Debunking the Debunkers of the Scriptures

Debunking, tke Debunkers of tke Scriptures THERE is an evident desire, if not determination, on the part of some of our pseudo- scientists to tear away the veils of sacred reticence from all that is holy and solemn. Their avowed purpose is to puncture the bubbles of reserve and reverence which we elderly fundamental religionists have wrapped around our accept- ance of creeds and dogma, while they give sympathetic support to those whose religion is science and whose God is the Debunker. These essayists and lecturers, within and without our university halls, have ignorantly assumed, it would appear, that we elderly de- vout worshipers have never had doubts to settle, questions to seek answers for, or religious problems to solve. pERHAPS the one vital differ- *• ence between them and our- selves is that we ancients took our personal difficulties into the decent retiring rooms of our own minds, seeking assistance from God in prayer, while they strip their own gaunt and unlovely souls bare in the public market place and on the lecture rostrum. The spectacle thereof is not edifying. As to the youths of today, some of those who think at all have become co accustomed to these ideas that they pass their teacher's expose up as another educational whoopee. Those who don't bother to think, just glance with bored eyes at the indecent publicly exposed mental disrobing of religious and scientific adjustments with the yawning in- quiry, "What's it all about, any- way: The two main horns of the re- ligio-scientific circus bull are: Revelation and the Bible. "D EVELATION, as quoted from -^ various scientific agnostics, is variously a mental gymnastic, an evidence of hysteria, or an ac- knowledgment of a personal in- feriority complex. The ultra-lib- eral scientific modernist gladly admits that the evolutionary pro- cesses of the mind demand some By SUSA YOUNG GATES forms of devout emotion in their upward climb to complete intellec- tual independence. We old-timers should express our humble thanks for such crumbs of religious com- fort which fall to our palsied hands from the altar-fires of these bril- liant reformers who are waking us up to scientific truths. I suggest here a careful study of the Prophets Joel and Amos. '"THE Bible, Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants are to me even as the personalities of my parents, sacred; sacred to them, and reverenced by me so that I would preserve their human failings, physical and mental, from all earthly eyes. When I speak of them I instinctively relate all that is good and true about them, leav- ing the trifling faults out of the picture. Don't you do the same? How would you feel to have some callous debunker come along and joke about your father's double chin or your mother's cross eyes? Would you join in the merriment? I have little patience with the debunkers who have dragged out every fault or rumored fault about Abraham Lincoln, George Wash- ington and Queen Victoria. So, too, if some lecturer were to give an address on the Prophet Joseph Smith, my father Brigham Young, or Abraham or David, I would thank him if he would quote the histories written by their friends, not those prepared by their detractors. The critics are much given to quoting from everybody outside the Church, but almost never from the Bible. TN 1928, Roger Babson printed ■^ the following in one of his bul- letins: "Charles P. Steinmetz, who was unanimously recognized by the General Electric Company and other great similar organiza- tions as the world's foremost elec- trical engineer, was once visiting my home. While talking over with him prospective future inventions in connection with radio, aero- nautics, power transmission, etc., I asked him: 'What line of research will see the greatest development during the next fifty years?' After careful thought, he replied: 'Mr. Babson, I think the greatest dis- covery will be made along spiritual lines. Here is a force which his- tory clearly teaches has been the greatest power in the develop- ment of men and history. Yet we have merely been playing with it, and have never seriously studied it as we have the physical forces. Some day people will learn that material things do not bring hap- piness and are of little use in mak- ing men and women creative and powerful. Then the scientists of the world will turn their labora- tories over to the study of God and prayer and the spiritual forces which as yet have hardly been scratched. When this day comes, the world will see more advance- ment in one generation than it has seen in the past four.' Huxley wrote: "True science and true religion are twin sisters, and the separation of either from the other is sure to be the death of both. Science prospers exactly in pro- portion as it is religious, and religion nourishes in exact proportion to the scien- tific depth and firmness of its basis. The antagonism of science is not to religion, but to the heathen survivals and bad philosophy under which religion herself is often well-nigh crushed." HTOO many of our modern stu- dents deify doubt. They al- most reach the point of the Know Nothing Party in ancient Greece. They declared at last that "we know not that we know not." So too, those who cultivate the negative attitude, reach the point maintained by Edgar Saltus in his "Theses on Negation:" "There is no help there, nor is there any elsewhere. The Orient is asleep in the ashes of her gods. The Star of Ormuzd has burned out in the skies. On the banks of her sacred seas, Greece, hushed forever- more, rests on the divine limbs of her white immortals. In the sepulchre of the pile Nazarene, humanity guards its last divinity. Every promise is unfulfilled. There is no light save perchance in death. One torture more, one more throb of the heart, and after it — nothing. The grave opens a little, flesh falls in, and the weeds of forgetfulness which soon hide the tomb grow eternally about its vanities. And still

408 The Improvement Era for April, 1930 ib2 voice of the living, of the just and of the unjust, of kings, of felons and of beasts, will be raised unsilenced, until hu- manity, unsatisfied as before, and yet im- patient for the peace of which life has disturbed, is tossed at last, with its shat- teredglobe and forgotten gods, to fertilize the furrows of space where worlds fer- ment. "On this vista the curtain may be drawn. Neither poet nor seer can look beyond. Nature, who is unconscious in her immorality, entrancing in her beauty, savage in her cruelty, imperial in her prodigality, and appalling in her convul- sions, is i o: only deaf, but dumb. There is no answer to any appeal. The best we can do, the best that has ever been done, is to recognize the implacability of the laws that rule the universe and con- template, as calmly as we can, the noth- ingness from which we are come and into which we shall all disappear. The one consolation that we hold, though it is one which may be illusory too, con- sists in the belief that when death comes, fear and hope are at an end. Then wonder ceases; the insoluble no longer perplexes; space is lost; the infinite is r/atik; the farce is done." HTHE Bible has many counts against its sanctity as portrayed by the modernist; yet take com- fort— in spite of all that can be said against it, one finds therein precious historic facts, strains of devout piety together with some most excellent poetic effusions. The critics take it as an acknowledged fact that the symbol of man's cre- ation from a lump of clay and the woman's from the rib of the man is in the same folk-lore legends which fit the earth's creation into six days of twenty-four hours each, while the whale story belongs in the same category with Joshua's sun legend. The witch of Endor ties exactly with the damsel at Phillippi, both evidencing the childishness of Saul and Paul who could record, much less believe, such ancient error. ["T is but a step farther for these critics to turn their scientific eyes upon Jesus, his miracles, his impos- sible virgin birth, and still more un-scientific resurrection. But though I am some four years past the superstitious Biblical span of three-score years and ten, I am expecting all that and more in my own short term of life. More — I look to see them clawing at my reverent belief in the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants. And I shall watch the process, as I am doing today, of their disillusionment with mingled sadness and amusement. They are so immature, these debunkers. I have been the mother of ten sons, and have traveled along their own questing religious ways side by side with them, helping when they wanted help, but always repecting the decency and dignity of silence and reserve in regard to these sacred and solemn personal revealments. I could not strip them or myself mentally and spiritually naked ex- cept in the recesses of our own minds and homes. When appear- ing outside my own life's inner chamber, I seek to clothe my spirit- ual or mental deficiencies in the usual robes of decent restraint with which most men — and almost all women — prefer to appear in public. I remember always that there is need of inner, as of outer concealment of physical, mental, and spiritual deformities. XJOW, in my effort to debunk the debunkers amongst us, I wish to add a few words concerning my own attitude on this subject. I am wholly and fully converted spiritually — as well as convinced mentally — that revelation from our Heavenly Father to his chil- dren on earth has been and is a divine truth. To me, "the Bible is the word of God as far as it is translated correctly." As to the age of the world, the time con- sumed in its organization, I am happy to find that our modern revelation in the Pearl of Great Price teaches that after the creation of the earth Abraham "saw it was after the Lord's time — for as yet the Gods had not appointed unto Adam his reckoning." And, too, I am happy in the assertion of my father, made sixty years ago, when speaking about the age of the earth, as claimed by scientists even then to be millions of years — "How long it has been organized it is not for me to say, and I do not care anything about it." Then the whale story is to me a matter of complete indifference. I am so glorified in the soul-build- ing words of Jonah, which have soothed my suffering hours of des- pair and lifted up my worship to my Father who succored Jonah and my own humble self that I never stop to wonder what kind of a big fish — ship or submarine — it was which enclosed Jonah till he had learned his lesson. AS to the poetic symbolism of ■ the creation of Adam and Eve and their subsequent story, the Pearl of Great Price and the revela- tion of creation therein found sat- isfies my own mind and answers my inquiry. Can the scientist find in evolu- tion of species a more logical expla- nation of man's coming upon this earth than in the words found in Scriptures? "God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and fe- male created he them." I certainly believe in evolution in species, not evolution of species. Adam came and lived out his allotted span of earth-life according to earth's time of reckoning. I love to consider the true accounts of life lived by some of Adam's chosen descend- ants, told in all truth, excusing nothing, concealing only the decent secrets of life's innermost processes. How I enjoy carrying out the Sa- vior's instructions to "Search the Scriptures," for in them I "find eternal life." AS to the brutality of destroying ■■ whole nations and peoples! Anyone who has read the stories of corrupt peoples in Caanan, Egypt, and Assyria, their horrible religious orgies, sex perversions and the dis- eases begotten of such idolatry, is glad that the Father who gave them life, to learn how to obey law by their own free will, com- manded his own executioners to destroy their diseased, corrupted bodies, even to the blind, moronic offspring of such debauched parent- hood. Isn't death far preferable to unrepentant wicked life? All this effort to prove religion by science makes me smile at the boyishness of the efforts made to do so. I wonder if the Prophet Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, David, Moses and Abraham don't say to each other Over There: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity." I Corinthians 13:11, 12, 13. Help me, dear Lord, to be pa- tient with thy developing boys! Teach them the folly of the tearing down the walls of the Temple be- cause of a tiny flaw in the struc- ture. Give me charity! Give them common-sense!