Of Geography and the God of All the Earth

A colleague this past week had a religious conversation in which an old academic chestnut was brought up. This was the one that begins with the undiscerning observation that the different religions are in fact pretty much all the same. Step two in the argument is that all religions basically teach the same thing, such as to be a decent person and kind to your neighbors. Step three in the argument is needed to explain why, then, if they all teach the same thing are there so many different religions. The third step is the assertion that the different religions are manifestations of different cultures or civilizations around the world. Judaism, so the argument goes, is the manifestation of an ancient culture from the area of Palestine, Christianity the religion of Europe and its colonies, Islam the religion of the Middle East, Hinduism the religion of India, and so on. The final step of the argument is that—and therefore—there is precious little in the way of “truth” in religion and certainly not enough to argue about.

No doubt you have heard the argument before, and as you consider it you very likely can see how thin of an argument it is. I have nearly always encountered it as a variety of argument intended to end rather than engage in conversation.

With regard to the first two parts of the argument, there certainly are similarities among religions, but it seems that the more knowledgeable one is about a particular religion the more prone he is to see how different it is from others. Religious converts are particularly good experts on differences in religion, the differences being powerful enough to motivate a change of beliefs and not infrequently a change in their entire way of life. The sameness tends to be seen more by those who are more casual about their religious knowledge.

As to the third and fourth elements of the argument, it is one thing to recognize geographic and cultural influences in religions and quite another to assert that the discovery of these influences means that the quest for religious truth is a waste of time and effort. To begin with, geography fails even as a superficial explanation for religious difference. How does it explain different religions that are embraced by large numbers in the same region. India is one very clear example, where several religions have tens of millions of adherents. It also poorly explains how Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have such close geographical ties that they have had and continue to have bitter disputes over the same sacred sites, most especially Jerusalem.

This is not to say that one cannot find original roots of particular religions in one place or another. After all, the religion had to start somewhere, with someone or some group living in some place on earth. From that place the particular religion spread to other places and people.

But now I present a different case. What of a religion that has its rising in two different locations, on two separate continents oceans apart? That is the case with the doctrine of Jesus Christ. With the testimony of the Holy Bible and The Book of Mormon taken together we have two witnesses—one from the Old World and one from the New World—that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and Savior of the world. No other religion can or does make that claim. Each volume of scripture is an ancient record of God’s dealings with His children, teaching the same plan of salvation through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ and His resurrection from the dead. In the writing of these records there was no comparing of notes between the separate series of authors, no communication other than through God and His Holy Spirit.

Whatever the geographical explanation of religion might claim, its claims fall to the ground in the case of Christianity. There truly is something different about the doctrine of Christ. It comes with the tangible testimony of dual volumes of scripture that proclaim with two voices from two hemispheres the single message that Jesus Christ is the God of the whole world and not just a part of it. As Christ explained to His disciples in ancient America,

Know ye not that there are more nations than one? Know ye not that I, the Lord your God, have created all men . . . ? Know ye not that the testimony of two nations is a witness unto you that I am God, that I remember one nation like unto another? Wherefore, I speak the same words unto one nation like unto another. (2 Nephi 29:7, 8)

Of Government Collusion and Market Discipline

There is a lot of noise and confusion about what caused the recent financial panic. The Obama Administration believes that the basic problem is that markets do not work right, people are too dumb to choose for themselves, and that regulatory agencies were not able or were unwilling to keep up with bank shenanigans. Their solution: more of the same, that is, create a variety of new government agencies and bureaus that have the authority to dictate and control any part of or player in the financial system, including control of financial customers large and small (look in the mirror for the definition of financial customer). This neglects the fact that government agencies were the most blameworthy in the recent financial panic. In fact, it is impossible to have a long, sustained economic recession or depression without government policies causing it. (I will save for another day how the policies of the Federal Reserve and the Franklin Roosevelt administration made sure that an economic downturn became a depression lasting for a decade.)

Let me address the first of these points in the Obama administration’s justification for taking over the financial system. First of all let us consider the markets. It is true that the markets did not perform right. That was because government rules, structures, and programs did not allow the markets to perform right. The government guarantees bank deposits, so depositors do not care very much how safe or sound a bank is. Government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, bundle up mortgages into securities that investors assume have little or no risk. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approves and controls the small number of credit rating agencies, and investors believe that these agencies are right when they give to a particular company or investment their highest credit rating (such as AAA), a rating that is thought to present little or no risk. The SEC has protected these agencies from competition and from market discipline for their errors while providing little in the way of regulatory discipline.

With those and other government protections in place the appearance of risk just about disappeared from the mortgage markets. Different investors have different appetites for risk. It was not the people hungry for high risk returns that fueled the housing bubble. Many of those with the weakest appetite for risk, seeking the safest investments, were drawn to the mortgage markets. In this government-manufactured atmosphere of little or no risk, many mortgage firms, increasingly non-bank mortgage firms, made it more and more possible for people to buy houses that they could not afford. Once the mortgage firm made the mortgage, regardless of the ability of the borrower to repay, the firm sold the mortgage to the GSEs, who sold it on to investors who poured trillions of dollars into what they thought was a safe haven. Then the mortgage firm went on to make more mortgages. Investors were shielded from asking whether the mortgages were any good, that is, whether the person buying the house could actually afford it.

That mispricing of the risk pulled more and more money into mortgages and real estate, driving prices up and up, pulling in more and more investors as the prices rose, until it was impossible to put one more Jack on the house of cards without it tumbling down. People panicked when “safe” investments turned out to be risky. Then the government started panicking, bailing out some firms and not others, changing the rules almost weekly, demanding hundreds of billions of dollars from taxpayers in order to pick financial winners and losers. Investors, not knowing where the government would turn next, panicked some more.

It was government interference in the market that failed, not the markets. Without all of the government camouflage, investors would have insisted on knowing that the mortgage borrowers could afford their houses before funding loans to buy them. Ask yourself this: would we have had the whole housing blow up if people who could not afford to buy houses were not given mortgages? Yet the Obama Administration, even today, is tripping over itself to find new ways to guarantee new mortgages, in many cases especially for people who cannot afford their houses. Where have all the subprime mortgages gone? They have gone to the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), where they have a government guaranty. (Watch what happens to the FHA house of cards in the coming months.) When will they every learn? Oh, when will they ever learn?

Giving more power to the kind of government agencies that helped create these problems hardly seems like the sensible answer. That is what the Obama Administration proposes, though. Instead of controlling the markets with more government interference and masking of risk, more bailouts for firms that should be allowed to fail, more power for some new government bureau to pick winners and losers and to tell people which financial products they can and cannot have, we should be exposing financial players more to market discipline. We should make it harder to hide risk and easier for investors to recognize the risks and allow the markets to charge higher prices for higher risks and lower prices for lower risks.

Market discipline has always been the quickest and surest regulator. It rewards the efficient provider of what the buyers in the market want, and it punishes the incompetent. Very importantly today, the market is stingy about bailouts.

Of Liberty and Barackracy

When President Barack Obama leaves office, he will leave Americans with less liberty than they had when he took office. Absorbing many liberties that Americans had, making decisions for Americans that they used to make for themselves, will be a vast array of new government agencies, the new Barackracy.

I chose the term “Barackracy” with care. It ends with a suffix similar to that in “democracy.” Democracy means rule or government by the people. Barackracy is similar to the well-known term, “bureaucracy.” That is not accidental. Bureaucracy was a pejorative term, coined in early modern times to criticize the French government, which had become by and large run buy unelected officials in government agencies, the bureaus. At the time, elective governments—and indeed, constitutions—in France would come and go with amazing frequency, but the bureaucracy and the bureaucrats who ran the operations of government would always be there and would carry on largely undisturbed. For much of what mattered in day-to-day life, France was ruled by the bureaus.

The bureaucracy helped to make France what it is today. More and more decisions over a wide range of matters in the ordinary lives of ordinary people were made by the bureaus. The Soviet Union learned from the French model and could probably not have been created without drawing upon that example. The Soviets expanded upon the French model, but the Soviets did not invent it. Even with the Soviet Union dissolved, the Russians are having a very difficult time establishing the liberties of the people, because the Russian bureaucracy survives at the core of the current Russian government.

When the United States was created we had no bureaucracy. In the early years of the Constitution we had only three departments of government, the State Department, the Treasury Department, and the War Department. These three departments focused on the three acknowledged purposes of the federal government, to conduct our international relations, provide for the common defense, and have a national system of revenues to pay for it all.

Instead of bureaucracy, we had liberty, protected for a time by a federal system of government that dispersed governmental power among the states and within a system of checks and balances. The founding fathers had already seen how government limited freedom and how government tended to grow if left unchecked.

Each order from a bureaucrat limits liberty. The decisions of bureaucrats, operating on behalf of the government, have the authority of law and occupy the field where individual decisions used to operate. And, unlike private decisions, the mandates of the bureaucracy are backed by force. Several decades ago Alan Greenspan described the power of bureaucratic decisions this way:

At the bottom of the endless pile of paper work which characterizes all regulation lies a gun.
(Alan Greenspan, “The Assault on Integrity,” in Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, p.119)

At the core of each proposal by Barack Obama to change America lie several new government offices and agencies that arrogate to themselves the power to make decisions that so far have been made by the people themselves. In the Obama “Cap and Trade” plan designed to save us from global warming (or now, “climate change” since it is no longer clear whether the earth is getting warmer or colder) are various agencies that will decide how people can use energy, what they can buy, how their products are made, and what they pay for them. The healthcare legislation will have an unnumbered collection of new government agencies to decide who gets to buy health insurance and from whom, at what price, with what features, covering which illnesses, under which treatments. The proposed new Barackracy will include new agencies to determine what financial services can be offered to you, who can offer them, and on what terms. It will also decide which banks and other financial firms can survive and which ones should be bailed out. There are other plans, too.

In each case, liberty is replaced by government decisions, made by people who are never up for election, accountable to no one. The Senate sponsor of the financial Barackracy bill, Senator Chris Dodd, said that with a new financial consumer regulator it will no longer be necessary to go back to Congress for new consumer legislation—the new Barackracy will have that legislative power. What if you do not like what the new agency does? Or, just what if you would like to decide for yourself? That liberty would be gone.

In the days ahead the power of the Constitution created to preserve the liberties of the people will be tested. The surrendering of our nation—described by Abraham Lincoln as possessing a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people”— over to rule by the new Barackracy certainly seems to be inconsistent with both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution. We will look next to the courts to uphold the Constitution and the liberty it was established to protect.

Of Literary Classics and Scripture

I was sad when I read the last book by Jane Austen. Her use of the English language delighted me with each and every volume, combined with her subtle wit and charming dialogues. I wanted to read more, but there was no more.

I felt much the same way when I could find no more to read from the pen of J.R.R. Tolkien. His fantasy works are the models of the genre, combining beauty, with plot, with never-ending-inventiveness that is marvelously varied and yet always internally consistent. Moreover, he is a great story teller.

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series demonstrates that mankind has not exhausted its ability to produce classic literature. The stories combine entertainment with depth of theme and timelessness of message—imbued with a magical charm. I loved the last book of the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, even more than I loved the first, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. My only regret was that the series was over, done. I would be eager for more, if the quality could be maintained.

Aye, and there’s the rub. These authors are all too human. Either they die—as do we all—or the challenge of continually meeting the test of producing a classic becomes too daunting.

Is God subject to these same limitations? Certainly He does not die, but is the Author of the scriptures in danger of falling short of continuing to meet the high standards of light and inspiration that make the scriptures what they are? That is to say, will the Source of inspiration ever be less than eternally abundant? The answer to that is equally, no.

All of that being so, then why would any believer in God give any credence to assertions that the canon of scriptures is closed? Even more, why would any believer in God react with anything other than delight at the news that there is more of the word of God available.

That was certainly how I greeted the news of The Book of Mormon. Raised with a deep reverence for The Holy Bible, I was overjoyed to learn that there was even more scripture, more of the words of Christ and His prophets and apostles.

A belief in God must mean a belief in a living God, and if living, He must continue to do what He has always done, be a Creator, a Father, a Comforter, a Guide, and a Revealer of His will to His children.  Thus the Lord proclaims through His modern prophets and disciples,

We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God. (Articles of Faith 9)

Our Heavenly Father has promised us more of His word. I can hardly wait for the next volume!

Of Fairness and Sacrifice

From time to time one or the other of my children would complain that this or that was “unfair.” The complaint could range anywhere from one getting more or less of something than another to being required to do some work or suffer some consequence that another avoided. “Suzy got a higher grade than I did for doing a poorer job.”

Those of course were little examples, the kind that all children seem to face growing up. There were more consequential examples of unfairness as my children matured. Such was the case of one of my children who was denied admission to a particular college to make room for a less qualified but racially-favored applicant. That was unfair to my child, and it was unfair for me, who gets to subsidize with my taxes the government-run college that operates admissions along racist lines.

My explanation to my children for these unfairness episodes usually contained elements of the following. My first point might be, who said life has to be fair? Then I might follow that up with the observation that mortality is all about unfairness. The real issue is how we react to the unfairness, what we do to overcome it.

If given enough opportunity, I could explain that things may appear unfair if we think that the score is final while in fact the game is still going on. Mortality is a small and temporary part of life, and many things that look like advantages here become serious liabilities later. Even in mortality we often see that demonstrated, such as the person who struggling against great opposition as a child develops skills and abilities that lead to far greater success than the person who seems to have an easy childhood. Identifying who had unfair advantage might then become more difficult.

In a discussion with my wife the other day, she pointed out how unfairness lies at the core of sacrifice. That is to say, that a sacrifice is the willing acceptance of unfairness. It is unfair that a mother has to go through so much pain at childbirth, but she sacrifices, she accepts that unfairness, in order to bring a child into the world. It is unfair that a father works at his job to earn an income that he shares with all of the members of his family, but he accepts that unfairness as a sacrifice that he makes for the benefit of his family.

Why does the mother do it? Why does the father do it? If they willingly accept that unfairness, they are making a sacrifice. I have often thought and said that it is hard to love someone for whom you have not sacrificed. I believe that is so, because very often the driving force in that sacrifice is love. We act out our love and make it real as we sacrifice for someone. Loving parents willingly and often sacrifice for their children—most of which sacrifices the parents may not even notice—because of their love for their children, begun by their love for each other. That, by the way, is one of the essential reasons for being organized as families and why no social institution has ever been found that develops love in people more than the family does. That, however, is a topic to fill many discussions on other days.

I think that each of these answers to my children is a good answer, and they are all related. Perhaps the best answer to the unfairness question is that no one in this life escapes unfairness. In fact, the greatest of all, Jesus Christ, suffered the greatest unfairness. He paid the price for all the sins of all who would accept Him, having committed no sin and having caused no offense against anyone. He willingly accepted that unfairness, He volunteered for and carried out that sacrifice, because of His love for us.

With the Savior’s sacrifice, with His acceptance of unfairness, all of the apparent unfairness to all of us is made right. In the end, by accepting the Savior and the power of His sacrifice, all of the unfairness that we might seem to experience is overcome. As the Prophet Joseph Smith proclaimed in April 1843,

All your losses will be made up to you in the resurrection, provided you continue faithful. By the vision of the Almighty I have seen it. (Joseph Smith, Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p.296)

Given that perspective, perhaps the only real and lasting unfairness is the unfairness we may do to ourselves. We cheat ourselves by not accepting the Savior’s sacrifice so freely extended to all of us, by which every unfairness can be overcome.

Of Christ and the Perfection of Men

A fundamental principle taught by Jesus Christ and His prophets and Apostles is the perfectibility of men. Embedded in the middle of the Savior’s Sermon on the Mount is this commandment: “Ye are therefore commanded to be perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48, JST) The resurrected Savior repeated the same commandment to His disciples in the Americas, with these words: “Therefore I would that ye should be perfect even as I, or your Father who is in heaven is perfect.” (3 Nephi 12:48)

The Apostle Paul developed this theme, explaining the role of apostles and prophets and other workers in the Church in helping men to become perfect:

And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ . . . (Ephesians 4:11-13)

Of course, looking around us it is hard to find examples of men or women who have become perfect. That is surely why Paul pointed to Jesus Christ as our example by which to measure our progress and upon whom to model our development. Having said that, I have not found it hard to discover examples around me of men and women who are becoming more perfect.

The objection to the perfectibility of men is usually raised with little substantive argument but rather with a disdainful huff or with a gesture to the surrounding society as if to suggest that belief in perfectibility of men is naïve at best. There is some merit to this argument if you neither look closely at individuals nor at how the power of God operates upon the Father’s children. Men left to their own devices are hardly improvable let alone perfectible. And yet how do we account for those who are becoming better people, often much better people?

An ancient American prophet king, by the name of Benjamin, described the common condition of men this way:

The natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father. (Mosiah 3:19)

We all know that untaught, unguided children tend to grow up to become barbarians. The biggest problems in public schools come from children who have either little parental guidance or bad parental guidance. On the other hand, time and again we see children who are well cared for and guided by their parents overcome enormous obstacles to become noble men and women.

King Benjamin, as a king and a prophet, was saying that we should learn from God our Father as our children learn from us. It is by allowing the power of the Holy Spirit to change our hearts and attitudes that we become better and better and more like God, more perfect all the time, as Paul also explained to the Ephesians.

Similarly in our day prophets of Jesus Christ have reemphasized the perfectibility of men under the influence of God. The Prophet Joseph Smith taught in an epistle in January 1834,

We consider that God has created man with a mind capable of instruction, and a faculty which may be enlarged in proportion to the heed and diligence given to the light communicated from heaven to the intellect; and that the nearer man approaches perfection, the clearer are his views, and the greater his enjoyments, till he has overcome the evils of this life and lost every desire for sin . . . (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p.51)

It is also proper and important to note that improvement and perfection is an individual accomplishment. While men certainly may help and encourage one another, each man must grow in perfection by himself, and he must do it without coercion, since perfection comes by his own free choices, building his own moral character through the decisions made throughout the course of a lifetime. Because of the individual nature of the perfecting process, efforts by governments to coerce perfection from their people are not only doomed to failure, but they will actually impede the moral growth of the people by limiting their opportunity to choose to do good.

Of Demagogues and Solving Problems

When demagogues, like Barack Obama, have major political setbacks, like Barack Obama, they usually resort to stirring up anger against a list of enemies. Obama has already begun that effort as his increasingly radical agenda has been difficult for even a growing number of congressional Democrats to bear. Expect him to turn up the volume on the loudspeakers.

For Barack Obama the list has been a catalog of “Big” this and “Big” that, including Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Insurance, Big Banks, Big Business, and so on. The formula involves finding a problem that Obama promised to fix but which remains unfixed, and then blame Big Something. A new set of policies is announced, involving giving the Federal government new authority over the economy, often some fundamental part of it, like healthcare, the financial system, or energy use.

Although his policies will purportedly be targeted on these Bigs, it is actually the general population on whom he paints his targets, the people whom he does not trust with making their own healthcare decisions, the people whom he does not trust with making their own choices of bank accounts and other financial services, the people whose very breath he considers the number one pollutant destroying the earth. It is the liberty of the people that is constricted by Obama’s policy prescriptions, which is undoubtedly why they attract so much objection from so many quarters.

Barack Obama will give a major public speech targeting Big Something for some punishing tax or regulation, and then declare, like some playground bully with a chip on his shoulder, “If they want to fight me on this, then I’m ready for them.” As one businessman reportedly commented late this week, “We are not looking for a fight; we’re looking to solve problems.” If he wants to play the bully, then let's give him the bully treatment, which is just to walk away and get on with our business.