One of my favorite books as a kid was A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Mark Twain was inspired to write it after a dream in which he was a knight burdened by his heavy armor, and wrote a story about a man from the 1800's (Hank, the Connecticut Yankee) who wakes up in medieval England and has to survive. While people much smarter than me categorize it as a satire poking deep fun at the romanticism of the Old South, I simply thought it was a great example of what would happen if you traveled in time back a few hundred or even a few thousand years. The main character uses his 19th century knowledge and experience to single-handedly dismantle the feudal system, unmasking magic with science and everyday (1800's) common sense.
My kids are now growing up in a largely demystified world, where they will never have to wonder what are the lyrics to a popular song, whether an urban legend really happened, or whether global warming truly exists. Okay, maybe not global warming, however, the wealth of information available to them, to me, to all of us on any subject is staggering.
For example, not only can they find the lyrics to a song in mere seconds, but they can also find the names of every person who was ever in the band, the schools each person attended, and with some small amount of searching, the names, phone numbers and addresses of their classmates, teachers and anyone associated with the band. This kind of information, literally at the tips of fingers, has never before been available, and in certain situations, much like that of our Connecticut Yankee, a game, life and history changer.
I've always realized and accepted that religion is based (almost) 100% on faith, on a belief in something that simply cannot be proven. The origins of all core religions (the Big Five – Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism) can be traced back historically to a point at which one either believes or one doesn't. The problem the LDS church is now facing is that belief in the church's foundations are a little different than that of the Big Five. Specifically, while their ancient origins are clouded in murky legend documented decades and centuries after the fact, LDS church's history is recent enough (a scant 200 years) that first person accounts, journals and a wealth of other documentation abounds. Not only has a staggering amount of the information been vetted by researchers and academics with a dizzying amount of clarity, but their texts, papers and even scanned historical documents are available to anyone with an Internet connection.
