Take What God Gives You

In true modernist fashion, I hereby state that we are better now than we were before. The present is an improvement upon the past, and to make changes to our current society that would make us more like past people and cultures from how we are now would be a regression and the opposite of improvement. Examples would be how we no longer believe that the cause of a valcano eruption is a god expressing his wrath. We don't believe that rain is angels' tears, and an outbreak of malaria is simply a lot of mosquitoes who spread the disease and a lack of prevention on the part of those affected. Really, these risks that are indicative of and associated with pre-modernity are still risks today. The big difference is the perceived causes of such natural risks. We have positive, natural science to thank for that. It is still being refined, of course. But we can certainly receive such knowledge without betraying God. If we believe that God created everything, we must believe that includes science. Therefore, a study of science is, in part, a study of God.
This modernization of knowledge and science also helps our understanding of God; and in more indirect ways than just another facet of Him, those facets including natural science. The modernization of social science has also opened up a valuation of reflexivity and reopened, some might even say 'restored,' past ideologies that were unnaturally extinguished. Such reflexivity can only be a good thing; well, honest reflexivity can only be a good thing. Like any responsible scientist, we won't say that stepping back out of the context and thinking objectively reveals truth. But such processes will sift out that which is not accurate. This leaves more plausible possibilities to be tested and eventually substituted for further, more acceptable possibilities.
The Reformers all came out of the modernist tradition. They thought critically about what they saw. They questioned. They second-guessed. They asked “What if?” and “Why?” The effectiveness and accuracy of religion is tough to be measured, however. There are no exogenous checks or tests of the root system by which we may know whether such changes are improvements. The only tests available to us are the ones given by the source of such an ideology as a belief in the non-testable. Such tests would include a feeling “in the mind and in the heart,” and a “burning in the bosom,” and “by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things.” These tests have a heavy assumption, of course. This assumption is that we accept God to be a literal Heavenly Father who shows His patriarchal care for us by providing a way to live with Him and our loved ones again. The Reformers held such an assumption, and modified their theologies to most closely resemble and reflect that assumption.
The ultimate and most extreme of the Reformers would be those whom claim a knowledge and truth which they received; not by reasoning themselves to a point of logic security, nor by forming a hypothesis and dismissing all other options. Their ideas, through a rational process according to the traditional theological assumption, came straight from the source, and therefore are not tainted by terrestrial factors. It is a wonder to me that more people didn’t see this logical path to a divine claim. All we have; in mainstream theology, anyway; are Mohammed, Joseph Smith, and Reverend Moon, who is more on the fringe. They all claim direct revelation from the source of all theology: Heavenly Father. If this one great assumption is accepted, then there isn’t really a way out of believing any one of these men; before, that is, we read their works for ourselves and receive a witness in our own souls that what they put forward is true. What is more reflexive than returning straight to the very foundation of your baseline assumptions as these men did?