ChristianEternalism

Play: 01. Eternalism Introduction

Eternalism is philosophy and theology taken together — a view of existence and an understanding of God in one system. This opening module explains where the term comes from, introduces the green/yellow/red color code used throughout the course, and lays out the three intended outcomes: increased testimony, clearer thinking, and more consistent action. True doctrine understood changes behavior faster than the study of behavior does.

Play: 02. Thinking Systematically

Philosophy is not optional. Everyone has one; the only question is whether it was chosen or absorbed. This module lays out the branches of philosophy as a hierarchy of facts — metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, aesthetics — shows how each branch depends on the one beneath it, and introduces the primacy issues that divide the restored gospel from the philosophies of men. Includes the first primacy quiz.

Play: 03. Axioms

Existence, consciousness, and identity are the three axioms: irreducible, inescapable, and invincible starting points that every argument assumes — including arguments made against them. This module shows how each axiom is affirmed in the very act of denying it, and why a philosophical barrel without a solid bottom cannot hold anything you put in it.

Play: 04. Ontological Frameworks

There are only three ways to relate God to reality: God outside the box, God inside the box, or God is the box. This module works through creation from nothing, pantheism, and the framework taught by the Restoration, then shows how the framework you choose settles everything downstream — including whether the problem of evil is a problem at all.

Play: 05. Plato vs Aristotle

Western civilization split along a single question: does reality conform to consciousness, or does consciousness conform to reality? Plato's two worlds and Aristotle's one world produced two vocabularies, two theories of knowledge, and two incompatible views of God. What historical Christianity holds as its greatest truth, the Restoration identifies as its greatest heresy — and the reverse.

Play: 06. Holy Spirit

The Holy Ghost and the Holy Spirit are not interchangeable terms. This module distinguishes the third member of the Godhead from the divine substance that fills immensity, relates both to the Light of Christ, and reads the baptism of fire in Helaman 5 as immersion in a real heavenly element rather than as a figure of speech.

Play: 07. Omni

Omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence are true — the sectarian definitions of them are not. Drawing on D&C 88 and 93 and on Orson Pratt, Erastus Snow, Charles Penrose, and Brigham Young, this module defines God's attributes in terms of a real divine substance operating under eternal law. It also draws the line between feeling the Spirit and feeling an emotion.

Play: 08. Metaphysics Summary

Six contrasts summarize the metaphysics of the Restoration against the metaphysics of the apostasy: creation from matter rather than from nothing, indestructible matter, unchangeable eternal law, the law of identity, the law of causality, and lawful rather than supernatural miracles. A consolidating review before the course turns to how we know things.

Play: 09. Epistemology Overview

Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know. This module frames the usual oppositions — reason against faith, heart against mind, observation against revelation — and argues that the restored gospel does not require choosing a side. The real divide is lawfulness against willfulness: whether truth is discovered or wished into being.

Play: 10. Proofs

Three kinds of proof are available: existential (test it and live it), philosophical (does it survive the axioms), and theological (what has God revealed). This module works each one in turn, puts the burden of proof where it belongs, and introduces a scale of evidence for weighing claims — including the claims of mysticism.

Play: 11. Truth Defined

Truth is the correspondence of an idea to reality — and Christ's own definition in D&C 93:24, knowledge of things as they are, as they were, and as they are to come, is a correspondence definition. This module works through Aristotelian logic, three tests for truth, and the difference between truth of thought and truth of speech.

Play: 12. Truth Attacked

Remove an objective standard of truth and something always takes its place. This module identifies the usual substitutes — appeals to passion, to popular opinion, and to authority — then does the harder work of showing how scriptures, prophets, and even God Himself get pressed into service as fallacious authority substitutes. Blind obedience is not the alternative to skepticism.

Play: 13. Faith Defined

Faith is not belief without evidence, and it is not Kierkegaard's leap into the absurd. Contrasting the blind-faith tradition with Orson Pratt, this module places faith on a scale that begins with evidence, moves to action, and returns with more evidence — the pattern of look, leap, look. Mysteries are invitations, not walls.

Play: 14. Ethics Overview

Ethics asks what a person ought to do — a prescriptive question that no accumulation of descriptive fact settles by itself. This module separates meta-ethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics, shows why contested questions stall when neither side argues at the meta level, and reduces the field to two broad camps: duty ethics and value ethics.

Play: 15. Happiness vs Duty

Duty ethics says the good is obedience regardless of outcome. Value ethics says the good is what actually sustains and enriches life. This module traces duty ethics from Plato to Kant, exposes the bait-and-switch hiding inside some very familiar phrases, and asks why the scriptures call it the great plan of happiness rather than the great plan of duty.

Play: 16. Life vs Love

If life is the standard of value, then virtues and vices are not arbitrary labels — they are simply what promotes or destroys living. This module builds the case from the life-or-death alternative that makes values possible in the first place, then tests the familiar claim that God is love against that standard.

Play: 17. Emotion

Emotions are not primaries. They are automatic responses to value judgments already made, which is why two people can meet the same fact and feel opposite things. This module lays out the sequence of thinking, valuing, and feeling, and reads Alma's counsel to bridle your passions as evidence that emotions are meant to be governed rather than obeyed.

Play: 18. Good Love, Bad Love

Love and hatred are not intrinsically good or evil. Both are directed at something, and the object determines the moral quality. This module distinguishes Christlike love and Christlike hatred from their counterfeits, treats the scriptures on righteous hatred directly, and shows how a hierarchy of values can be tipped, flattened into indifference, and finally reversed.

Play: 19. Deadly Virtues Overview

There are two ways to miss the mark: undershoot it through obvious vice, or overshoot it through false doctrine that looks like virtue. This module introduces the three deadly virtues drawn from duty ethics, uses D&C 76 to locate over- and undershooting, and shows how correct doctrines — grace, obedience, faith — are corrupted by distorting their definitions.

Play: 20. Unconditional Love

Divine love is real, actionable, and proportional — and the scriptures state its conditions plainly. This module traces the unconditional-love doctrine to its historical source in agape theology, contrasts it with the conditional structure of covenants and of the tree of life, and works through what loving your enemies actually requires of your judgment.

Play: 21. Selflessness

Selflessness and selfishness are not the only two options. This module recovers the self-full alternative in value ethics — give and take, growing from grace to grace — and reads the altruist interpretation of familiar hymns and scriptures against the many passages that plainly promise gain, inheritance, and a crown of glory to the faithful.

Play: 22. Self-Sacrifice

The law of sacrifice is not self-destruction. It is trading up: surrendering a lesser value for a greater one. Using The Giving Tree as the clearest popular statement of the opposite view, this module asks whether Christ's Atonement was self-sacrifice in the altruist's sense, and what the doctrine of eternal reward implies about the answer.

Play: 23. Eternal Progression

Progression comes line upon line — through the Light of Christ, the gift of the Holy Ghost, temple ordinances, and the resurrection. This closing module returns to Christ as the center of both the philosophy and the theology, names the common pitfalls along the way, and makes the case for becoming a defender of the faith.

Play: 24. Discussing Politics

Politics is the branch that protects facts — the external conditions a person needs in order to live well. This opening politics module reviews the hierarchy of the branches, defines politics in relation to everything beneath it, and takes up the practical question directly: what the Church's political neutrality does and does not mean for what may be said at church.

Play: 25. Political Primacy

Flourishing requires two things: the internal conditions supplied by ethics and the external conditions supplied by politics — habit and habitat. This module introduces the political primacy issues, surveys three theories of justice and the doctrine of positive law, and includes a political checkup you take before the arguments are made rather than after.

Play: 26. Justice Definitions

Two rival definitions of justice remain in contest: the social good and natural rights. Beginning with the Dodo's race in Alice in Wonderland — everybody has won, and all must have prizes — this module examines collective rights, equality of kind under the law, and what a natural-rights definition of justice requires you to concede and to defend.

Play: 27. Political Unity

Is opposition in all things intrinsically good? 2 Nephi 2:11 is routinely read that way, and this module tests the reading. It then takes up the disunity among Latter-day Saints themselves, summarizes the competing definitions in play, and offers a three-tier resolution for reaching unity without pretending the disagreements are not real.

Play: 28. Kingdom of God

If the object is a kingdom, is the King simply the law? This module answers the charge of positivism by going back to metaphysics, contrasts the two plans presented in the council in heaven, distinguishes justice from benevolence, and reads the first mile and the second mile as the line between what may be compelled and what must be freely given.

Play: 29. Equality

Equal in what respect? Numbers, people, and snowflakes are each equal in some ways and unequal in others, and that ambiguity is doing political work. This module separates equality of nature from equality of outcome, shows why equality must be tempered by justice, and argues that consistent egalitarianism is not merely undesirable but impracticable.

Play: 30. Liberty

Liberty, freedom, and agency name the same thing, and the word carries at least three distinct meanings that keep people talking past one another. This module separates natural freedom (metaphysics), moral freedom (ethics), and circumstantial freedom (politics), and shows precisely what each one protects.

Play: 31. License

License is injury done under the name of liberty, and it is the reason freedom must be governed by justice. This module draws the line between liberty and license, distinguishes both from anarchy and from coercive force, and maps the intersections where freedom, virtue, and good fortune meet — or fail to.

Play: 32. Learning the Constitution

The Constitution is worth studying well enough to teach. This module gives a working map of the document — the legislative, executive, and judicial articles, the remaining articles, the amendments, and the sweeping or elastic clauses — so that befriending the Constitution can mean something more specific than approving of it.

Play: 33. Constitutional Crisis

Hanging by a thread is a claim about a specific document, and it can be examined. This module traces the shift from a fixed constitution of enumerated powers to a document of evolving meaning, sets that timeline against a map of property control, and asks what a post-constitutional era requires of citizens who can see it happening.

Play: 34. House Divided

Matthew 12:25, quoted by Lincoln on the eve of the Civil War, is a warning about contradictions. This module examines popular sovereignty, the difference between a democratic republic and a simple democracy, the tyranny of the majority, and the debt and welfare structures that translate license into tyranny — closing on why the individual, not the collective, is the great thing in the Lord's accounting.

Play: 35. Safeguards

Three inspired safeguards protect liberty: written guarantees, structural guarantees, and foundational guarantees resting in the character of the people. This module shows why written guarantees alone are frail, draws on the Book of Mormon's record of what follows when the foundational layer erodes, and makes the case for positive engagement rather than withdrawal.

Play: 36. Course Summary

A review of the politics course in ten questions: what guidance we have on discussing politics at church, which primacy issues matter most, how unity is possible among competing definitions of justice, how the Constitution is under attack, and what the three safeguards to freedom are. Useful as a standalone summary or as a final pass before starting again.

Play: 37. Which Came First: God or Reality?

The first primacy issue, applied. This case study sets the three E's of Eternalism — eternal laws, eternal truths, eternal lives, summarized as lawfulness — against the three A's of the Apostasy — absolutism of God, of faith, and of others, summarized as willfulness. Apostasy and Restoration run as parallel tracks, and Joseph Smith's work was to turn things upside down in order to turn them right side up.

Play: 38. Primacy of Consciousness Examples

What happens when the primacy of consciousness is taken seriously enough to live by. This case study examines the claims of The Secret — that the universe answers to feeling and that thought creates reality — follows them to their real-world consequences in the 2009 sweat lodge deaths, and contrasts the science of wishful thinking with the way the gospel actually works.

Play: 39. True Wealth Examples

In which branch of philosophy do riches, wealth, and treasure belong? This case study starts with wealth as a metaphysical fact, then lets Brigham Young reframe it: metaphysical wealth is not riches, though it can prepare a person to receive the true and eternal riches of knowledge and wisdom.

Play: 40. Tragedy of Mixed Premises

Western civilization could not decide between Plato and Aristotle, so it split the difference — the primacy of consciousness for religion and morals, the primacy of existence for science and practical life. This case study shows what that split does to a person: a Sunday self and a weekday self, a junk heap of contradictions, cherry-picked scripture, and the low-grade guilt described in James 1:8.

Play: 41. Resolving Mixed Premises

Identifying contradictions is dangerous; failing to identify them is worse. This case study takes up the practical work of finding and eliminating mixed premises — tier-one identification, three-tier thinking, and the discipline of knowing what you stand against because you know what you stand for. Revelation 3:15–16 asks, at minimum, for consistency.

Play: 42. Divine Attributes

God's attributes are routinely defined in ways that quietly require the primacy of consciousness. This case study tests omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence against the axioms and against the revealed doctrine of eternal law and eternal matter, and shows that the lawful definitions are both scripturally faithful and philosophically coherent.

Play: 43. Deadly Virtues Proofs

The three proofs applied to the three deadly virtues. This case study runs unconditional love, selflessness, and self-sacrifice through existential, philosophical, and theological testing — the same method established in epistemology — to show why doctrines that feel virtuous can fail every test at once.

Play: 44. Welfare Principles

Which has primacy as the moral ideal: charitable giving or provident living? This case study places provident living in ethics and charitable giving in politics, sorts the poor into four quadrants, and examines what providing in the Lord's way accomplishes that a transfer payment cannot.