 Caleb Jones lives in the Pacific Northwest, is a husband, father, engineer, and a practicing member of the LDS church. He has a computer science degree from BYU and works as a systems architect at Disney focusing on large scale data. I've seen some of the stuff he does at Disney and it looks like so much fun. I just kind of wish sometimes that I could do what he does every day. He is passionate about science and religion, particularly in areas such as astronomy, network science, emergentism, religious cosmology, and transhumanism. His introduction to transhumanism came from the writings of Freeman Dyson and have developed through associations with the MTA. In addition to blogging on the MTA blog, transfigurism.org, Caleb also blogs about network science analysis and visualization on allthingsgraphed.com and co-authors the blog NavigatingDiscipleship.com with his wife. Thanks, Caleb. Thank you for that introduction. So Carl Youngblood, you spoke earlier about breaking myths and that myth is the language of religion. If that's the case, then semiotics really is the study of that language. And I am not a semiotician, so I'll put that out there, but what I really wanted to showcase was with even just a 101 level understanding of what semiotics is, that can transform and improve a view of faith, and particularly when it has to deal with revelation. So as a show of hands, how many people here are familiar with what semiotics is? So I can know how quickly I can skip through different sections. Okay, about half and half. All right, so we'll go through it. So as we've developed as a species, we've really crossed this planet geographically and carried our symbols with us. We've carried our signatures, our portraits, and our projections. So we share an evolutionary history of semiotics as evident in this survey of early common symbols found in stone age artifacts across different regions. They follow patterns of migration as well, which is what I find fascinating. We see this pattern as well in how religion has evolved over time, influenced by culture, language, music, and interaction with the divine as they find semiological expression. One of my favorite quotes is from William James, I think gets to the crux of this. He said, religious language clothes itself in such poor symbols as our life affords. I think there's great insight in this perspective that religion is limited to the semiological domain of those it finds expression in. And as our knowledge, aesthetics, culture, et cetera change, our religious expression will change too as we find new ways to express those religious longings. In Mormonism, our scriptures, much like Christianity, make reference to likening, comparing, typifying. We have models, maxims, parables, allegories, metaphors, et cetera. All of these are semiological expressions in our scriptures and teachings. The reason I absolutely love this scripture which I used to borrow from my title is that the instance where the word is likened is used here. It's because it breaks the fourth wall and reveals the author's hand and intention in the process of revelation, which I think is really important. Breaking the fourth wall is a literary device. It evokes a conversation between author, messenger, and audience. It ties all parties together and invites them to consider each other's realities. It brings a sense of self-awareness and agency that otherwise can be missed. And it's this self-awareness that I think is so important for religious expression and faith today. In order to illustrate this, I'll look at each word in this phrase from a semiological perspective. First is that word unto. It's a functional word indicating reference or directionality. A common Buddhist teaching highlights the difference between the subject and the object that it points at. For instance, it says towards the end there, a person who only looks at a finger pointing at the moon and mistakes it for the moon will never see the real moon. Joseph Fielding Smith Jr. highlights how scriptures are replete with allegorical stories, faith-building parables, and artistic speech. All of this points to some fundamentals of semiotics which I think are important to cover briefly. I'll do it here shortly. So I thought of a way to illustrate this. I have a lot of slides here and I tried to just build this picture as we go along. Hopefully it will make sense. At the base of this of semiotics is communication, particularly communication between two self-aware individuals. The difficulty is how do you communicate something from an unfathomably complex mind to a different, independent, and likewise unfathomably complex mind. The person communicating has in her mind an object to communicate. This object is what is being signified. It can be a picture, a concept, sound, truth, smell, taste, aesthetic, experience, fiction, model, anything, as long as it can be communicated via some chosen medium of communication. In order to communicate this, she must encode this into abstract symbols or signifiers. In this case, she chooses the concepts of mountains, colors, and ruins. She then must select symbols within the medium of communication. Here in this example, she's using the spoken English words, mountains, colors, and ruins. This is the process of semiological encoding. The other party then must understand those communicated symbols and then construct abstract symbols. Then form an object to try to understand the original idea that the other had. And I think we've all had experiences where this process didn't quite work the way we had hoped. As was the case when I failed to decode a text message from my wife recently that reminded me not to leave our son at school during the science fair. Issues in decoding. It also breaks down when there's no longer a shared medium of communication. Language, we see that. Differences in how ideas don't transfer across cultures as easily. Those can be difficulties. In particular, in decoding, the process can break down in issues of comprehension, relevancy, engagement, value judgments, and the non-neutrality of communication medium itself. I think we're all probably having acute awareness of the non-neutrality of Facebook communication. Furthermore, even before communicating, the task of encoding can break down on ideas of accurate sign selection, biases, lack of trust with audience, compensating for audience, and again that non-neutrality of the communication medium. I think that this is what Paul was referring to when he was maybe not by name but that conceptually when he talked about knowing or prophesying in part and that we see through the glass but darkly with the hope and faith towards a greater time of clarity. This all comes back to the topic of religion. We see visions of greatness as we commune with the divine. Then we seek to find ways to express it, that greatness, using the crude symbols our life can afford. The word what references the thing or things in question. So James E. Talmud's observed that God is often treated merely as a projection of our own traits. And Greek and Roman mythologies were very much projections of human nature, the embodiments of different, or different natures. As a tool for exploring those natures, there are benefits here. But as New Testament scholar and T. Wright points out, there are problems when our own human nature becomes an object of worship. In regards to modern society's obsession with eroticism, he noted the goddess Aphrodite, even though unnamed, is believed in and served by millions. In the wake of global financial crisis and scandals, he points out, we still assume that even though something has gone horribly wrong, that the only thing to do is to shore up this idol and get it going again. And critiquing our modern machines of war, he said, no matter how many body bags are brought home, we still assume that that's how the world ought to work. Now he does clarify and say that he's not a killjoy, a communist or nor a pacifist, but that we must seek to challenge these idols that can be set up at times. This kind of idolatry has a long history with religions we're probably all familiar with. I absolutely love Isaiah in this regard. Isaiah brings an iconoclastic perspective. Here, Isaiah, in this opening chapter in Isaiah, Isaiah critiques the uselessness of religious symbols at the time. Whenever I read this scripture, I like to liken it to our own set of religious symbols so I can see how I could use this to likewise critique whether or not I'm treating symbols that are available to me correctly. So I'll flip the language a little bit there. How are tithes and fast offerings used? Does the Lord delight in our casseroles in home teaching, visiting teaching? Do we remember who we worship? What do our hymns provoke us to do or be? What effects do our Sabbaths and general conferences have on us? Is our use of sacred spaces in our temples worthy of God? Would the Lord hate our meetings in family home evenings? Of course, my selection of Elias symbols here is somewhat arbitrary. Regardless, however, these are intentionally provocative questions, but I think that's the point Isaiah's making here. Our religious symbols, when detached from how they relate to the larger picture of what they signify in God, become ineffectual and worthless. They become idols and we become idol worshipers, mistaking pointing hands for the moon they point to. Now Isaiah nor I are merely iconoclasts. Isaiah was truly prophetic in the purpose and meaning of those symbols and reattached them to their intended use, to become clean, to put away evil doings, to learn, to do well, to seek discernment, to relieve the oppressed, to plead for the widow, all this in the framework of forgiveness with God. Returning to the scripture, next is the word shall. This denotes choice or freedom of the author is what really draws me to this scripture. Anyone bring their seer stone with them? There you go, there you go. So I challenged my son last year to take notes. There you go. I challenged my son last year to take notes during general conference talk, but I challenged him to try to use symbols as he did so, and this is what he came up with. Any guesses of who the author of that conference talk, there's a clue in there if you can find it. There you go, you got it. So this was by the talk of Uptorf. It was last April conference, the gift of grace. So you can decode that meaning there. So I've gone through and done this exercise a few times with Elia's sacrament meetings. I try to draw what the hymns mean to me. So here's some examples. This is while of these emblems we partake, and you have to excuse I'm obviously not an artist. In humility our savior upon the cross of Calvary and Jesus of Nazareth, Savior and King. Freeman Dyson makes a point that's relevant here. In his book, Infinite All Directions, he reflects back on science at the beginning of the 20th century when there were great mountain peaks of which dominated scientific visions and attitudes that the landscape of physics was almost fully mapped with only a few unimportant valleys to be surveyed. But he also noticed in his time and when he wrote this in the 1980s that we are beginning to understand that the jungles, both literal and figurative, are the richest and most vibrant parts of God's creation. Then the richest and diverse and unexpected flora and fauna, we've come back to the rainforest, so to speak. I had the opportunity to ask him about this analogy, how it could also work for religion. And he agreed and he mentioned that this is especially true in the context of Mormon religion, is his comment there. So what are some of the transformative results this kind of semiological approach can provide? Instead of divining God's one will, we can see that God's will is infinite in diversity, but within a domain, doctrine and policies can be treated less as edicts and instead be approached as milestones. Fixed religious symbols are instead used as aesthetic tools for finding meaning. Devotional or reductive interpretations are expanded by literary analysis. Singular idealized interpretations instead follow the pattern of manna and are reintegrated, reapplied. Instead of there only being one possible right way or outcome, we see many even infinite possible outcomes within that domain of God's will that we may choose from. Rights and rituals rather than being treated as final or instead as expressions of evolving faith. Passive acceptance is abandoned for the self-awareness that comes from active choosing as we take responsibility for our own beliefs rather than advocate them to another. I'll skip through here and since I'm running lower on time, the word I hear obviously reveals about authorship and I wanted to get to some of the meat here. This is a huge debate within Mormonism. When is a prophet acting as a man or is acting a woman? This has a couple problems. First, why isn't anyone asking when a prophetess is speaking as a woman or speaking as a prophetess? So technical authority definitions aside, we have functioning prophetesses today even if unordained. I watched the most recent general woman's broadcast and their leadership and efforts to focus our faith more on refugee outreach is nothing short of prophetic. Second, it proposes a false dichotomy. It forces us to pull apart the agency and person from the divine calling. It dehumanizes religion. This is a mistake and often leads to implied or explicit infallibility of leaders. Fundamentally, the man or woman is always present in the limitations of their knowledge to decode what they feel from God and then in turn encode that in a way which others can then decode. So I'm gonna skip forward here a bit and briefly mention there are four ways that we as individuals can understand prophetic vision and judge it. First, Christ mentions the two great commandments. We have Paul who mentions that prophecy will fail as it's detached from charity. We have Moroni mentioning how anything that provokes us to do good and to believe Christ comes from that spirit of Christ. And Joseph Smith powerfully taught about the origins and limits of authority that must be exercised within a context of virtue. These filters just skip through a little bit here. So a landmine in this ground of debate around Mormonism is that, well, God won't allow prophets to lead the church astray. The media arguments and interpretations surrounding this are almost always escapist in nature and provoke bolts of lightning, sudden diseases inflict on prophets, et cetera, but all advocate responsibility to discern away from individuals. This kind of hermeneutic filter approach has a provocative, but I think much more robust way forward and I'll make this my final form, we'll have to cut that last part out. Okay, so if or when, as history indicates, prophecy advocates something that fails these tests to prophecy, what are we to do? I think this kind of approach where we look at the way of hermeneutically understanding these ways to understand prophecy and apply it leads to ideas of how these prophecies will fail, not because God magically comes down with the bolt of lightning, that they fail precisely because the disciples of Christ simply say no. But conversely, and this is important, when prophecy advocates something that passes these tests and which might go against commonly held opinions and practices, disciples of Christ will repent and turn towards Christ. We remove Christ from this and place any other object there, we become those idol worshipers that Isaiah was talking about. This gives prophecy the power to call to repentance as that repentance leads towards Christ, but it also gives power to disciples of Christ to be a balancing force against imperfections of process and partnership of prophecy as we work together towards Christ with mutual forgiveness. Finally, Lichen, and I just wanted to skip down to a final point here. Richard Bushman paints a picture of expanded scripture and takes us back to this evolutionary tradition of religion. He mentions that scripture comes from all people and that God gives all people scripture in their myths and their visions. Canon, however, can be selective whereas scripture spans creeds and religions, Canon becomes whatsoever a group feels inspired to use, to judge or hold themselves accountable to. Enti Wright makes a similar connection when he sums up the three biblical coordinates of Christian wisdom that we are called to reflect the creator's wisdom and care into the world. We contextualize our wisdom as part of a much bigger world full of interlocking connections and mutual relationships that our knowledge is never in isolation, that we can be bold and humble in stating what we have seen and know, but we'll always covet other angles of vision. This is why I love this phrase unto what shall I liken? The breaking of the fourth wall of Revelation evokes a much needed conversation between author, messenger, and audience. It ties all parties together and invites them to consider each other's realities. It is a gift of grace from God and it is a gift that we can extend to each other. And as I believe as we do so with self-awareness and agency that otherwise is sometimes absent, our religious discussions will be elevated and a sense of authenticity and Christ-centered faith can better grow. Thank you.