The Temple and the Gulag

I’m pleased to announce that videos of the presentations that were given on the campus of Brigham Young University on 10 November 2018 at the fourth biennial “Temple on Mount Zion” conference are now beginning to appear on the website of the Interpreter Foundation:

https://interpreterfoundation.org/conferences/2018-temple-on-mount-zion-conference/

These videos are, and will continue to be, available for viewing at no charge.  However, they were not produced without cost — so, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I hope that (if you find such efforts worthwhile) you will consider making a year-end donation, however small (or large!) to the Interpreter Foundation.  At a very minimum, if you ever buy anything through Amazon.com, will you please enroll in AmazonSmile?  You should do this even if you designate some charitable recipient other than Interpreter, because making your purchases through AmazonSmile costs you nothing.

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Did you see this article, posted on the Book of Mormon Central website?

“Does the Book of Mormon Really Have “Bad” Grammar?”

Here’s the latest from Book of Mormon Central:

“Why Is the Book of Mormon “Another Testament of Jesus Christ”?”

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I am pleased to see this new video from the Church, and I think that it can be helpful in explaining our beliefs, and what we hold most sacred, to those not of our faith, as well as to those within the Church who haven’t yet been to the temple:

“Church Releases Video Explaining Temple Endowment”

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Well worth a read, from an ongoing serialization:

“CES Reply: Let There Be LiDAR!”

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I failed to share it on its anniversary date, but this address — given by the great Russian novelist, historian, and anti-Soviet dissident hero Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature — will reward a thoughtful reading at any time:

“‘Men Have Forgotten God’: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1983 Templeton Address”

I cite one specific passage from it here, and for a reason.  I have at least a couple of atheists who regularly comment on my blog.  One of them excoriates religion from time to time for the suffering that, in his view, it has inflicted on humankind.  So many people, he says, have been killed in the name of religion!  The obvious response to his criticism is “Citizen Robespierre, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Enver Hoxha, Mao, Castro, and Pol Pot.”  When that response is offered, however, the other inevitably springs into action to deny that there was any particular anti-theistic persecution under Communism and Nazism.  It’s a strange denial, quite indifferent to historical fact.  As this passage from Solzhenitsyn’s 1983 speech illustrates:

It was Dostoevsky . . . who drew from the French Revolution and its seeming hatred of the Church the lesson that “revolution must necessarily begin with atheism.” That is absolutely true. But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot. To achieve its diabolical ends. Communism needs to control a population devoid of religious and national feeling, and this entails the destruction of faith and nationhood. 

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I have long thought that the temple and the Gulag are appropriate opposing symbols.

The Gulag — which, for me, represents the entire class of concentration camps, labor camps, extermination camps, and similar phenomena — embodies the denial that human individuals have any particular value.  For Marxists, particular people are mere instantiations of classes, some of which need to be eliminated.  For the National Socialists, specific individuals were nothing but representatives of approved or disapproved ethnic groups.  Hitler, a social Darwinist, regarded humanity as a whole as no more than “a ridiculous cosmic bacterium” (ein lächerliches kosmisches Bakterium).  For the totalitarians of the twentieth century, entire populations were to be “liquidated.”  And, in the Gulag and at Auschwitz and in the Ukrainian terror-famine and in the Cambodian killing fields and, for that matter, under the blade of Madame Guillotine, they were.  Brutally and remorselessly.  Whole villages and towns were demolished, their records destroyed, their populations murdered, all human traces obliterated.

In stark but wonderful contrast, the temple represents a conviction that human individuals are eternal and of irreplaceable worth.  They aren’t fungible.  Ordinances are performed for particular people, by name.  Families aren’t destroyed; they’re sacralized.  We labor to preserve records of individuals and families, not to destroy them.  We do research, sometimes at considerable cost and effort, sifting through the records that remain in order to identify our ancestors and others who have passed away.  We do this so that we can act on their behalf, for their benefit.  As I’ve said before, in many cases these people are being remembered, and their names spoken, for the first time in generations and perhaps for the first time in centuries.  This is in dramatic and holy opposition to the work of the death camps.  It is, in centrally important ways, a profoundly humanistic enterprise.