NOM

Once upon a time I contacted Alonzo Gaskill to try and sort out some issues with him. Not very helpful; in fact he insulted me with “How could you grow up in the SF Bay Area in the 70s/80s and NOT know Joseph Smith was a polygamist?” Gaskill Gaslighted me! No problem he’s deeply, deeply invested in the system and I understand he has to somehow reconcile things to himself. As the conversation went on my wife joined in and I pressed on him for a binary answer (yes or no) to this question:

“Will I, as a resigned member, be with my Spouse on the other side?”

After some heeing and hawing he came up with, “I just believe that there must be some mechanism to keep you two together.” Which wasn’t a yes or no but a simple surrender to the idea that a loving God wouldn’t separate us from our loved ones. He refused to say yes or no because (I believe) he’s a good, loving, Christian man.

Binary answers are brutal to members. They leave no room for feelings. It’s yes or no. For example if you’re discussing worthiness issues you can draw the line at: “Should middle-aged men be asking underage girls if they masturbate?” Yes or No? No spin, no “buts”, or “you need to understand” just yes or no.

Binary questions. They’re a bitch but they make you take a side.

Thank you for pointing this out. I think I've been conditioned, not just in the church, to ask open-ended questions to get at the reasons someone believes something. Binary questions in an interview setting, for example, would do no good whatsoever.

In this circumstance though, I think it not only requires someone to take a stand but to better understand their own thinking behind that position. I love it.

If someone did that to me, I would insist that my answer is provisional and that I get a chance to clarify my precise stance afterward, on giving a degree of confidence rather than a yes/no, or on giving what I think is the relevant context.

Let's make it abstract. Suppose you think negative numbers are bad in response to "How much froozle?" and the more negative, the worse. I think the correct answer is definitely -0.1. But you insist that I only answer the question, "Is froozle negative? Yes or no?"

I'm not going to answer that question unless you let me clarify afterward, or ask me multiple questions to find out what I really think about froozle.

Or maybe you don't think in terms of an amount at all, but in terms of "froobed." "Is it froobed? Yes or no?" you say. Now I have to translate, and information gets lost. Maybe I think you would think it's froobed if froozle is positive. So I say "45%" and that's the best answer I can give - and it relies on a guess about what you think.

Maybe I think the answer to your question is highly context-dependent, but you think it's absolute. I think froozle should be -0.1 on weekdays, but 2.3 on weekends. What I think is a function of the day of the week but you want me to answer with the sign of a single value. What can I possibly do with "Is froozle negative? Yes or no?" besides answering "Sometimes"?

I guess what I'm getting at is that there are good reasons to not answer a binary question directly.

Don't get me wrong: there are plenty of bad reasons. I think human beings, apologists in particular, too often let the possible universes that underlie their explanations mix together in their heads, and that pinning them down on one can be a good way to keep those universes properly separated. I think they know at some level that they do this, and that it accounts for a lot of wishy-washy answers to direct questions.