed that determinism was compatible with human freedom. He believed man to have within him “a power of self-determination, independently of any coercion through sensuous impulses.” He also promoted a new theory that nature operates in time, but the “human will belongs to a non-phenomenal self that transcends time” (Kenny 2010:63).
        In reflecting back to Boethius, and his understanding that God resides outside time, there is discussion among theologians in the Christian world about whether this is possible, or alternatively, if God resides within time like us. Plato’s influence on Christianity in the Middle Ages, especially the Catholic faith, teaches that the body is corrupt; therefore God is a Spirit who is not confined to a body. If this were true, what is to stop him from being outside of time, viewing everything from a different point of view? I like an example shared by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, comparing God’s ability to view everything to someone standing at the top of a tall mountain, watching what is happening below. “Just as [the traveller] who goes along does not see those who come after him; whereas, he who sees the whole road from a height sees at once all those traveling on it” (Ostler 2001:150). Aquinas asserts that God’s knowledge resides in eternity which is “above time”.
        Alternatively, those who believe God does possess a body find it impossible to fathom that even he could be in two places at once, but that he would be confined within time, unable to see more than the present. According to Ostler (2001:149), “it is almost universally recognized by biblical scholarship that God’s relationship to time is different than the human relation to time.”  but according to most non-Catholic Christians, God’s experiences are within time, like ours.
        In conclusion, I do not know if God resides within or outside of time. Assuming, however, that this God I write of is the same that is the author of the Holy Bible, could not he experience revelations which allow him to see the past and future just as Paul, John, and other beloved prophets of God? God would not have shown these men things that he did not know about himself. God knows all and can see all. Whether he resides in time or outside of time is irrelevant. The point is, we know he knows what will happen to us. But this does not diminish our abilities to choose for ourselves. Like a loving father, God hopes that we will refrain from sin, and wants our happiness. He will try everything to guide us in the right direction. But he will not force us; we are ultimately left with the power to choose.

References

        Boettner, Loraine. 1960. The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination. Ann Arbor, MI: Cushing – Malloy Inc.
        Earman, John. 1986. A Primer on Determinism. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company.
        Kenny, Anthony. 2010. A New History of Western Philosophy. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press.
        Ostler, Blake T. 2001. Exploring Mormon Thought: The Attributes of God. Salt Lake City, UT: Greg Kofford Books.

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I created a talk for Sacrament Meeting in my sleep. Pretty impressive, I know. :) I was given very little time to prepare, and I could choose the topic. I was mortified about standing up in front of my new ward without my talk written down and well practiced. That is when I thought of a topic which, by merely talking about, would help me rid my fears of public speaking. The topic comes from 1 John 4:18 and also Moroni 8:16: "Behold, I speak with boldness, having authority from God; and I fear not what man can do; for perfect love casteth out all fear." (This scripture comes from The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ). Perfect Love Casteth Out All Fear. Faith also casts out fear. If we have adequate love for something or someone, this should give us the faith we need to act. And even if we lack the love for someone else, God has perfect love for us, and His love can eliminate our fear. Sometimes we are blessed with the Spirit, prompting us to help someone else. But fear too often comes in the way, causing us to worry that the person will not accept the help or will think we are strange for suddenly wanting to help them. But if we truly love the person, be it a family member, someone we home or visit teach, or someone we don't even know, but a child of God, we will see that the ramifications of us listening to the Spirit will be better than ignoring him. Heavenly Father knows all, and He blesses us with the Spirit on occasion, according to our faithfulness and necessity. He knows better than we can guess what is going on with the person we are prompted to help. It is best to trust Him, follow the Spirit, and help, casting out our fear. And as we do so, Heavenly Father gives us more promptings from the Spirit, allowing us to more often become instruments in His hands. To be a servant of God, and His hands upon the earth, is the most wonderful and rewarding feeling.