Hope continued...

The thoughts on hope from yesterday were inspired in part by a recent post at Mormanity about 'Faith-promoting hoaxes'. (The relationship is a little tangential, hence the separate posts yesterday and today...)

There have been many hoaxes created to discredit the LDS Church, but the ones supporting Church history or doctrine don't get as much press and, in fact, make for a more interesting discussion. Acting from the assumption that the LDS gospel is inherently true, of course--what do we make of stories/arguments/conversion techniques that are logically and factually dubious, yet still encourage people to believe in things that are true? For example, telling someone that Joseph Smith once saved the life of US President Andrew Jackson by predicting an assassination attempt before it happened (false) in an effort to convince them that Joseph Smith was really a prophet (true).

My stake president a few years back told a story where he was visiting with some full-time missionaries and one of them told him about a discussion technique he and his companion used that involved archaeological and scientific evidence for the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon. Being learned in this area, the stake president informed them that the 'facts' presented in their discussion were almost certainly not true and had little to no factual basis at all. "Well," the missionary returned, "the point is...it is a very effective technique to bringing people to the gospel..."

It's one thing to share stories and arguments that you 'heard from someone else' and haven't verified--which is merely careless--and quite another to purposefully fabricate and/or use arguments that you know to be false in order to achieve your goals, which is low, underhanded and dishonest (among other things) even if the goal is good.

In accordance with our discussion of true and false hopes yesterday, let's discuss the actual differences (if any) in two recent LDS converts, one whose testimony is based on true things, and one that has been 'flim-flammed' into getting baptized by a mix of bogus story telling and a misrepresentation of facts. From a personal standpoint, it's hard to quantify any difference in the two personal testimonies--not that testimonies can really be quantified anyway. The main difference, just as with the 'hopes' yesterday, is that in the second situation, the false testimony has a large chance of being 'exposed' sometime in the future. The second person may chance upon some reliable sources, or have a discussion with someone in the know, and discover that some/all of the things that served as the foundation of their 'faith' are wrong--which quite likely will cause them to question the truthfulness of everything they've learned in and about the Church so far, including things that are actually true. If the lying party is lucky, by the time this 'day of discovery' comes about, this new convert will have already have absorbed a number of other, 'truer' things about the gospel that will shore up their testimony, leading only to a loss of credibility for the person who told them about those things in the past, not a total loss of credibility for the Church itself, but there's no guarantee of that, of course... This provides yet another reason (if we needed any more) why lying about true things is not an effective missionary technique, since it's essentially 'building a house on sand' which may remain standing for a while, but eventually the rains will come and wash it away. I doubt the 'put sand first and hopefully someone will replace it with stone later' technique will have any positive results in the long run...

Interestingly, though...what if that 'day of discovery' never occurs? There's no guarantee that a person who hears a false story about Church history or doctrine will ever enter into a situation where the falseness is exposed. If that never occurs, though, is there really a fundamental difference between a 'true' testimony and a 'false' testimony if the personal feelings and actions are inherently the same? This certainly doesn't excuse the 'end justifies the means' argument, but it is an interesting thing to ponder...

[Side Note: Politically astute readers will note the similiarity between this principle and the recent controversy involving CBS's documents about Pres. Bush. As even casual research has shown, the documents are almost certainly forged, yet also almost certainly still happen to contain truthful statements about Pres. Bush's Guard service... Does the end justify the means here in the political arena? Discuss...]