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Tal Bachman is an internationally recognized singer-songwriter from Vancouver, Canada.
As the son of rock legend Randy Bachman (The Guess Who, BTO), Tal grew up around music. (In fact, pictures of Tal as a pre-schooler sitting at the drum kit in his father?s studio can be found in the sleeve of his first album.) It wasn?t long before Tal was playing the drums and numerous other instruments in various incarnations of his dad?s post-BTO bands - though it took quite a while before he would pursue his own career in music.
Raised strictly in the Mormon church, Tal spent two years in South America performing missionary work and learning Spanish. Upon his return to North America, Tal married and began his own family. (He and his wife Tracy now have
seven children.) After a short time on the west coast, where he was raised between B.C. and Washington State, Tal and his young family headed for Utah, where, in the bosom of church and family, he returned to school, studying
politics, philosophy, and history, and reading voraciously.
Well-read, and a thinker by nature, Tal had become increasingly puzzled and disturbed by the mounting evidence suggesting that the founding events of Mormonism had been fabricated. Finally, just as he was completing Staring down The Sun, he felt he had to remove himself and his young family from an organization whose claims he could no longer believe to be true. As a virtual elder in the local congregation - a Sunday school teacher, no less - Tal had to go through an awkward but necessary official removal process, doubly difficult and uncomfortable in such a small, tight-knit Mormon community on the island where they live.
The Mormon Curtain is proud to contain some of Tal Bachman's very best.
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| | Does Anyone Else Hate The Term "Anti-Mormon"
| | Posted Jan 26, 2006, at 12:20 PM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: Tal Bachman | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
 TOP | | I hate the term "anti-Mormon". And I hate it for a few reasons.
1.) The term has been rendered meaningless by the church's funding and promoting of "pro-Mormon" apologists who ask us to disbelieve Joseph Smith, about as much as do other supposed "anti-Mormons" (see also point four below);
2.) The term is sometimes used by Mormons to describe those who merely value fact over non-fact, like, say, those who don't believe our sun is drawing its light from Kolob, but who have no particular animosity to Mormons, or their choice to believe things, nor any particular desire to disabuse them of their ideas.
3.) It betrays the cult fantasy of being the chosen few besieged by deliberately mendacious, wicked, omnipresent "enemies". One example of this was Dallin Oaks' insinuation that the entire news media was deliberately conspiring to withhold the "crucial" information that "the image of the salamander was often used to refer to fire", etc., during the Hoffmann affair.
4.) The term "anti-Mormon" is sometimes applied by members to quotes from church sources themselves. Obviously, when a paragraph from a sitting church president can be considered both "pro-Mormon" and "anti-Mormon" by members, the term has ceased to have any meaning.
5.) It implies that those who have concluded that Joseph was lying when he, say, began telling girls he needed to marry and have sex with them lest a homicidal angel kill him, feel personal animosity toward those who believe those stories, when in fact many of us feel great affection for many members of the church.
6.) What I most dislike about this term is that it casts as specific religious bigotry what is in fact a simple dislike of fraud and a corresponding wish to expose it. That is, to characterize arguments against Mormon fraud as "anti-Mormon", rather than "anti-fraud", bespeaks conceit and a very narrow understanding of the world. I dislike Mormon fraud as much as I do conservative or liberal fraud, or Moonie or Scientologist fraud. And it is nothing unusual for someone who's life has been touched specifically by one type of fraud, to focus on it more than on others. We know more about it, those we love are still affected by it, etc. I see no difference between those who wish to expose pyramid-scheme fraud, Scientologist fraud, government fraud, or Enron-style fraud, and those who wish to expose Mormon fraud; and I think that someone who dislikes one particular type of fraud, will dislike them all. That includes me.
Members who throw around the term "anti-Mormon" at anyone who discusses fraud within Mormonism, make themselves sound as foolish as Enron employees calling fraud investigators "anti-Enronists". They've missed the point. They're not anti-"Enron" - they're anti-fraud, and it isn't the investigators fault that Enron has become so fraudulent that the two, for the time being, might be indistinguishable. It's the fault of those who made it so.
If I were a true "anti-Mormon", I would criticize Mormonism even were it to cease to be fraudulent. But I wouldn't - I would praise it, join it, if it ceased to be fraudulent. But while it is fraudulent, I don't know why I shouldn't be as willing to discuss openly the nature of that fraud, as I am the nature of any other type of fraud (like political fraud) which in fact I do sometimes in other situations.
Anyway, I don't know about anyone else, but I think "anti-Mormon" is a stupid term which amounts to not much more than a kind of cult-belief-reinforcing de facto obscenity used by members against anyone who dares speak of fact in the presence of fantasy - or as it happens, fraud.
Not "anti-Mormon", only anti-fraud,
T.
| | | | Are We Liars?
| | Posted Jan 18, 2006, at 09:52 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: Tal Bachman | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Are we liars?
Yes, according to many hundreds of church members who have posted on apologetic bulletin boards, sent letters to Eric, posted as trolls, or who just try to keep the faith teaching classes in their local wards. One teenager last year posted on the board, saying that when he mentioned me to his YM advisor, the man immediately said, "he's a liar. Don't believe him".
Yet, what lies have we told about the church? I find there to be very little damning information which is not either explicitly or tacitly conceded to exist by most informed LDS historians and apologists. They may still retain belief that Joseph was a "prophet"; yet they concede that he fundamentally changed his stories, that the text of Hor's funeral scrolls have nothing to do with Joseph's "translation" of them, that Joseph lied about his sexual liasons, that he had himself anointed king, that he had sex with a frightened, 14 year old Helen Kimball, that Joseph knew his foray into the world of banking was illegal, that it resembled more a counterfeiting operation or harebrained Utah-style get-rich-quick attempt than anything respectable, that Joseph's behaviour was sufficiently shown to constitute criminal misconduct and thus warrant a formal trial in 1826 for "disorderly conduct" as a confidence man, that he did convince farmers to pay him money to find them treasure in his magic peep stone though he neverfound any, that his emendations to the KJV text bear no relationship whatsoever to the oldest manuscript texts available, that the witnesses included genuine religious flakes, men prone to hallucinations, Joseph's relatives, men who in some cases later denied they had seen any plates with their "physical eyes", etc.
In many cases, the only difference between us, and the dudes still drawing church salaries (who our accusers seemingly sometimes revere as demi-gods), is we filled in the blank after the "equals" sign: "Everything I Just Mentioned =.....Joseph didn't tell the truth about his sacred experiences". Some people, it seems, feel that as long as they don't fill that blank in, that "the answer is inherently unknowable", or that Mormonism may still be - or actually will remain - the world's only true religion. (And yet, what, other than an unwarranted belief that our feelings meant God told us Joseph never lied, could ever stop us from acknowledging that answer? Our informed friends must have all thought we were insane...)
If Mormonism really is all it claims, then the truth is, we must loathe forever as hellish deceptions the principles of inference, induction, deduction, elementary logic, prediction, observation, hypothesis testing, mutual criticism, evidence, probabilities of human behaviour, and catalogued physical laws which disallow things like regeneration, de-materialization, and spontaneous language decoding. We must also regard as hellish deceptions the methodologies of astronomy, zoology, metallurgy, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, botany, biology, geology, etc., since they all too lead to a conclusion that Joseph didn't tell the truth.
In short, if Mormonism is the truth, then everything else in the entire world is a lie. No wonder we've been lumped in then, in the Mormon mind, despite not having told any that we know of.
What can make the immediate accusations of lying sometimes hard to take is that the accusers, so often, have not even read their own church's literature. If they did, they wouldn't label it as a "lie" when it is simply read back to them. When Joe Fairboard reads the EQ manual at church, it's "true"; but somehow when I quote it to him, "I'm lying". How can that be? How can quoting Brigham Young constitute me "lying"?
Answer: It cannot - and yet, at the same time, anything can become anything when we are in such a psychological state, that the prospect of finding out we have been wrong about all that was most important to us seems is so unthinkable, so nightmarish and exruciating. So, in a flash, to protect us, our minds can transform horses into tapirs, reason-spawned-doubt into "the temptations of Satan", previously clear "translations" into "unclear processes which we should stop focusing on", ex cathedra pronouncements into "personal opinions", fundamntal changes in doctrine into undisturbing new "insights", BOM chiasmus into evidence of Hebrew origins but not chiasmus in a Danielle Steel novel...and truths into lies.
So of course, truthtellers can instantly become liars for someone in that state. Black can become white, square can become round. O'Brien says it best to Winston in Orwell's "1984", when he says that Winston's mistake is that he thinks reality is something external, when in fact it can become infinitely malleable to serve the ideology, and one's subscription to it. DonLoy Q. Gormless over at FARMS couldn't have said it better.
Heck, I once existed in that state myself. I didn't need reason or facts to form conclusions. Anything could become anything. For example, I "knew" the Tanners were liars, notwithstanding I had never before in my life read one single word they had ever printed. Why did I need to, when I already "knew" they were liars? Right? It's just like Joe Fairboard with Grant Palmer's book. He doesn't need to read it because he already knows Grant Palmer's a "liar", and besides, the FARMS "reviews" said about the same thing. So, no problem. It's all "lies", so why waste the time?
This all leads to a few discernible ends. One is the embarrassing (and very obviously counterproductive) habit of Mormon defenders, including Richard Bushman, to utilize approaches to defending Mormon "truth" borrowed from (oddly, often atheist- and Marxist-inclined) philosophers who attack Truth as a component of a metaphysical reality and deride it as nothing more than a fiction qua instrument in a global, animal-like struggle for power. (It's no wonder defenses of Mormon historiography so frequently refer to utility...).
But, as Einstein once said of idealism, does the sun cease to shine when we stop looking at it? Either "the sun exists" is a true statement, or it is not. And either "Mormonism is all it claims" is a true statement, or it is not.
I submit that it is not a true statement. One reason to conclude that Mormonism does not qualify as "true" is that its truth claims do not accord with reality as we can discern it through the most tested, reliable means we have of doing so. Its physical claims embedded in canonized scripture, such as that our sun produces light not from internal nuclear processes but from borrowing light from an as-yet-undiscovered star called Kolob, or that the entire human race was wiped out a mere 4500 years ago, are now so obviously false that even devout members have had to render them "not essential to our salvation" and then pretend they're not in the scriptures anymore. Not even FARMS will touch those. They too, of necessity, must make them "not matter" anymore. That alone says a lot.
Not even Mormonism's claims for testimony withstand scrutiny in light of Mormon history itself; they are exploded by incidents like the Paul Dunn episode, the church's 150 year championing of the Kinderhook Plates as authentic, and GBH's judgment that the Salamander Letter - putative "scripture" - was genuine.
Maybe most devastatingly (dangling modifier), Mormonism does not qualify as true because it carries within it mutually exclusive truth claims; that is, its truth claims do not cohere with each other, and internal incoherence alone proves falsity absolutely. "A" and "not A" cannot both be true (a piece could be written just about how Mormonism fails by this criterion).
The sight now of so many sincere members, many of whom have no idea those they trust most in the world - church leaders - are authorizing the misrepresentation of a history those members *deserve* to know, must cause pain to all who long for every last shackle upon human enlightenment to fall away. And that those sincere members immediately shout "liar!" at any who try to show the misrepresentation for what it is, only makes the feeling worse. I really await the day when I never again have to see another institutionalized superstition so seize upon, and inhibit, human imagination and potential.
That the religion I devoted my whole life to isn't what it claims was a conclusion born of many hundreds of hours of study and prayer and anguished contemplation, and the most sincere consideration of apologetic rebuttal attempts. I believe my conclusion is true, though it broke my heart to admit it; and I often think how great it would be to meet God (supposing he exists) and talk with him all about my experience. It's hard to describe, but I feel a peaceful but sure confidence, that if I ever do meet him, he won't describe himself as a member of the Mormon church.
That is the truth as best as I can see it.
See ya,
T.
| | | | Feature Article "King Kong Racist Packer" By New Lds Shadow President, The Black Lesbian Marxist Sis. Nyamba T. Shelburn
| | Posted Jan 10, 2006, at 07:43 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: Tal Bachman | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | From "The New Ensign"
Shadow Home Teaching Message, January 2006:
“King Kong Racist Packer”, by Shadow Church President Nyamba Theodicy Shelburn of the Shadow Church of the Ungendered Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
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The recent release of a Hollywood moving picture by the title of “King Kong” has once again raised the luridical specter of corporate globalism infused with transmuted Mormo-mainstream assumptions and their below-lying underspringlings of ethno-gendral oppression and the accompanying viper of victimization. Satiating public hunger for yet another minstrel show gallows lynching, for which I hold Boyd Ku Klux Klan Packer personally responsible for reasons I may or may not further moreover additionally nurture to fruit-ation below, “King Kong” confronts all those concerned with “the equality of justice” with a grave concern to be concerned by.
The character of King Kong is very obviously a thinly veiled and demonizing caricature of the black man as Mandingo-style sexual animal. Unfortunately, the minds of all Mormons were prepared to applaudingly view exactly these dehumanizing portrayals by the tilling and irrigating effects of Brigham Young's virulent racism via seminary-teacher-sponsored picnics and their corresponding counterpartmentalization within CES and the unaffiliated Society of Jesus, which is why there has been absolutely no protest from within the Mormon community about Jewish Hollywood's latest portrayal of lusty black animalia homicidally-seeking blonde caucasian princesses. Through the epistemological strictures of post-modernism and the relatedly wish-subserved visibilifying lens of Nibleyan methodology, the pervasive parallels between Kong and O.J. Simpson betray themselves in all their manifestitudinal aspects to all discerning discerners. Yet where is the outcry from the “Lord's covenant people” and their Dixiecratified leaders?
Moreover, the culturo-religio-affinity attested to by Mormons between themselves and Jews establishes a more or less definite collusion between the two power groups. Jews in making this movie very clearly planted the seeds of its conceptualization in the fertile loam of D.W. Griffiths-style racism as reformulated by past Mormon gerontocrats like J. “Jim Crow” Reuben Clark, Mark E. “Evil” Petersen, and Ezra Taft “BobWelch” Benson, and have allowed that in turn to inform their weltenschaunng worldview paradigm according to wholly Zarathustran dictates. Through this multichronous prism, “King Kong” clearly appears as just the latest slavemaster's blow against persons of color struck wholly to perpetuate the reigning hegemonic power structure for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many at the cost of infinity in the mire of anthro-iniquitarianism.
Most egregiously, this depictive depiction preys upon gender stereotypes and justifies male rape fantasies in depictimizing Ann Darrow as inevitably falling in love with her captor, Stockholm-syndrome style. This pornographic celluloid violent victimization of females everywhere through the, as I said, depictimization of the infatuable feeble personness of Darrow cannot help but to further stigmatize all those who refuse to buy into a phallocentric human ideal stained with the semen of sexual imperialism. As Foucalt said, “I love FARMS. They prove that we can make anything into anything, and believe in it just as though we hadn't”. It is now clear that many more males, after seeing this depictivization, now assent to kidnapping as a viable strategy for realizing inchoate domination-instincts through the sexual act, which due to patriarchalized institutional structures cannot help but be forced in even the most putatively consensual cases.
In conclusion, I conclude that the continuing attitudinization-toward-alterity of male-female relationships in black-white relationships as asymptotes per Packerian sermonizing has done much to unjustifiably exculpate White House neo-conservatives and their puppets in Salt Lake City from crimes of domination.
Sister President Nyamba Theodicy Shelburn
Shadow President
Church of the Ungendered Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Cross-reference: Fruit-ation, anthro-iniquitarianism, Mandingo, domination.
| | | | Gordon B. Hinckley: Accomplice To Murder
| | Posted Jan 3, 2006, at 07:30 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: Tal Bachman | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | http://www.wtkr.com/Global/story.asp?...
Gordon Bitner Hinckley presides over the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. At his command, the historical archives could be opened up fully, so as to facilitate the fullest investigation possible into the question of whether Mormonism really is the world's only true religion, and therefore worth dying for.
But he does not do this. The archives are still closed. Why, when people are being shot because they believe Joseph always told the truth? Doesn't Hinckley care?
The dishonesty with which he conducts nearly every interview is more than enough to answer that question. No, he doesn't care enough even to tell the truth, and there is no way around this. And to think he could call himself a "man of God". It must profane the very name and idea of God to say such a thing.
Any man in posession of possibly incriminating information about an organization, but who hides it for whatever reason, which if it were known would have caused others to decline to risk their lives for that organization and therefore NOT GET SHOT for it, in my mind is an accomplice to murder when there is one - and it doesn't matter that his name is Gordon Hinckley, and that's a Mormon. If the Twelve were any better they'd hold a court and remove him, and then do the right thing. The one, true church could NEVER hold any secrets. Never. It would trust that the Holy Ghost was all the church said it was ("the most potent testator of truth in the universe"). It would cherish truth no matter what it was or where it came from. And it would never endorse lying through omission or commission to innocent people who think they are doing God's will. Gordon must have the 12 whipped - or else they're just as amoral in the end as he is.
Ah, but thinking back...murders for his obfuscations is old hat for Gordon Hinckley. Elders Ball and Wilson got shot in the eighties in Bolivia while Hinckley was hiding incriminating documents in the locked-up vaults. After all, all those people need lies, don't they, Gordon? Why, you're a regular Platonic philodosopher king, aren't you, doing the world a favour misleading them, letting them believe what they want to believe, right? We don't want them suffering from existential angst now, do we? So what's a few murders for a few lies which so many other people need, right? And besides, "how much does anyone really know about God anyway", right? So when we say in the temple recommend intereview that we are "honest with our fellow man", we really do have to put quotation marks around "honest", don't we? We can't be TOO "honest" when most people are so dumb that they require being fed BS in order to be happy, right? Of course not.
The legacy of Gordon B. Hinckley, in the minds of informed observers, won't be his expensive, often vacant buildings and his idiotic, almost prurient inclination to affectation control. It will be the shameless dissembling and lying he did for the organization he presided over, lies that in the end - there is no other way to say it - facilitated innocent people getting MURDERED on a number of ocassions. I mean, literally, there is hardly an interview Hinckley's ever done as president which doesn't have some dishonest and misleading statement in it, and doubt that even the Hosea Stout-like psychos at FARMS would deny that.
Remember when Oaks told Newell and Avery that it didn't matter what the truth was, that his responsiblity was to protect the "reputation of the prophet" and the church built on it? That whole way of thinking has just helped KILL another person. Not bad for the "one, true church", right? Nice. Maybe to top off the whole thing, the family could get the former Utah Supreme Court Justice Oaks himself to deliver the speech at the boy's funeral. That way he can explain to the boy's parents why lying about the church is more important to him than their flesh and blood getting shot, instead of growing to manhood, marrying, having children, and blessing the lives of others through his unique talents. (I'm sure Oaks' bodyguard will be happy to help further explain this cult-conscience-induced line of reasoning to the bereaved parents).
Really sad, really unnecessary, and really truly damning to all those self-styled "men of God" (if this what "men of God" do, how would "men of Satan" act any different?). They're no better than the criminals running the Roman "whore of all the earth". They might as well merge. They all have innocent blood on their hands.
Ill,
T.
| | | | Help Me "Raise The Bar" For Trolls And Amateur Online Church Defenders
| | Posted Dec 30, 2005, at 08:02 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: Tal Bachman | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Let's face it - notwithstanding four years of seminary, three hour blocks each week, institute classes, youth conferences, General Conferences, Ensign reading, all that, online trolls and amateur church defenders often seem stunningly unaware of the history and doctrines of the very religion they wish to defend. This has to stop. It's high time that the church "raise the bar" for these online missionaries - but since that's not happening, perhaps we can help push the bar up a bit ourselves. What follows is my open letter to all those who believe Mormonism is in fact the world's only true religion, and who wish to defend it effectively against those who don't believe it is.)
Dear Would-Be Church-Defender Friends,
It will probably be impossible for you to believe that I know very much what it is like to feel passionate about defending the church. As it happens, while I was still under the impression that Mormonism was the world's only true religion, I defended it - I'm talking garments, polygamy, everything - in media all around the world.
Anyway, what follows has been written in the earnest desire to raise the level of discussion between those who believe that Joseph Smith told the truth about his many extraordinary experiences, and those who don't. It may even be the case that those members who follow my advice will be permitted some room to raise questions on this very board, though that of course will be at the discretion of those responsible for maintaining this board as a place for recovery.
But down to business.
To better defend the church, here is what I recommend.
1.) Blow a couple hundred bucks on church history books at your local Deseret Books, and READ THEM. I cannot believe how unaware most online amateur church defenders are of facts long since conceded even by their professional counterparts.
Don't be scared - read them. You believe you have the Holy Ghost, right? And it can tell you fact from fiction, right? And most of these church history books were written by LDS historians working out of the LDS archives, in which they quote LDS founding members, weren't they? And they are on sale at the OFFICIAL CHURCH BOOKSTORE, aren't they? And you are dedicating your life to this religion, which you think is the world's only true religion, aren't you? Then for heaven's sake, learn about it, its founding, its scriptures, its charter members, what they thought, what they felt, why they believed. Learn about it not just so you can better defend it, but so you can better live it if it IS true. What is so controversial about this?
If you're broke, your local institute library will have some of the following titles; your local public library will also be pleased to order them for you.
Here is a starter library:
1.) "Story of the Latter-day Saints" by Allen and Leonard. This is a very easy-to-read, very faith-promoting church history commissioned by the church, written by two church-employed historians working out of the official church historian's office. This book isn't exactly a classic work of research, but at least it's more accurate than Joseph Fielding Smith's "Essentials of Church History". At least reading it would be a start.
2.) "Brigham Young: American Moses" by Arrington. Also originally commissioned by the church, and written by the church's official church historian. While Arrington offers up the odd mild criticism, the tone is overwhelmingly laudatory. Do not fear.
3.) "Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith" by Newell and Avery. This book is on sale at Deseret Books; it won the Book of the Year Award from the Mormon History Association, an organization started by official church historian Leonard Arrington and largely comprised of Mormon historians; and it is recommended by Leonard Arrington himself on the flyleaf. These are his words: "One of the great biographies in Mormon and nineteenth century American literature. A model of honesty, clarity, and fairness". For heaven's sake, read this; there is no reason not to.
4.) "Mormon Polygamy: A History" by Richard S. Van Wagoner. This is also available at Deseret Books.
I could add a lot more, but this would at least be a start. You just cannot defend the church effectively when you don't really know it's history.
2.) When you defend the church, pretend just for the sake of discussion that Moroni never said essentially that the only reason anyone could believe the Book of Mormon to not be historical was being insincere and having an unclean heart (see Moroni 10:3-5). Just file that for the sake of discussion, and just try to imagine somehow that it is possible that someone could find what they thought were very convincing reasons to believe that the Book of Mormon was not written 2000 years ago, and does not actually describe real multi-million member civilizations in the New World.
This will have the salutary effect of inhibiting our natural tendency as members, in defense conversations, to seek for "the real reason" (i.e., the secret evil motivation) for those who no longer believe what they used to. After all, you're trying to defend the church, right? So why abandon that task in order to begin speculating on motives, in effect character assassinate through insinuation, etc.?
See, most people who think the Book of Mormon is fictional don't believe they had any particular desire to believe this so they could go do a bunch of sicko, twisted, evil things. They simply think it is fictional for the same reasons they came to think some Old Testament stories are fictional, some Koran stories are fictional, some Native American myths are fictional, some Hindu sacred stories are fictional, etc.
So my advice is, forget about "secret motivations" and all that stuff, and just focuse on WHAT THEY ARE SAYING. Most people, never Mormon or former Mormon, will be straightforward if you ask them questions, so LISTEN TO THEM. That way, when you think you see a flaw in their reasoning, you can point it out to them, instead of insulting them by asking which sin they wanted to commit; and THAT approach may actually yield some fruit. After all, if Mormonism really is the world's only true religion, you'd want them to know about it, right? And they're not going to be able to know about it if you don't listen to them, and then respond to THEIR CONCERNS, are they? People who feel they are completely sincere in their beliefs, who were formerly very devout members, and who have given up the admiration of their friends and family in order to live their lives according to what they now see as the truth, aren't exactly going to change their minds after being bombarded with sophomoric, Midgley-style insinuations, are they? NO ONE WOULD. No one. Not you, not anyone. So don't do it.
3.) I alluded to this in #2, but here it is again: Listen closely to what those you are conversing with are saying. The reason why you should is that cult fanatics don't. They talk; they say what they want to say; they interrupt; they change the subject; they don't ever allow themselves to grasp what others are trying to get across to them. So if you don't listen, you'll look just like a cult fanatic, plus you never will be able to resolve concerns.
Here's a quick example. The other day I noted on here that due to temple death oaths of allegiance to the church, there would lamentably be a cloud of suspicion over anything exculpatory that BYU scientist Scott Woodward said about Hinckley's possible role in suppressing DNA research at BYU, just as there is over any member's exculpatory testimony vis-a-vis the church for that same reason. DingDong C. Dimbleberry then came on and essentially claimed I'd said that no Mormon could or should be trusted in a court of law about anything, and then went on to further make himself look insane by saying that my perfectly accurate description of those temple oaths, and the inevitable cloud of suspicion which must then attend all exculpatory testimony about any church issue by members (since we've just sworn a DEATH OATH to protect the thing), constituted a "theory" which predicted that Scott Woodward would definitely lie! This is an example of a man who would like to defend the church making himself and it look pathetic, because in that role he is unable to understand even the simplest words of his native tongue. So, listen before you respond so this doesn't happen to you.
4.) This will be a hard one to believe I know, but here it is. When you bear your testimony in the middle of a discussion with people who have serious questions about specific church claims due to what they see as overwhelming evidence against them, it makes it sound like all you have, in the end, is a mind-numbing, belief-insulating mantra. Skeptics, far from "feeling the spirit", will rather instantly conclude they are talking to people just like the Hare Krishnas banging tambourines in front of the mall downtown, people who are completely detached from reality, people who seem like they...might be in a cult. I am totally serious. If you said to a Branch Davidian, "How can you believe that David Koresh is still alive, when he's actually dead?", and they responded by saying, "I just want you to know that I know that David Koresh is still alive", you'd think they were nuts. Do you know what I'm saying? Maybe David Koresh really COULD be still alive - but that answer would STILL make you think they were nuts,wouldn't it? Yes. So save the testimonies for later, after you hear out and resolve their concerns and they're sitting in a church meeting with you or something.
5.) When you are asked a question about Mormon truth claims you don't have the answer to, DO NOT immediately shift to a utilitarian argument (i.e., like saying that the church teaches "a great way to live" and "is the best thing out there" and "can you give me something better than Mormonism?" or telling your story about how your life was bleak until you joined the church). Doing this once again makes you look incredibly weak, as though all the truth claims were just hollow bravado, like you were The Lion on the Wizard of Oz talking tough at first to the Tin Man and the Straw Man, but then falling to pieces as soon as Dorothy slaps you on the nose.
When you are trying to defend Mormon truth claims, and you get caught not knowing what to say, just say, "You know what, that's a really good question, and I'm going to think about that. Can I get back to you on that one?". If you switch to the utility argument, you sound just like the Jehovah's Witnesses who always change the subject when they're stumped. Shifting from truth claims to utility claims IS "changing the subject" in a way that makes you and the church look ridiculous, so don't do it.
6.) DO NOT QUIBBLE OVER WORD DEFINITIONS. This will make you look like a pharasaical, boorish idiot incapable of understanding relevant concepts and issues - and this will once again make the church you're trying to represent and defend look bad. Once you understand what your conversation participant means, just respond to that despite the imprecision in his language, or re-phrase what you think they mean to give them a chance to confirm you've understood correctly.
Hijacking a conversation over definitions, when done by anyone, is seen by most people as a distraction tactic, a way to stop real inquiry from occurring under the false pretence of trying to facilitate it. Doing so also makes you seem as though you're trying to show off, or bully people.
7.) When you send me an email and I ask you, "If the church weren't what it claimed, would you want to know about it?", immediately say, "Yes, I would, because what this is all about for me is the truth." If you ignore the question or say no, it makes YOU sound like the insincere, unclean of heart person mentioned in Moroni 10, you know? That in turn makes the church look very bad.
See, most humans on the planet would presume false the claim that the seemingly inviolable laws of physics were regularly violated (which is what Joseph's claims require us to believe). So, if you don't answer, or say you wouldn't want to know if it was a fraud, you're indicating that at least for you, this isn't about the truth AT ALL; and you only help confirm the suspicion that Mormonism is an attractive religion to some which nevertheless was probably started by someone similarly indifferent to the truth.
To effectively defend the church as true, you MUST be willing to find out that it isn't, IF it isn't, and get that across. And you have to REALLY mean this. You can't be guarded on this issue, playing cat and mouse word definition games and garbage like that. You have to throw yourself out there, really and truly, bet it all, and show that this is NOT just about ego protection for you, not about delusion, not about indifference, but about a profound, passionate devotion to all that is true in the universe. This is probably the first and most important thing. Before entering the lists, so to speak, you must ask yourself:
If the church were a fraud, would I really want to know, knowing as I do how upsetting that would be? (If you can't answer yes, do NOT defend ever it again).
And
If the church were a fraud, how would I know? To show your faith isn't ignorant delusion, you must be able to think of some hypothetical way of knowing it was false, if it was false. It is easy to do this for everythine else we know. For example,
If the world were not round, how would you know? That's an easy one, right?
If Catholicism, with its doctrines of transubstantiation and the like, were not true, how would you know? Also pretty easy.
So if Mormonism were not true, how would you know? You MUST show that faith in Mormonism does not depend on delusion by thinking of some good answers to this question; and if you cannot even think of hypothetical ways of knowing if it were false, then you have not yet shown this.
That's enough for Lesson One.
| | | | A Few More Authoritative Quotes For Farms To Pretend Don't Exist Re: The Lamanites
| | Posted Dec 21, 2005, at 11:25 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: Tal Bachman | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Simon Southerton posted a link and response to the latest sad offering from the church's best and brightest over at FARMS the other day (it was a review of his book). So here are a few more quotes for FARMS contributor Dr. Ryan Parr to pretend don't exist. These were taken from that evil anti-Mormon book, "The Encyclopedia of Mormonism", compiled and published under the direction of vicious anti-Mormon apostles of the church.
-----
Sitting LDS Church President Heber J. Grant, Dedication of Hawaiian temple Nov. 27, 1919:
“We thank thee that the plates containing the Book of Mormon were preserved so that they could be translated, and that the words to the prophet Joseph Smith might be fulfilled, namely, that the Lamanites might come to the knowledge of their fathers....
"We thank thee that THOUSAND AND TENS OF THOUSANDS OF THE DESCENDANTS OF THE DESCENDANTS OF LEHI, IN THIS FAVORED LAND, have come to a knowledge of the gospel".
New Zealand temple dedication April 20 1958 by sitting LDS Church President David O. McKay:
"We express gratitude that to these fertile islands thou didst guide DESCENDANTS OF FATHER LEHI and hast enabled them to prosper".
Mexico city temple dedication, First Presidency counselor Gordon Hinckley, Dec. 2 1983:
"Bless thy saints in this great land and those from other lands who will use this temple. Most have in their veins the BLOOD of Father Lehi. Thou hast kept thine ancient promise."
Is there any other church in the world that tolerates such chaos, such divergence between what its defenders claim and what the leaders of the church claim is THE TRUTH about "the keystone of the religion"? It is total madness, totally embarrassing. And to think we're supposed to believe that the Creator of the entire universe took the time to tell Gordon B. Hinckley to warn all the women of the world about the dangers of wearing two earrings in one ear - but then can't be bothered to clarify WHO THE BOOK OF MORMON IS ABOUT, or where they are!
If the prophet can't lead us astray, why is he allowing FARMS, forever contradicting sitting church presidents, to operate under the auspices of the Lord's university and post their apostate articles on the church's official website? And if FARMS isn't leading people astray, why then were earlier prophets allowed by God to lead the people astray?
No one should need any DNA tests to figure this out. All one needs is the church itself, for incoherence between parts proves falsity absolutely, and there is no way around that.
Nuts.
T.
| | | | Is The Mormon Ship Listing? Joseph's Prophecies Fulfilled
| | Posted Dec 20, 2005, at 08:10 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: Tal Bachman | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | I am always happy to acknowledge that Joseph Smith was a talented man, who on occasion predicted the future accurately.
Take for example this millenial prediction, from II Nephi 30:
"...The things of all nations shall be made known; yea, all things shall be made known unto the children of men.
17 "There is nothing which is secret save it shall be revealed; there is no work of darkness save it shall be made manifest in the light; and there is nothing which is sealed upon the earth save it shall be loosed."
Indeed.
Another one, from D&C; 1:
"And the rebellious shall be pierced with much sorrow; for their iniquities shall be spoken upon the housetops, and their secret acts shall be revealed."
When Joseph Smith rose on April 7, 1844 and declared that "no man knew (his) history", of course he was perfectly correct. Neither Hyrum, nor his mother, nor his father, nor Brigham or Heber or Parley, not even his own wife Emma, knew that "history", for it included all kinds of deceptions, lies, and dissemblings of which each could have but fairly little, if any, knowledge.
But while no mortal will ever attain a God's eye view of the past, all would also admit that in 2005 we know more about Joseph's history than any of his individual contemporaries did. And with the advent of satellite dishes and wireless internet communications, it could almost be said that literally, that history – the history of his achievements as well as his “iniquities” - ARE "spoken upon the housetops". Like those of so many others now, Joseph's "secret acts" very much have been “revealed”.
Not that this unique to Joseph, of course. The truth is that there has never been a time in the history of the world when it has been so difficult to keep a secret. No sooner is a secret revealed to anyone, than it may become accessible with the click of a button to anyone in the world. It just has particular relevance for Joseph, because of course there were so many secrets to begin with.
And that reminds me of another Josephine prophecy, from D&C; 130:
"This earth...will be made like unto crystal and will be a Urim and Thummim to the inhabitants who dwell thereon, whereby all things pertaining to an inferior kingdom, or all kingdoms of a lower order, will be manifest to those who dwell on it..."
Sure he's talking about earth in its "sanctified" state and he gets the inferior kingdom thing wrong, but, you know, not bad.
Anyway, the earth seems rather to have become a Urim and Thummim, albeit in a manner quite unlike that imagined by Joseph. Whereas forty years ago people might have asked questions of a ouija board at parties, now we type questions into a Google search box, and in sooner than a second, our Urim and Thummim gives back answers.
And what are those answers? They are answers that I am sure none of Joseph's successors - who for decades spoke of modern technology as the gift of God for spreading the gospel - imagined. They are answers which, in many cases, rest on supporting facts and evidences from across a wide range of research disciplines, answers fundamentally no longer even denied by those still clinging to belief in Joseph's claims, though without exception they cast the greatest doubt imaginable on those claims.
They are answers which reveal human life on earth to be far older than six millenia; they are answers which explode Joseph's claims that native Americans were Israelites; they are answers which show the Book of Abraham to not be what Joseph claimed it was, namely, a "translation"; they are answers which show that Joseph was also incorrect in his statements about the fraudulent plates found at Kinderhook, Illinois; and they are answers which demonstrate that much of the sometimes charming Joseph's behaviour, far from being anything one might expect from a holy man of God, is more in line with what one might expect from someone with genuine antagonism toward both convention and commandment. And some answers include quotes from Joseph which make him sound very much as though he felt just that antagonism.
Some answers align various story versions told by Joseph of his supernatural experiences, so that the whole world may see the ways in which those stories conflict with each other in irreconcilable ways. That is, the whole world may now see instantly that Joseph is an unreliable source of information about himself. Other answers show ritual suicides being enacted in Mormon temples, or tell heartbreaking stories of innocent women denied love and companionship for their entire lives merely because Joseph or Brigham wanted them. Others reveal disturbing obfuscation from the church's current president; others reveal a kind of insanity and blindness on the part of some members many of us have not seen elsewhere.
In short, almost in line with Joseph's smoky, apocalyptic warnings in D&C; 1, the Mormon ship seems to be listing because of a strange confluence of phenomena:
1.) The existence of the internet as a means of communication, conversation and inquiry, and a means of information distribution. (Because of it, for example, your local ditch digger will be able in an hour or two to recognize there is something awry in a biography of Joseph Smith which doesn't deal forthrightly with the pedophilia questions. Local primary teachers now have more access to LDS history than did apostles a mere forty years ago).
2.) The tenure of Gordon B. Hinckley, whose refusal to be "honest with his fellow man" about LDS history and doctrine, and his obsessive lust for form, hollow ritual and pageantry, and capricious power trips over silly affectations (earrings);
3.)The spectacular LDS apologetic crack-up, made all the more spectacular by the fact that - unlike increasing thousands of inquiring members - neither LDS leaders nor the apologists themselves seem yet to have any idea they're even having.
These three things, I think far more than the influence of Elder Packer's gays, feminists, and intellectuals, have combined to really strike a blow against Joseph's church. (Sure, the DNA evidence might have been there without the internet - but the ease of accessing it now is what really seems to have changed things). Even the most devout members who notice the last two points are able to be shaken enough to wonder, often for the first time in their lives, if something is wrong. And the first point enables them to try to answer that question.
Now if Joseph had actually told the truth, I doubt there would be much problem at all. The evidences of his truthtelling I am sure would be abundant; there would be general uniformity between Joseph's various versions of his experiences; his predictions would all have come true, rather than just a few like any other man's; the spirit would testify to Joseph's stories in much more powerful ways than it does other things; and the world would have increasingly yielded forth corroboration for Joseph's claims about time, Egyptian hieratic, native Americans, astronomy, geography, etc.
But like every other person on this planet, Joseph Smith did not always tell the truth. And as the world becomes increasingly a vast Urim and Thummim through which “secret acts” will be revealed, that Joseph's untruths just can't help but be more and more known. Because of this, I think conversion and retention rates must continue to fall. There may be some better years here and there, maybe even the odd trend upward. But the world seems to be rapidly advancing in understanding; Africans who fifteen years ago were staving off famine now own laptops and cellphones. Latin Americans who fifty years ago would have traveled by burro now zoom round in cars with GPS systems. People seem more and more to be progressing in their abilities to understand the physical world.
So, every day the percentage of people who would ever study with LDS missionaries without running a serious Google search is decreasing. Also decreasing are the members without access to facts. That is good news for those of us who think there is real value in finding out that fraudulent stories are fraudulent, no matter how pleasing they might be - good news for those who don't think it's such a bad thing that "secret acts" should be revealed, and lies exposed as such.
And I guess that means - it's really bad news for the church.
T.
| | | | Helping FARMS Explain Away The Cumorah Problem
| | Posted Dec 16, 2005, at 09:16 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: Tal Bachman | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | In the spirit of Christmas giving, I hereby waive all rights to the following, which I feel I received by revelation from the ghost of Hugh Nibley.
Problem: NY Hill Cumorah has no skeletons, swords, wheels, nothing. One solution: Invent a "two Cumorah" solution, where the other Cumorah is somewhere in Mexico.
Since for some strange reason, FARMS has not yet picked up my "Three Cumorahs Solution", I offer a new proposal, a reprise of the classic "new research forces word redefinition (forces declaration of war on reality)" fake out.
So, my FARMS friends, feel free to use what follows next time you spend all day arguing with fifteen year olds on the FAIR board.
Ahem. (Affect Utahn voice tinged with resignation and all-knowingness).
"...and what the anti-Mormons are NOT telling you is that research has now established that the ancient word 'cumorah' was not only a proper noun, but was a common noun which simply meant 'place', rather like the word 'city'. For example, in the case of Atlantic City, 'city' refers to a particular location, but 'city' also refers to any city anywhere. Thus, no one should be surprised that no artifacts have been recovered from either the NY or Mexico locations; these are only two 'cumorahs' out of literally millions of 'cumorahs', or 'places', around the world.
"In short, once we understand that 'Hill Cumorah' also simply means 'hill place', and can thus refer to any hill anywhere on earth, the supposed 'problem' of there not being any physical evidence in the New York 'hill place', nor as of yet in Mexico, vanishes.
(Inject a victorious tone into voice during this part)
"What is a far more interesting question is, if Joseph was a fraud, how could he have known about the dual meanings of the word 'cumorah'? We submit he could not have. We await (in vain, we suspect) for the anti-Mormon answer to this question".
Merry Christmas!
T.
| | | | A Golden Oldie: An Apostle Of Jesus Christ Explains The History Of "The Inferior Race"
| | Posted Dec 15, 2005, at 09:44 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: Tal Bachman | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Is this George Lincoln Rockwell, once head of the American Nazi Party, or an apostle, future president-of-the-church, and official LDS church historian, Joseph Fielding Smith, whose remarks here were NEVER repudiated by the First Presidency after they were published?
This is starting on page 101 of "The Way to Perfection", published by Deseret News Press, which I just found unpacking:
"Not only was Cain called upon to suffer, but because of his wickedness he became the father of an INFERIOR RACE. A curse was placed upon him and that curse has been continued through his lineage and must do so while time endures. Millions of souls have come into this world CURSED WITH A BLACK SKIN and have been denied the privilege of Priesthood and the fulness of the blessings of the Gospel. THESE ARE THE DESCENDANTS OF CAIN. Moreover, they have been made to feel their inferiority and have been separated from the res of mankind from the beginning.
"Enoch saw the people of Canaan, descendants of Cain, and he says, 'and there was a blackness came upon all the children of Cainan..."
"But what a contrast! The sons of Seth, Enoch and Noah honored by the blessings and rights of the Priesthood! The sons of Abraham made rightful heirs to all the blessings of the fathers!" (exclamation marks in the original) "And the sons of Cain, denied the priesthood..."
Now in fairness, I should note that Apostle Smith DOES concede that blacks are actually human beings, even going so far as to admit that blacks and whites are "brethren"; unfortunately he can't do so without a parting kick to the groin.
"In the spirit of sympathy, mercy and faith, we will also hope that blessings may eventually be given to our Negro brethren - children of God - notwithstanding THEIR BLACK COVERING EMBLEMATICAL OF ETERNAL DARKNESS".
Gladys Knight, hello?! Are you there, Sister Knight? This is just "one man's opinion", you say? If it was, why wasn't it immediately denied by then president of the church David O. McKay? Why wasn't Apostle Smith disciplined for this stuff? What does it mean that no one said a word - and that this kind of stuff was in the manuals and church mags and everthing else?
By the way, if the church thinks this stuff is so bad, why hasn't Hinckley actually repudiated it or apologized for it, rather than just glibly trotting out another thought-terminating cliche from Mormonism's endless cache of them? ("That's all behind us"). I guess that's all David Duke would need to say and we could all feel great about voting for him for president, couldn't we? Unreal.
It is fortunate for those uninspired by Ku Klux Klan pamphlets that Gordon B. Hinckley feels totally detached from every last Mormon doctrine - for him, everything is sacrificable - and so doesn't keep spouting this nonsense. But unfortunately, because no Mormon prophet has every acknowledged the Mormon history of nutcase racist mythology and apologized for it, this stuff is still kind of part of the church, still on the radar screen. Why don't they flush it? Ah well...to apologize would undermine present authority claims, wouldn't it? So who cares what the right thing to do is, when it threatens one's interests?
By the way, this book is chock full of gonzo inbred religious retard lunacy. It would actually be hilarious - if your High Priest Group Leader didn't still believe it all.
T.
| | | | Why You, TBM Lurker, Shouldn't Help Clean Up Your Local Meetinghouse
| | Posted Dec 15, 2005, at 09:44 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: Tal Bachman | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | As some know, the church has decided to stop paying people to take care of local meetinghouses, and is now insisting that members take turns doing so on a "volunteer basis".
Question:
How many meetinghouse toilet bowls do you think Thomas Monson's scrubbed lately?
Now quick - *don't* think of King Benjamin "laboring with his own hands"...
"The prophets and apostles should be given a pass because of their advanced age", you say?
Why then is such a pass not given to local members with arthritis, with big families they are busy taking care of, without access to easy transporation to and from the buildings, with advanced age, etc.? I know someone personally who, despite being physically unable to clean without suffering because of a hernia, is still being hounded to go push brooms and scrub toilets. While she has expressed her sorry physical state to her ward leaders several times, they keep asking; she thus has felt guilty about "not being able to do her part". She can't physically do the work; she keeps saying this; but they won't stop asking her anyway, leaving her feeling embarrassed and guilty.
How much were locals being paid to serve as church janitors? Not a lot, surely a pittance compared to the average monthly ward tithing donations.
How much did the Crossroads Mall cost? $1.5 BILLION.
And once again, how many toilets do you think Monson's scrubbed lately?
One crazy idea: If the church has enough money to blow millions on a Gentile-owned Public Relations firm; enough money to blow millions on a brand new conference center and often-vacant temples; enough money to keep the embarrasing, counterproductive FARMS going; enough money to blow ONE AND A HALF BILLION on malls; enough money to blow millions every year on cattle ranches, radio stations, satellites, insurance companies, and international tours for apostles and their wives; and enough money to pay people to scrub His Royal Highness Thomas Monson's toilets at headquarters; how is it that there isn't enough with which to compensate a local janitor? Why are arthritic 65 year olds, already devoting hours and hours a week to the church and donating money, being expected to do what no General Authority ever does?
And the final kick in the teeth is that despite members donating their time and money to the church, that church in return has such contempt for them that it refuses to disclose how much (non-toilet-cleaning) General Authorities are being paid each year; how much the church makes each year; or anything at all about how "sacred" church monies are spent.
Until they do, and until H.R.H. Monson does what he tells everyone else to, I don't see why any member should.
Kind of a little thing, but just another thing which seems to betray a kind of contemptuous obliviousness.
Just my two cents,
T.
| | | | I Killed Santa Claus!
| | Posted Dec 13, 2005, at 07:39 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: Tal Bachman | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Once you realize a lot of what you believed in just wasn't true, a lot of things change. One of them was Santa, who I first created for my children, and later killed ("Santacide").
When my son Jed was a toddler, I came across a Santa outfit in a store once, and bought it. After that, every Christmas I would arrange fairly elaborate deceptions for my children. I would "remember" that I'd forgotten to buy milk, go to the store, and while I was gone, late Christmas Eve night, Santa would come.
I'd put on this crazy down coat my dad had given me, shove a pillow inside, and then put on the red coat. The outfit had a white wig and beard, the hat, the pants, everything. I would have already put presents in a giant sack, so once dressed I'd grab the sack, and then begin lightly jingling the bells, and throw a handful of rocks on to the roof (reindeer landing). (One Christmas Eve, when it was really dark out, I got out a small flashlight, put red cellophane over the front, and flashed out in the front yard. From where the kids were they of course thought it was Rudolph.)
After I'd "gone to the store", Tracy would lead the children in the dark, into the kitchen, under the table, from where they could see the tree in the living room. And huddled there in the dark, wild with excitement, awe, and fear, they would watch the "real" Santa come into the house and leave their presents under the tree. I had a particular slow, raspy, "old man" Santa voice I would do which didn't sound like me at all, and they fell for it year after year.
That is, until one year, over in White Rock where we then lived, Ashton said a few days before, "Why is it that Santa only comes whenever Dad's gone?". That was it - they were *thinking*. Mayday. Can't have that. (Somehow I never put this together with the church at the time...). I was all over that one like Hinckley jumping over the DNA results back from BYU.
So that year I convinced my stepfather-in-law to play Santa while I hid under the table with the kids. What is kind of sad is that after that, they seemed to have no doubts again, and told people very confidently throughout the year that they had all seen the real Santa ("we have seen and hefted the plates"...).
We first kind of put the whole church thing together around November of 2003, and my wife immediately began saying, "What about Santa?". Shyeah. Exactly. That church thing really stung; and once you realize you've been conditioning your children to believe things which are just as fake as the Santa story itself, you just can't keep the other stuff going. You have to tell them. You don't want another terrible sting, no matter how pleasant the illusion was. And the thought of perpetrating a fraud just because you've decided that others are "better off with it" (thanks T.S. Ferguson, Gordon Hinckley, Paul H. Dunn, Richard Bushman, etc.), just doesn't wash anymore. You can't stomach it.
At my wife's request (she likes to go slowly with things) we didn't say anything about Santa that Christmas, didn't do the act and just kind of didn't bring it up; but as we approached last Christmas, Matthias started talking about Santa again and it was clear it would have to be confronted directly. So, because I was the one who'd had "the talk" with the kids about the church, my wife wanted to have "the Santa talk" with the younger kids (the older two had already figured it out by then). Poor Matthias, ten at the time, was genuinely shocked to find out he wasn't real.
I thought about all this again a couple of days ago, when Matthias said to me, "Why'd you tell us all those fake Santa stories?". For a moment I wanted to say, "Because I'm an idiot", but then I said, "Because I thought it would make Christmas fun for you guys, and I didn't think there was anything wrong with it. But once we realized we'd all been wrong about the church, Mummy and I decided we should stop saying such things, and try to have Christmas fun in other ways. I think I made a mistake - sorry".
Perhaps out of a lingering sense of foolishness over my Santa escapades, we have tried extra hard to capture the same Christmas magic we had with the fake stories (actually elaborate deceptions), without them. We've gone for horse carriage rides, outdoor Christmas celebrations, "sailpasts" (where all the local boats decked out with lights sail past the pier), have lots of story nights in front of the fire at home, make treats and sing, etc., and especially, talk about all the virtues Christians and non-Christians alike celebrate at Christmas time. Hopefully Christmases are just as fun as they ever were for the kids, and even more so.
Has anyone else killed off Santa for your kids, and if so, what have you done instead?
T.
| | | | Silent Seraph - Answering The Question Of Mormonism
| | Posted Dec 12, 2005, at 07:28 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: Tal Bachman | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Silent Seraph
I appreciate your comments. I think you bring up a good point.
It is true that the church proclaims that what it's all about is "coming unto Christ".
To use just one grotesquely extreme example to raise a counterpoint, the Ku Klux Klan currently says it is not about preaching racial hatred at all, but simply focuses on caucasian pride. And no doubt, there are sincere Klan members who would say without any guile that that is just what their organization is about.
Would you accept that characterization of the Klan? Or do you think it is possible that there is some other dynamic there?
Let me ask you this, Silent Seraph. If a man appeared on CNN tomorrow claiming to be Jesus Christ, but Gordon B. Hinckley claimed that he wasn't - who would you believe?
The truth is that as a Mormon, you have absolutely NO way of knowing anything about Christ save for what the president of the church tells you to believe. Think about what that really means for a second...Think about this: If the church prez told you the man was Jesus, he would be Jesus. If he told you he wasn't, he wouldn't be - at least, for you. And how would you know whether the church prez was wrong?
You answer, because I already know the prophet can't lead me astray.
I ask, how do you know that?
You answer, because the prophets have said so.
(Do you see a problem here already?).
I ask, and how do you know the prophets were telling you the truth?
I answer, Because I have a testimony of the church and I know they're true prophets.
I ask, How did you get a testimony?
You answer, I read the BOM and prayed about it, and felt the Holy Ghost.
I ask, How did you come to believe that those feelings you felt came from the Holy Ghost, and that they absolutely meant that the BOM was historical fact and that Joseph's church was Jesus of Nazareth's only true church?
Think about this, Silent Seraph. How did you ever come to think that?
It is because - you were told by others that that was the case. And you believed them. You took someone's word for it, that your feelings were God's Holy Spirit declaring to you that everything you'd just read was absolutely FACTUAL. Just like I did, just like we all did. We all took someone's word for it, and the truth is, that every human being on this planet practically has felt those same feelings, people in all different religious traditions, in all different situations. Those feelings are nothing unique. They in fact are so strong, that people in other religions are blowing themselves up for their faith, and swearing vows of celibacy. Those feelings are real - they are strong - and also, there is NO reason to believe that feeling them means, "We - we alone - have God's only truth".
None.
The truth is, we made a mistake, and with the best of intentions we have been involved with a church which we found quite congenial in many respects, but which we had as much reason to believe was the one, true way, as any other believer in any other church had to believe that s/he was in the one, true way:
None.
And what's worse is - it is not what we thought it was. It is not what it claims. And it is not about truly "coming unto Christ" at all.
Maybe that's hard to believe. Think about this for a second.
If the prophet tells you Jesus doesn't want you to have two earrings in an ear, then, in your mind, you know that Jesus really doesn't want you to have two earrings. Don't you? And tomorrow, if GBH or his successor tells you that Jesus doesn't want you to wear ANY earrings anymore, then you know Jesus doesn't want that anymore, either.
And if the next day, the prophet tells you that now, Jesus wants you to wear five earrings in each year, you now "know" that Jesus wants you to wear five earrings in an ear.
Don't you?
The truth is, that "Christ" for you is, and only can be...whatever the president of the church says he is, whatever he says he isn't, whatever the prophet says he says, whatever the prophet says he doesn't say. You can reach him, "know him", ONLY in the way the prophet says you can - that is, all you REALLY know is...what the prophet says. For example, you cannot communicate with Jesus directly, can you? After all, the prophet has decreed that "we pray to the Father", not to Jesus.
It doesn't matter that people prayed to Jesus in III Nephi, and Jesus accepted that, does it?
It doesn't matter that even Joseph Smith in section 109 prayed to Jesus ("Jehovah"), does it?
It doesn't matter, because now the prophet says you shouldn't. And tomorrow, when he says you should, then you should.
The truth is that no Mormon has any Jesus at all, except the Jesus that the prophet, at any given moment, says you should have. And when the prophets change their teachings about the "eternal" laws governing your relationship with Jesus, as they most certainly have throughout Mormon history, then your religious duty is to not notice; just keep believing that you are really "coming unto Christ", even though the truth is that every time you might try, you will never - and I mean, never - get closer to him. In reality, you will only be "getting close" to..."the prophet", "the church", "the church commandments", anything and everything but a Christ who is YOURS, a Christ you embrace directly.
There is a grand secret at the top of Mormonism, and Gordon B. Hinckley knows it. That secret, for the Mormon prophet and his counselors, is: "WE are the gods". (And if you don't believe me, just as a starter go read the bios of Heber Kimball and Brigham Young, where they refer to the prophet as their "GOD". That's the word they use - "god".)
If you want to "come unto Christ", you ought to come unto Christ, and stop wasting your life in a church which, however much we may enjoy, in the end, is literally indistinguishable from any common cult-like religious organization who uses the image of Jesus as an attractive deception so that we don't notice that all we're really coming unto is "the church", and the man at the top of it.
Best of luck,
T.
| | | | A New FARMS Press Release
| | Posted Dec 7, 2005, at 08:59 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: Tal Bachman | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | AP Provo - The Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, a research institute affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, today announced the adoption of a new slogan.
"Now that the curse against the negroes has been lifted, allowing us to believe that in fact they never were cursed in the first place notwithstanding that we did believe just that, we have decided to show our racial egalitarian bona fides and borrow a little something from the United Negro College Fund", said Garloy Pratt Hendricks, (fictional) director of the institute, in an interview conducted Tuesday.
"The wonderful negroes who run that organization are fond of saying, 'A mind is a terrible thing to waste'. As Latter-day Saints, we also value things like facts and reasoning and such things, as long as they are kept in their proper sphere - and that place is subservient to what our feelings tell us, because we know the Holy Ghost tells us what's true through those feelings".
Hendricks went on to explain that what our minds tell us is often wrong. "People didn't used to believe in germs and things like that, but now we know there are germs. That tells you right there something's wrong. That's why we trust feelings." As a result, FARMS has adopted the slogan, "A mind is a terrible thing to use", and will henceforth include the motto on its letterhead.
"We are all really excited about the change", commented Hendricks. "It kind of wraps up everything we're about".
| | | | Should It Really Be Surprising That FARMS Writers Spend All Day On Bulletin Boards?
| | Posted Dec 7, 2005, at 08:55 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: Tal Bachman | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Should it be a surprise that 48 year old FARMS writers spend all day on bulletin boards debating fifteen year old skeptics about what Joseph REALLY might have meant by the word "translation"?
What's the difference between their online postings, and the pieces they publish in church-funded organs like "The Journal of Book of Mormon Studies"? Neither one would pass review, literally, by a bright ninth grader, let alone the editor of, say, the Journal of Near Eastern Studies. (And speaking of the J of NES, what was that DCP Ph.D. in again? Oh yeah - Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. Huh.... Funny how...nevermind).
Pro-church bulletin boards, The Ensign, the Journal of BOM Studies, what's the difference?
And by the way, BYU junior prof lurkers - don't bother ever trying to get anything published in an actual academic journal. When you come up for tenure, just explain that academic journals are just an expression of "paradigmatic hegemony", and that the fact you've spent twelve hours a day posting on your cousin's apologetic site instead of publishing shouldn't be held against you. And when he asks, "Are you nuts?", just look at him and say:
http://farms.byu.edu/viewauthor.php?a...
Good luck with the tenure review board!
Tal
| | | | In Search Of The Mormon Conscience
| | Posted Dec 1, 2005, at 12:07 PM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Is there a Mormon conscience, and if so, what is it like?
Everytime I wonder about this, I begin to feel that dark, sick feeling in my stomach...All kinds of thoughts flash through my mind, thoughts I don't want to think of anymore, and I feel a ferocious hurt...
I see bright, shiny faces, kisses and embraces, kids singing, standing in white in front of the mirror peering into eternity surrounded by loved ones, not even a question that we followed God's one true way...
And I see the joy of submission, the ultimate escape from personal responsibility it affords...(we follow the prophet, and if he makes a mistake, then he will be held accountable, not us)...the pleasure of being praised by the one you obeyed...there was worth there, standing, identity...one found purpose, strength, in obedience...and it felt good at the time...
And then I see thousands of those human beings, having surrendered their own consciences to “authorities” who, in reality, have no authority whatsoever other than what we all granted them out of our own ignorance and/or self-interest. We, or at least I, gave it to them...I looked to them for direction, instruction, commands, because in the end, I think, it was in my own selfish interests to do so. I acquiesced; I always told myself that those who left only wanted the easy way, but the truth is that it was I who wanted the easy way. It was much easier to simply obey and not worry about my own responsibility, than to do the hard thinking about my true place within the human family, and my true responsibilities to others and myself. You'd better believe I was thankful for the prophet; because of him, the only decision I really needed to make was to obey him. It made things easy and tidy.
So on my mission, I was informed when I should rise, when I should go to sleep, what I could read and not read, what I could listen to and not listen to, what I could write and not write, what I could say and not say, what I could think and not think, and when I could write, when I could read, when I could listen, who I could talk to and not talk to (my own flesh and blood were forbidden), what I could purchase, how much I had to live on, where I could travel, when I could travel, where I could live, how I could groom myself, how I could travel, when I could have recreation time, what I could do during that recreation time, what shirts I could wear, what pants I could wear, what ties I could wear, how many doors I had to knock on, how many discussions I had to give each month, how many people I had to give Books of Mormon to, ad infinitum...and I lapped it all up like a hungry puppy. I had eagerly sacrificed every last bit of decision-making power I naturally posessed to an external party. If my own dad had flown all the way to Argentina to visit me, and was staying at a hotel a block from me, I literally would have asked my mission president permission, and if he'd said no, I would have declined to see him.
After all, I was “on the Lord's errand”, and to disobey the man the Lord had asked to preside over the mission would be to deprive myself of the spirit. And, in the spirit was protection and safety. I needed that, because the forces of the adversary were everywhere, surrounding us, waiting for any opportunity to ensnare us. And that was why...I was never to be alone. Better put, that was why I didn't want ever to be alone. I must always stay with my companion. I cannot be alone. And I felt overwhelmed with gratitude that, unlike others, I had access to all that light and truth. I wanted that. What does that really mean about me?
...I swear a death oath of loyalty to the church in the temple, enacting my own ritual slaughter if I ever divulge the secrets. I commit to give my life for it. I commit to never speak ill of the Lord's anointed. I commit to consecrate all to the church, a “church” which in the end is run by only one man who “holds the keys”, the president of it. And for all the talk about the scriptures as the Law of the Lord, the truth is that the real law is whatever the prophet, at any given moment, says it is. It is, in effect, the “unwritten” law Pres. Packer mentions.
And I will know the prophet is speaking as a prophet by the fact that he did not mention while speaking that he wasn't. So of course he was – and I obey. And later, after he is dead, his successor will tell me that other prophet wasn't speaking as a prophet at all; and when I wonder how then I am to know that the current prophet is now speaking as a prophet, he will answer, “because I am telling you that I am”. And I will believe him. And then once he dies, and HIS successor also tells me that his predecessor was merely speaking as a man, I will also then instantly believe him. For there is no past for me, there is no “eternal”, there is no memory, there is no law but my master's will, whoever the master is at the moment, and whatever his will is at the moment; and in the instant he expresses it, it will be, and have been, eternal law; and in the instant he or his successor changes it, that too will be, and have been eternal law – and there will be no contradiction there, “because the gospel is eternal” and “the Lord won't let the prophet lead us astray”. And I will be content.
The truth is, I have no conscience of my own in that state. Anything the prophet asks of me, I do; it is no use to imagine that I might get a “no” from the Lord when I pray to him about whether to obey, for I have already pre-committed myself to the proposition that the prophet cannot lead me astray. What that means is, to ever presume that the Lord exempts me from obeying the prophet is tantamount to rejecting the only true and living gospel on earth in toto. And that is unthinkable. There is no out. There is no “righteous disobedience”. There is no “loyal dissent”. There is no allowance for independent conscience. It does not exist. There is no out. I shall submit. In submission only is there purpose and righteousness.
Gordon Hinckley has made it clear; Dallin Oaks has made it clear; they've all made it clear. There is no law but the master's will, the prophet's will that is; and we will know his will is righteous, because we already know it cannot be otherwise. By definition, his will is all-righteousness. In Joseph Smith's words, he (the prophet) has no law. His will itself is the only law. It is a declaration of war against all nomos, at the same it masquerades as its ultimate expression.
Some people spend time wondering whether Mormonism qualifies as a cult. Why? Because the church has nice commercials? Because the APA doesn't want to be accused of religious bigotry? Authors Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad suggest a definition of a cult, and it fits Mormonism to a T, for whatever it's worth. They write that cults are “groups with an authoritarian structure where the leader's power is not constrained by scriptures, tradition, or any higher 'authority'...In a cult, absolute authority lies in a leader who has few if any external constraints”.
Member lurkers might object that “the prophet” is constrained by both the will of God and the quorum of the twelve. First question: How do we know what the will of God is as it pertains to the church? As members, we only know via what the prophet himself says about “God's will”; which is to say, we by definition as Mormons have no way of knowing how divergent the two might be. If we were ever to presume they did differ, we would by that fact alone know we were wrong. No - they are inextricably linked. And how we know they are is - because the prophet himself told us they were. The fact is that no member can argue that God's will is a constraint on the prophet's, because no member has the ability to even fathom "in righteousness" a divine will distinct from what the prophet declares it to be, let alone ever know it to diverge. It's impossible within that world. The prophet's will is God's law is the only law. That is the way of Mormonism, and always has been.
And about the quorum - because the president of the church is the only man sustained as having the keys of receiving revelation for the whole church, there are NO grounds for ever imagining that a believing quorum of the twelve would ever dare to contradict what the prophet says is the will of God. None. They are as wound-up in the thing as we were, I presume, as unable as we were to make sense of the cyclical maze we all inhabited psychologically. There is no out, not for us, not for them, not for anyone. We must all obey the master, and the master is...a man, at the top of the pyramid. Of course it's a cult. It's the very definition of it.
So...
Pres. Packer threatens CES employees with job loss not for lying, but for telling the truth. He literally compares full disclosure about facts relevant to ascertaining whether the church is a fraud or not, with gratuitously insulting overweight secretaries. That any human being could draw moral equivalence between these two things, when many hundreds of people have DIED for this church, and thousands more now are willing to die for it still, is unconscionable. And that the man who could say such a thing could regard himself as a holy man is nearly unfathomable.
Elder Oaks a few times has compared the church and its “adversaries” to warring litigants in a courtroom, in which neither side has a moral obligation to “tell the whole truth”. He declares that it doesn't matter whether something is true; only that which promotes faith in the authority of the church should be spoken. And these people recoil when they are presumed to be indifferent to the truth! Presuming them indifferent is actually unwarrantedly charitable; if we take them at their word, we ought to presume them positively antagonistic to it. He tells the authors of “Mormon Enigma” that it doesn't matter whether what they report is true; he must preserve the reputation of the prophet.
Pres. Hinckley announces that it doesn't matter whether prophets are right or wrong – they must be obeyed regardless. It doesn't even matter if the prophet's error would facilitate the continued erosion of American democracy at all levels by national crime syndicates, that is, “secret combinations”, who are bribing, extorting, and murdering – just “follow the prophet”.
Joseph Smith orders the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor, not because Wm. Law lied, but because he told the truth. He declares truthtellers “perjurers” in his famous 1844 sermon, and in so doing, bears public false witness against his neighbours, slandering and defaming them.
We swear a death oath of loyalty in the temple, vowing to consecrate all we are, all we have, even sacrificing our lives, for the thing.
Joseph F. Smith lies under oath in front of Congress about polygamy. The other apostles all lie about polygamy. Leonard Arrington's autobiography, while claiming that it's possible to write accurate but faithful history, also reports that apostles secretly asked two of his assistants to spy on him (which they did), and that his work, and that of others, was often subject to approval by the very men whose authority might be most jeopardized by certain facts.
Even now, certain historical material, owned by the church, is totally off-limits.
LDS General Authorities draw salaries while impoverished people in Third World countries put in hours of work doing church callings, instead of earning more money to feed their starving families, and scrimp to pay tithes and offerings. The church demands that wards from now on take care of their own maintenance in the interests of cost saving, and then buys a 1.5 billion dollar shopping mall. Its manuals obscure facts about core church doctrines; so does its prophet, Gordon Hinckley, in public interviews. How does misrepresenting Mormon doctrine qualify as being honest with your fellow man?
Mormon elders, following their temple oaths, kill members of the Fancher party. It doesn't matter whether Brigham Young ordered it or not; they thought he had, and the actions taken on that belief tell us once again that within the closed psychological world of Mormonism, there is no out.
I hate thinking about this stuff because it reminds me that there is nothing I would not have done if the prophet asked me. I was, I guess, as conscienceless as anyone. Or at least, my own conscience had been as entirely surrendered by me as had anyone else's. And all the indignant blowing and sucking that church defenders engage in now whenever someone wonders whether they are really being forthright and honest is just the same stupid ego-protection schtick I used to do myself. “How dare you say such a thing?! How dare you impute unto me disingenuity?!”. And at the same time, I was protecting the thing too, really only protecting my own vanity, my own self from pain.
Yet somehow, in my uber-Mormon state, I imagined myself to be a man of great integrity, of principle. I imagined that I would have stood up during the Stanley Milgram experiments and said, “No, I won't administer the shock”. I imagined I would rather have been shot than go along with Nazi extermination efforts. I imagined all kinds of things, all of which, suspiciously, were exactly what I wanted to believe most about myself. But they weren't true. And I feel this terrible hurt, this sick feeling, in the knowledge that I would have done all the horrible things I never imagined I would do. I can put myself just in those places and see myself, know that I would have been no different than men whose actions I must condemn now, and I feel a kind of vicarious guilt over it all, and I don't think I will ever live that down in my own mind.
I wasn't the kind of man I thought I was; I guess to put it more accurately, I am not the kind of man I wish I was. And if I had been doing, as a member, research in the archives and drawn up a draft essay, and my supervisor had laid a hand on my shoulder and said, “I don't think the brethren will appreciate you mentioning this episode”, I would have excised it, too. After all, “the church is true, so why cloud the issue?”. I even remember saying to my friend Doug over a decade ago, talking about Mormon historiograpy, “Why does everyone need to know everything? Why cloud the issue? We already know it's true. What does this other stuff matter?”. Of course I would have excised whatever I felt would embarrass the church, or was asked to. No “real” Mormon would do anything else. We follow the brethren. We follow the prophet - he knows the way.
There is a Mormon conscience. It is one which has lost any conception of good and evil outside of what a mortal man, who we imagine to be a prophet, seer, and revelator who could not lead us astray, tells us is good and evil at any particular moment. It is one which regards as “good” that which “builds up the church”, and evil that which inhibits it. And the truth – well, as Pilate said (we might say as members) “what is truth?”. “What's true is – the church. And that's why anything we say, however misleading or incomplete, qualifies as 'true' as long as it builds up the church!”. And whatever we do, at the behest of the prophet, must also be by definition, good.
That same “conscience” leads us to derive pleasure from the sadness of others who leave the church. It leads us to demonize them, to cast aspersions on their sincerity, on their motives. It leads us to reject “moral relativism” at the exact same time we must relativize all conception of morality so as to accommodate the necessary actions for building up the church. So, lying is bad when it hurts the church; lying is not necessarily bad when it serves the church's ends. (We can easily convince ourselves that like Jesus, we have no obligation to cast pearls before swine.) And with this shifting attitude toward the virtues, it's no wonder Oaks keeps comparing the church to a corporation, like Enron, being defended in a court. Talk about a telling analogy.
Our Mormon conscience leads us to take the initiative in calling others to repentance, in judging others who “we know” are not obeying the prophet as we are, in some cases in humiliating them. In can lead us to sacrifice our children for the church; lead us to die for the church; in some cases, it has led some to kill for it. It seems to know no morality outside of the church's survival and growth needs and whatever version of morality the church is preaching at the moment. In the end, our Mormon conscience is a totally co-opted conscience, unworthy even of its own name, for in the end, it is no conscience at all.
| | | | The Story Of My Parents, Siblings, Immediate Family, And The Church: A Response To The Inquiries
| | Posted Nov 23, 2005, at 11:14 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | In addition to inquiries about the stake president thing since the conference, I've been getting lots of inquiries about my family and the church, and in particular my mom and dad, so I thought maybe I could post something on here about it (if it's too much just delete it). This is a rundown for those curious about what effect the church thing has had on my siblings, parents, and my own family, and where they are with the church and me leaving.
Siblings
I am the oldest of six. My four sisters are all active, but I think two of them have a hunch that the church isn't quite what we all thought. But whether they ever decide to follow that up or not, I don't know. They don't want to talk with me about the church, so I've just let it go.
My little brother Brigham hasn't gone since he moved out of the house when he was fifteen. That was fifteen years ago. He was kind of the black sheep of the family, whereas I was kind of the "white and delightsome" sheep - RM, married-in-the-temple, a child a year, etc. I always thought he was kind of lost. Turns out he understood a lot more than I did.
In one funny little exchange, we were chatting about how my mother shows no worry about his inactivity because once, my uncle (a Stake President) gave her a blessing in which he promised her that "one day, Brigham would come back to church". So I said kind of playfully, "Do you think you'd ever go back?". And he said, "BRUDDER - WHAT are you TALKING a-bote?! Are you NUTS? We're talking MK ULTRA, brudder, Manchurian candidate, Mormonian candidate. We're talking SHAPE SHIFTING REPTILIANS from outer space brudder! Are you kidding? The thing's a total cult! They're de-looj-a-null. Gonzo, brudder!"
So I said, "Are you going to tell Mom that?". And he said, "What for, brudder? Why not let her just think I will? Who cares? We're talking abote Kolobian LOONS, brudder. She probably wouldn't believe me anyway since Uncle Bob said it in a blessing. Anyway brudder, chock this ote (check this out) - this new watch I gots has a rad little alarm thing...BEEP BEEP BEEP...See?...RIGHT ON!...Brudder, let's go to DQ, brudder. I need the samwich NOW, and there's this cute little filly that works there with red hair...".
Anyway, it's like we're total buddies again.
I have a step-brother, too, who never joined the church. He's a year younger than I am. We got together last time I was in LA to hang, and we really connected for the first time since we were teenagers. He said, "it was always kind of sad when I would visit, because you guys seemed...gone, like there was a wall there or something, like there was nothing there in a way. And now it's like I have my brother back". I wonder sometimes what we were really like.
I have a half-sister, too, who never joined either.
My Mom
My mother, who works for CES, told me directly to my face earlier this year that even if Joseph Smith had never actually had any golden plates, had never actually been ordained by Peter, James, and John, and did not actually see God and Jesus Christ, that "the church would still be true". And she said it with a strange, and kind of unnerving, frozen smile on her face; and I thought at the time, "There's something weird going on here, I feel like I've seen that strange smile before". And I remembered in that moment I was thinking of the smile on Marshall Applewhite's face, on that video of him they play on Heaven's Gate documentaries. And witnessing that strange smile and the nonsense she uttered in that measured voice, I thought, "What in the hell is this really? What is this? There is no bar here to Jonestown, none."
When I first talked to her months prior to that conversation about the church, I said, "If it wasn't true, would you want to know?" and she said, "I don't know". I asked her later if she still wouldn't want to know if the cost of not knowing was that one of her grandkids came home dead from his mission. I'm still waiting for an answer to that one.
I feel grateful that my mother was concerned enough about my welfare that, soon after I told her what was up, she sent me two books to read to bolster my faith: Dean Jessee's Papers of Joseph Smith, and Bushman's original bio of Joseph Smith. But I'd already read both of them, so I called her on the phone to thank her but to tell her also that I'd read them, and then said though that I would love to discuss them with her, so she could help answer questions I had.
Upon hearing that, she seemed reluctant, and in that moment, I realized something - I blurted out, "Wait a second, Mom - you've never read either of these books, have you?". And do you know that no, she hadn't? And not only that, but once I said that there were things in them that to me raised serious questions about the credibility of Joseph Smith, she then said she WOULDN'T READ THEM. That's right - in that very conversation, she told me she wouldn't read the very books she'd sent for me to read.
So I said, "I have to ask you a serious question, Mom. What am I really supposed to think of the fact that you are sending me books which you claim are faith-promoting, which you've never even read yourself, and then when I ask you to read THOSE VERY BOOKS WITH ME so we can discuss them and you can help me clear up my questions so my faith can be bolstered, you won't because you're scared to? Is THAT supposed to reassure me that this isn't more about our own psyches than it is about communications from the creator of the universe? If these books aren't faith-promoting, why did you send them to me? And if they are faith-promoting, why won't you read them with me?". No answer.
I admit it for all the world to hear - I have a problem. I felt when the church thing all happened, that I really understood my mom for the first time: why it made sense to her to divorce my dad (she came to feel he was a "spiritual danger" to the kids), a move which inflicted so much heartache on all six kids in our family. And that allowed me for the first time to really feel an empathy for her, even an admiration for doing something hard which she thought was right, even though it wasn't.
But over the past year, the Applewhite smiles, the crazy talk about the church still being true even if JS had invented everything, the unwillingness to want to know if it's a fraud even if that means the death of her own grandchild, has really made it difficult to feel any closeness to her at all. That sucks, because we've never really been close. She kicked me out of the house when I was eleven, after the divorce, for reasons she never did explain to me or anyone else (my guess is because I'd asked to be able to spend time with dad, which she had forbid for months [this was prior to the custody trial which, very unusually, she lost in spectacular fashion to my dad]). (For better or for worse, the kicking out episode is described in more detail in the biography of my dad by John Einarson).
So frankly, I grew up (except for a period before and during my mission) not thinking very highly of her. Because of the things she'd done, she represented to me utterly charming, winning manipulation, caprice, limitless self-justification, and obliteration of you to keep her own beliefs going. We could chat and have a few laughs, even connect every once in awhile, but in the end, one had to be on guard.
I suppose the sting of what seemed like an arbitrary, incomprehensible decision to get rid of me as a kid never quite faded (it was probably another one of her revelations which prompted it); and the steeliness I often saw in her afterward, though I grew up at my dad's, and her unwillingness to ever talk about any of those painful things, but rather to just laugh off my attempts to do so dismissively, and the truly abusive things she did, in the name of her and my grandmother's divine revelations, to my little sister (which I have yet to recount in public for my sister's sake, and the memory of which still makes me tear up), and a dozen other things, all left me very leery.
The thought then, two years ago, that perhaps all that could be put away was attractive to me, but now I find myself void of all hope whatsoever. Fortunately for her, she is attractive, charming, clever, and talented, and so has many friends and CES colleagues who no doubt would find any stories of serious abuse, no matter how true, totally unbelievable. In fact, if I was one of them, I would disbelieve them myself. She could sell sand to a desert nomad, and after the deal was done and the guy began to wonder what he'd just done, she could chat him up and the guy would probably happily buy more the next day.
My Step-Mother
My step-mother got baptized not long after she married my dad, I think in 1982. In 1989, I received a letter from Dad while on my mission in Argentina that she was leaving the church. I got the impression it was because "the church was too patriarchal" or something. I thought this was a ridiculous reason to leave the church; "too patriarchal" was a perjorative, but how could anything be "bad" when it was ordained by God himself? It was pride, I "knew"; she was "kicking against the pricks".
And do you know that I got off my mission, she had resigned from the church, and I never once asked her personally why she had left? Why ask, when I already "knew" that whatever her reason was, was stupid? Why ask, when I already "knew" that "deep down, she knew it was true, but was willfully rejecting the Holy Spirit"? What point was there? I didn't need to ask. I already knew. Pride, a desire for the easy life, a (willful?) misunderstanding of church doctrine, etc. What was the point? She'd already defected to the evil side, so there was no point in saying anything.
And certainly, there was nothing I would ever learn about the church from her darkening mind. And her return to semi-radical environmental issues and stuff was only further evidence that the quickening influence of the spirit was long gone. She was being "tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine". She was lost. Why talk to someone who knowingly turns their back on the truth, who is knowingly lost?
So, about four years ago, my dad and my stepmom had a kind of marriage crisis. My dad wanted them both to visit with our SP (the guy who related the GBH story), which they did, right before I started teaching Gospel Doctrine. Part of the agreement they came up with was that Denise, my stepmother, would attend church with my dad, since of course he still believed. It had always been an issue with him that she didn't go. He feared the eternal ramifications of her disobedience, and often when they would squabble, he could hold over her the fact that she didn't attend, that she had actually resigned.
So, in this really weird turn of events, they wound up coming to church every Sunday together, including my Gospel Doctrine class; and what is REALLY weird is that my stepmother, who had resigned from the church years earlier, was literally one of the two best students in the class, always coming up with something really insightful to say, always catching every nuance of meaning. Not bad for someone who supposedly had entirely lost the gift of the Holy Ghost. More on her below.
My Dad
As I've mentioned in a number of posts, my dad asked me to come over and talk to him after he knew something was up with me and the church. I was his Gospel Doctrine teacher in the branch we attended at the time, so maybe this made him especially interested in what was going up.
I declined to talk to him about anything at first, mostly because I felt totally, utterly sick, and in a way, I thought that maybe life outside the church was miserable, even though it wasn't true. But finally, he prevailed on me, so I went over, talked to him for a while, left some stuff for him to read through and think over, and he called me back a couple of weeks later I think it was, and said, "I guess we've been had".
My dad doesn't talk much about this now, but I think it was really a sobering realization for him. He has told me that he feels that being a member of the church was good for him in a way during the seventies, since he was never tempted to touch any booze or drugs or girls or anything, when of course so many others did and really messed up their lives as a result. Of course, I don't think it was very "useful" to him to lose his marriage because my mom, fueled by untrue religious beliefs, detonated our family. But maybe that beats dying from a drug overdose. Or maybe he never would have touched drugs anyway, I don't know.
So, my dad doesn't attend anymore, and never will, I don't think, again; and a huge wedge between my stepmom and him has apparently vanished.
My wife is out; after years of the most creative and strict conditioning regimen I could put them through, not a one of my children has ever so much as hinted that they would like to go back to church. And to be honest, they seem to have a surprisingly mature understanding of the mental tricks and fallacies and delusions which enabled our belief for so long. Sometimes my boys even joke around about it. Once, right before we moved, I was riding around on my horse, when he got spooked and took off at a gallop down a steep hill; it happened so quickly that the reins slipped out of my hands. I don't know if anyone on here's every tried to ride a galloping horse down a steep hill without any control over direction or stopping and not being able to get back into the right saddle position, but it's pretty hard, and I fell off. When I told my son Jed I'd fallen off, he looked at me and said, "See? That proves the church is true".
Coda:
A number of my close (formerly devout) friends now have also left the church, and I continue to hear stories from them about other devout friends and relatives of theirs who are leaving. It makes me really wonder about attrition rates. I don't know if what I hear isn't truly representative of larger trends, or if there really is something of a snowball effect. Whatever is the case, it is amazing to me just how quickly lifetime, thoroughly immersed members, who have never previously contemplated the church might be a fraud, can "come to". Literally within a few hours, all the thought control and indoctrination can be overcome, the huge structure and superstructure of ignorance and self-deception can implode, just by exposure to a few key facts and asking a few key questions. That really says something about the miraculous human mind.
But having friends who have left has made transition a lot easier and I feel really grateful I have buddies to talk to about what has been a pretty traumatic realization.
Anyway, that's the story of my family.
T.
| | | | I Drove Past The LA Temple Last Night
| | Posted Nov 21, 2005, at 08:39 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | I'm in LA on a trip, and last night I drove past the temple on Santa Monica Boulevard...then I thought...
Of all the surreal things, it is now the case that if we were to invite Mormon missonaries into our houses and say, "When I went through the temple, the endowment ritual included a penalty which had us enact our own ritual suicides by pretending to slash out our guts, and slashing open our own throats", that they would say, "Those are anti-Mormon lies. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that isn't true". And they would leave, absolutely certain, via the Holy Ghost which had told them so, that no such macabre thing had ever transpired in the temple. (After all, how could it, when the ordinances in the temple are expressions of eternal ritual law?) And what's the MP going to tell the missionary from Guatemala who's only been a member a year and a half if he asks? That yes, we used to recite oaths in pure Adamic and then disembowel ourselves? He'll probably say, "Elder, don't listen to the critics of the church. All they want to do is trip you up".
Crazy.
| | | | Has Another "Controversial" Talk Gone Missing From The www.lds.org Conference Archives?
| | Posted Nov 17, 2005, at 09:29 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | I don't know if it's just my faulty computer skills or what, but today I zipped over to www.lds.org to find Pres. Benson's talk, "To the Mothers in Zion", which if I remember right, he delivered not so long after "To the Fathers in Israel" (which is still there in the archives).
But no matter how I searched, I couldn't find "To the Mothers in Zion". My recollection is that this conference talk was pretty direct about the responsibility of mothers to not work outside the home. Where is it?
Normally I wouldn't think much about this, except that a while ago an RFM poster went looking for a General Conference Boyd K. Packer talk (I think it was "To the One"), but which does not appear in the conference record for that session on lds.org. He emailed the church and asked them where it went, and as I recall, the church employee said it "wasn't available anymore online" or something (though you can still get it as a pamphlet).
Is is just my computer illiteracy, or is it possible that Pres. Benson's talk "To the Mothers in Zion" has disappeared, too?
T.
Excerpts from the removed talk:
"Fathers are to preside"
"Mothers are to conceive"
"responsibility of wives is to ‘multiply and replenish the earth,"
"special blessings of a large and happy family"
"have your children and have them early"
"do not curtail the number of your children"
"what is our duty? To prepare tabernacles for them."
"It is the duty of every righteous man and woman to prepare tabernacles for all the spirits they can"
"Some women are not able to bear children. God has promised they will be blessed with children in the eternities."
"Through faith, prayers, fasting and special priesthood blessings, many of these sisters have been blessed with children."
"A mother's calling is in the home, not the marketplace."
"The woman is to be an assistant to the husband, but not to earn a living"
"It was never intended by the Lord that married women should compete with men in employment"
"Numerous divorces can be traced directly to the day when the wife left the home and went out into the world into employment"
"Wives, come home from the typewriter, the laundry, the nursing, come home from the factory, the café"
| | | | Cult Joys
| | Posted Nov 16, 2005, at 07:42 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Sure, the three hour block was too long...
Sure, the high councilman talks were boring...
Sure, some of us found ourselves feeling hollow or confused or unable to meet expectations...
But cults have their attractions. Speaking for myself, I felt belonging; I felt I had access to answers to life's profoundest questions; I had status within the church, though I wasn't conscious of that being an attraction at the time.
My kids had friends. The picnics were fun, the work activities, the ball games. Even now I would say that teaching Gospel Doctrine for two years was one of the great experiences of my life, as was running a growing branch as a (hyperactive) member of the branch presidency. I saw my ideas implemented, and what joy when they worked!The Christmas party we threw for the community (on Salt Spring Island, BC), Christmas of 2002, was completely LEGENDARY.
I slaughtered one of my sheep, as did another branch member, and we roasted them over a spit...We'd rented this hall which we totally made into an ancient Palestinian village (my sister was the activities chair). We had booths inside for all the kids and adults to go to, each one doing some activity common to Jewish life 2000 years ago. This is no lie - my sister and I did most of the planning for this thing, and we made sure that all the food was totally authentic for the time of Jesus. We had the unleavened breads and the olives and dates and goat cheeses, almonds, all the spices, etc. We had real papyrus flown in from Egypt (I know that's probably hard to believe, but most of my stories are - still they're true...), and all the kids could get a sheet of papyrus with their names written on them using Aramaic letters. We had incense and candle lights all over, people dressed in period costume, and we had a stereo playing a CD of slow, traditional Jewish folk songs. I could go on but it was a complete full-tilt extravaganza which I think was an amazing success, and the whole island was invited. THAT was fun.
As a member, I often thought that people who left were either ignorant or wished to commit sin - they just didn't like church or whatever. The truth is that being a member of the church was the defining feature of my entire life and consciousness, and I never even contemplated the possibility of living one second of my life as a non-Mormon until those last moments when it all clicked, after two torturous years of finding problems I'd never really considered carefully or thought through. And literally, those first moments of realization were the worst of my life.
It was only after this experience that I realized how blind I'd really been about those who had left. I also knew that those I loved, who were still in, or others, would never believe me, that they would think all the same silly things I used to think about me, and nothing I said would ever matter. And in fact, that is just the case, I think - it doesn't matter what I or anyone says to people out in cyberspace or in person who have not yet come face to face with the questions: "if the church were a fraud, would I really want to know? And how WOULD I know?". Nothing seems to matter - no facts, no logic, no story, nothing. If "X" damages faith, and you say "X", they literally hear "Y", even though you didn't say it. But X just...it just can't be heard. It's too much. So they hear Y instead, and never even notice, and then don't believe you when you say, "but that isn't even what I'm talking about".
Immunizing ourselves against pain is one of the great tasks of our conscious and unconscious minds - no wonder some part of our psyches can so effectively blind us to that which will hurt us. I guess I can't really blame anyone. The truth is, finding out you've been wrong about everything that was most important to you in life really, really hurts. It hurts even now. Even after two years, I still feel often like I'm seeing stars, though of course I have also encountered more and more joys outside church life.
I guess all I meant to say on this post was that churches/cults do have their attractions; and the stories they tell can move us so powerfully, take such hold of our psyches, that they can become synonymous with reality itself, and in some cases, impossible to give up even when we know they don't actually add up. Many of those stories made me feel important. In them I found identity and purpose and meaning - and I was so convinced they were all true, that I would have gladly given my life for the church which told them.
But fortunately, the good things I knew in church exist outside of it, including wonderful, life-enriching stories, which have the added advantage of being factual; and while it may take awhile to track them all the good things down, I have no doubt they are out there. And as it happens, all of us have had many moving experiences since walking away from the only church we'd ever known, and a church we'd actually loved though it misrepresented itself.
It is hard not to be wistful sometimes for the flattering feelings we once felt as members of "God's covenant people", with "the true gospel" and all that. But life is, or can be, about so much more than a flattering myth, that in the end there doesn't really seem to be that much to be wistful about. The truth really is good enough.
Just rambling...
See ya,
T.
| | | | The "Essential" Gospel Which "Isn't Essential To Our Salvation"
| | Posted Nov 15, 2005, at 07:59 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Is there anything sillier than the thought-terminating cliche offered up whenever we detect an irresolvable contradiction in Mormon theology: "that's not essential to our salvation"? What kind of defense is that? And where is the "inessentialist" impulse really taking the thing?
How long until the question of whether the Book of Mormon is "a revelation given to Joseph by God" or a literal translation of an already written account, becomes "not essential to our salvation"?
Large segments of the story of the fall have already become "non-essential to our salvation", despite them being in the LDS standard works (implying that they are essential), simply I think now because of their unbelievability (age of the earth, time of the fall, Adam as "primal parent of the human race", etc.).
And I guess the temple penalties, after 160 years, turned out not to be "essential to our salvation", either, after being essential before (no problem there). And I guess whether the Book of Abraham is an actual "translation", as Joseph said it was, has now also been deemed "not essential to our salvation". I guess also that the doctrine of the Godhead found in the Lectures on Faith, which was canonized until 1921 or whatever, was also "not essential to our salvation". And this being the case, I guess it only makes sense to regard the CURRENT doctrine on God as easily revocable, and therefore "not necessarily essential to our salvation", either.
I guess it's also "not essential to our salvation" to know whether God was once a man, even though this concept can't be extricated from the whole fabric of Mormon theology, including the atonement of Jesus, without destroying it all.
Will there be plural marriage in heaven, as per the declarations of numerous prophets? "Not essential to our salvation". "Why did God punish Adam and Eve for doing something which He forced them to do?" - "Not essential to our salvation", etc.
I'm wondering if there are any other "essential" religions out there so eagerly declaring gigantic, canonized sections of itself "not essential to salvation" as the church we once all belonged to...
How long until Joseph's religion in effect declares itself in toto, if it hasn't already, "not essential for salvation", in order to keep from collapsing under the weight of its own internal contradictions and falsified claims?
I think I know the answer: it's not essential to our salvation to know when...:P
Great church.
T.
| | | | Great News! I Just Finished Inventing My Own Brand New Religion!
| | Posted Nov 14, 2005, at 08:14 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | It all began when I remembered what I did when I decided I wanted to learn how to write songs. I'd grown up listening to tons of stuff from my dad's humongous record collection, but now it was time to focus. I went out and bought the entire Beatles catalog on CD, got a stopwatch, a notebook, my guitar, and began deconstructing every song. I'd time how long the intros were, how long till they got to the chorus or payoff, map out the bars, write out the lyrics to see how they developed themes and storylines, orchestration and production techniques, etc. And then, I sat down and wrote my very first complete pop song ("Angeline"). It wasn't great, but it was something. I continued doing this, even buying orchestral scores and following along with classical pieces, until I felt like I could write consistently good things without much effort.
So, I was already familiar with Joseph Smith's "catalog"; so in an effort to really prepare myself adequately for founding my own religion and religious doctrine, I read through the Hymns of the Rig-Veda, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-gita, the Life of the Buddha, the Dhammapada, Jaina Sutras, the Analects of Confucius, Mencius, Chuang-Tze, the Zendavesta, the Bible, the Talmud, Emmanuel Swedenborg, Spinoza, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Jonathan Edwards, Martin Luther, the Koran, Bahai stuff, Seventh-day Adventist stuff, the Catholic apocryphal stuff, papal encyclicals, and dozens of other pieces. Then, I climbed up to the top of Mount Tuam, on Salt Spring Island, BC, with my notepad and pen, crossed my legs, closed my eyes, and waited for the magic to hit me.
Then I heard a voice say, "Pick up your pen and write, Talmage". For a moment I thought it was the voice of God, until I realized I was actually talking to myself.
Anyway, the good news is, by the time I was done (where the voice came from "isn't essential to our salvation"), I had a brand new religion all sketched out. So here, breaking the news on RFM like Schwarzenegger announcing his gubernatorial run on Jay Leno, I present a brand new religion...
IGNORANTISM
The great thing about Ignorantism is that one can learn all about it in under three seconds: there's nothing to learn because I, its founder, don't know anything of cosmic importance, the end.
There are no "scriptures", because I could find no grounds on which to regard my own writings, or anyone else's writings, as somehow superior or "more sacred" than, say, a Charles Schulz comic strip or a guest op-ed piece by a concerned citizen. So, long story short, in Ignorantism we don't have "scripture memorization" or anything like that - because we don't even have scriptures, because we don't know what they are or what they should be. "Scripture" then just kind of means, whatever material that means the most to any individual person, from wherever it comes. It could be a Danielle Steele novel, the Vince Lombardi bio, Matthew 5, whatever.
There are also no worship services, mainly because it has been totally impossible for me to find any grounds for thinking that one day of the week might be intrinsically more holy than another. Every day can be as holy or profane as we make it - whatever "holy" or "profane" are supposed to mean, which I guess would be up to every individual. For the record, repeated attempts at imploring the creator of the universe to announce his favourite day yielded nothing but disheartening silence.
And speaking of the creator, another reason there are no worship services is because I was unable to get any farther than child-like wonder about whether there was a God or not. I think there is, but I don't know. "Ignorants" therefore have no idea whether there is or isn't, how many gods, what sex, nothing. This means we don't even have any idea whether we should worship anything, especially anything personally invisible; therefore, there are no worship services. Obviously, then, there aren't any formal prayers either, except for whatever prayer anyone wants to make to anything, including trees, stars, Zeus, Jehovah, or themselves. No one knows whether those are bad or good or neither, so really, it's whatever you want.
Another result of all this is that there are no commandments. Sure, I could issue my own - but then, I was also unable to find any reason to believe that my own commands had any greater intrinsic validity than the desire of someone else to not obey them. So, other than your basic "don't hurt people, try to make the world a better place", etc., something you might find on any Hallmark card and which everyone already claims to believe in already, there's nothing in Ignorantism.
In fact, I'm not even sure if the Hallmark card cliches stem from anything other than the necessities of survival - that puts even the cliches in jeopardy. See, in Ignorantism, we have absolutely no idea about this kind of thing; there is only the vague feeling that if there were a creator, and he or it or they or she was really all that concerned about tea or blacks or gays or wine or anything else, there'd be at least as much announcement as a local change in by-law gets in the newspaper.
As it is, there's nothing except three thousand year old claims from guys who took sexual slaves and killed infants, that they talked with the creator and "this is what he said". Gee - that's not suspicious. Problem - If you'd take a sexual slave and kill innocent infants - you're exactly the kind of guy who would exaggerate or invent a story about hanging around with GOD on top of a mountain. But if that weren't bad enough, we don't even know who the chronicler of these stories is, or how much he invented, etc. So, as Ignorantists, we remain as though those supposedly sacred accounts had never been written, because we can't find any reason to credit them, and overwhelming reason to disbelieve them.
We have no idea how we got here, what we're doing on planet earth, what happens after death, nothing.
In short, in Ignorantism, there is no doctrine, no deity, no worship services or formalized ritual, no scriptures, no "leader", no nothing, because any reliable understanding of a realm beyond the physical appears to be impossible to gain. And perhaps the strongest proof of that is that every religion which has claimed to have gained it, including Joseph's religion, has also CHANGED and REVISED OUT OF EXISTENCE and "drastically augmented" over the years its purported "understanding", thereby forever and inevitably torpedoing any reason they might ever have had to be credited. And no amount of "continuing revelation" can spin away that fact.
So, for all those interested, our first worship service will be...never; and no, we definitely do not have any pamphlets to send out.
Ignorantly yours (what else?),
T.
| | | | Why We Shouldn't Care What Apologists Think, Or Say, About The RFM Board: A Parable
| | Posted Nov 14, 2005, at 07:57 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Imagine we were all born as crack babies, and we were continually given crack, unbeknownst to us, as we grew to maturity. In time, we started taking the crack ourselves (say in pill form), because all those we trusted most in the world told us those pills were in fact "super vitamins" that would enable us to become far better, and favoured, people, than others who didn't take them.
Because those pills were first given to us from those we loved and trusted most in the world, we never doubted the whole story behind them. But alas, those very pills affected our own judgment, precluding even the possibility of doubt in many cases, just as it did those who in turn had given them to us, and in turn, those who gave it to them, and on back, until we get to the original drug dealer who, of course, at some level consciously misrepresented those pills. But that didn't matter to him - after all, he had long since cared about fealty to the truth. Why, fealty to the truth would have endangered his, and his family's, survival. And what's a lie or two compared to going to bed hungry?
The drug supply company is ruled by a CEO and board of directors, who employ a team of salaried drug defenders. The drug they push has been exposed innumerable times by innumerable sources in innumerable settings, but that doesn't matter to the defenders, nor to most addicts under the drug's influence (who largely remain unaware of the exposures anyway). Defenders' "research" is generated from within their ranks and would not only never pass "peer review", but LITERALLY would not even pass review from an 8th grade chemistry student. But the drug defenders don't care - after all, they've got a job to do, and in fact, they and their wives and kids are as high on the stuff as we are. It is often unclear to what extent they are conscious that the pill isn't a vitamin at all. Maybe they know, maybe they don't - but most likely, since the drug has such pleasing effects, they just don't care.
And then one day, we discover to our shock that the vitamin isn't a vitamin at all, but a drug which has debilitated us at the same time we thought it was making us and our children strong and healthy, and in some ways, happy. Maybe it even did make us happy in some ways - but the cost of that "happines" (which as it turns out would have been available to us anyway) was to close off to us possibilities for even greater happiness than we ever could have imagined, just like any other addictive drug.
So, a bunch of us begin the often painful process of weaning ourselves from the fraud that was the "super vitamin", and adjusting ourselves to dealing with average human beings and life situations without that mind-altering crutch (just like those who've been addicted to heroin or alchohol from a young age). Recovery entails everything from serious, soul-searching discussions about the most personal of problems, to lightly shooting the breeze or even making fun of all the silly things we used to tell ourselves while addicted.
But drug defenders see nothing funny in anyone recovering from this drug addiction. No - anyone who publicly acknowledges that the "super vitamin" is a fraud from an original drug pusher poses a threat to the pleasing fictions the drug facilitates. And this makes the defenders angry, just as much as a cop stopping a local street addict from getting a fix makes them angry. And so they will say and do the most ludicrous, embarrassing things to those who happen to think drug addiction isn't all that great a thing (just as we used to) in order to maintain their own ego-flattering, drugged out lives. They must must make war against any source who threatens the believability of the fiction that the drug is a super vitamin, and that the first drug pusher did not deliberately misrepresent his magic pills.
But in the end, nothing that any of the drug pushers say can make their drug anything other than - a drug. It is a drug, not a super vitamin pill. It is a fraud. No amount of rancour or frothy indignation or trespassing or psychotic behaviour can change that, because there is such a thing as physical reality, and the "super vitamin" exists within its parameters, and the fact is - the super vitamin is not what its inventor claimed it to be, rather like the Book of Abraham isn't what its inventor claimed it to be, and the Book of Mormon isn't, and the First Vision isn't, and Section 132 isn't, and Zelph isn't. They are just...not. So it is with the pill.
So, if we were recovering from a terrible addiction to an actual drug, and so left all our drug buddies behind, all the drug dealers we knew (though they still may have no idea the pill is a drug) - why the hell would we care one whit about what criticisms those still drugged-out drug defenders offered about the effort to construct and live a life WITHOUT DRUGS?
A million articles and essays about how the drug isn't what it claims wouldn't be enough for me; but one response to how dumb or "evil" our old drug buddies think drug recovery efforts like the RFM board are, is too much. I don't see why we should care at all. Life can be beautiful and wonderful and inspiring and soul-enriching - and DRUGS SUCK, because in the name of ENHANCING all those properties of life, they DIMINISH THEM.
Just say no to drugs - and for God's sake, let's ignore our old drug dealers when they get angry that they can't keep us addicted anymore.
We are free.
Just a thought.
T.
| | | | Am I Out Of My Mind? Is There Some Kind Of Contest Going On On Here?
| | Posted Nov 10, 2005, at 08:28 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | I wanted to respond again to the post started by Steve regarding "jockeying for status", but it was closed.
I just want to say for the record that perhaps the reason my "huh" didn't fool Steve is because it wasn't meant to. I was genuinely surprised by his post.
All my jokes about it aside, the thought of there actually being some sort of real contest or jockeying for status on here makes me want to vomit. I couldn't care less what "place" anyone has, whatever that's supposed to mean. The reason I post a lot on here has nothing to do with any particular poster, but is mostly attributable to the fact that I'm sitting here writing songs that, given the cesspool-like state of the record industry, no one will probably ever hear, and that I'm supposed to send out to my *^&%$ record company so they can say, "nope, not quite", and I often get stuck on lyrics. So I hop over here when I'm stuck and blast something out.
Steve Benson's posts continue to fascinate me, especially since I idolized Ezra for years, and I thought this board really suffered when he wasn't posting here.
If there ever is any kind of ranking on here, I think I belong in the special slot reserved for fathers who would have handed their scared fourteen year old daughters over to "the prophet" or shot innocent children under flag of truce at Mountain Meadows out of devotion to the cult - dead last.
If Steve's reading this, let's forget this. I barely even know what we're talking about and I literally couldn't care less about ranking or jockeying; outside of my necessitated responses to the troll Logic Chopper's references to this a few months ago, this doesn't even exist as a topic for me.
The only genuine contest I know of on here is the one within each of us as we try to transition from being freakazoidal cult zombies into healthy human beings.
T.
| | | | Check This Out - FARMS Is Unveiling A Brand New "Three Cumorahs" Theory!
| | Posted Nov 7, 2005, at 09:07 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | AP - Provo
Scholars based at Brigham Young University today announced a new theory to defend the Book of Mormon's claims about ancient America.
"The Book of Mormon only mentions one Hill Cumorah, as does Joseph Smith", said Professor Garloy P. Hendricks, director of Mormon research group FARMS. "The problem was that excavations at the hill in New York identified by Joseph Smith as Cumorah failed to uncover any trace of the two million people who supposedly died there a mere 1600 years ago. And that could only mean one thing - NOT that Joseph Smith had written the book himself, but that there had been TWO Cumorahs".
The most prominent Mormon defender of the Two Cumorahs Theory has been anthropologist John L. Sorenson. According to Sorenson, the second Hill Cumorah is located not in upstate New York, but in Mexico, in or near the Tuxtla Mountains. This theory, contradicting as it does the words of Mormon prophets and apostles, has increasingly come under fire by critics. Hendricks however continues to defend it.
"I have no doubt that John Sorenson's theory is true", remarked Hendricks, "even though excavation in southern Veracruz has also failed to uncover any evidence of any of the events, people, or places described by the Book of Mormon. But that in turn has led to a wonderful breakthrough in our understanding of the Book of Mormon - NOT that it was authored by Joseph, but there was not only just one Cumorah, nor just two, but THREE Cumorahs!".
When asked how the One Cumorah, Two Cumorahs, and Three Cumorahs theories could all be true when they all contradicted each other, Hendricks simply replied, "with God, nothing is impossible. Besides, I don't really see a problem there".
The Three Cumorahs Theory, or TCT, as propounded by Hendricks and his colleagues I. Bray Forluker and S. Nodefrum Burth, posits that the source record of the Book of Mormon - the so-called Golden Plates - was indeed recovered within New York's "Cumorah One", though they are not there now. It then argues that a fairly small area of Central America was in fact the "spiritual home" of the events, people, and places described by the Golden Plates, rather than the "physical home", and that "Cumorah Two" is thus merely the "spiritual" home of the final battle. "The fact is, there never was any reason for anyone to believe there was REALLY a giant battle in the Tuxtla mountains. A close reading of the text of the Book of Mormon, and of Sorenson's writing, makes it clear that Cumorah Two isn't the physical site of the battle at all, just the spiritual home".
Asked to elaborate, Hendricks remarked that "if, for example, Jewish people do something in New York City, the actual 'spiritual home' of the people, and what they just did, is across the Atlantic, in Israel. Something similar, we now know, is the case with the story of the Book of Mormon. So Sorenson's theory is still perfectly valid".
However, critics argue that a serious flaw in the Three Cumorahs Theory (the TCT) is that neither Hendricks nor his colleagues will actually specify any possible location for Cumorah Three. "If upstate New York was the home of the plates, and Central America is the 'spiritual' home of the story of the Book of Mormon, where actually is the real home?", asked Jack Daines, a founding editor of liberal Mormon magazine "New Delusions". "People and places and events, if they are real, actually have to exist physically, within the boundaries of time and space. Where is that space?".
Hendricks responded that neither he nor his colleagues had any obligation to pinpoint the actual physical setting of the Book of Mormon, since the burden of proof is on those who doubt the historicity of the Book of Mormon to prove it never happened anywhere. "The TCT stands on its own", said Hendricks. "And may I say that we have no desire to 'confine the sacred'. The Book of Mormon is scripture for everyone, everywhere, so in a real sense, it can be said to have happened, potentially, anywhere and everywhere, for everyone. Mormons therefore should have no fear about their faith in the Book of Mormon - with the TCT, it is safe forever".
In a related story, LDS apostle Dallin H. Oaks recently met with representatives of the Great Pumpkin Research Foundation to discuss joint apologetic efforts. "We anticipate a 'fruitful', ha ha, collaboration with members of the GPRF", said Oaks. "As Latter-day Saints, we are always interested in coming together with others with whom we share similar belief systems".
(If one Cumorah can become two Cumorahs, is it really so crazy to imagine that within the loonar world of Mormonism, two of them can become three?).
Bullseye.
Out,
T.
http://www.exmormon.org/boards/w-agor...
| | | | The Inevitability Of Mormon Apologetic Failure
| | Posted Nov 1, 2005, at 07:22 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | When I was growing up, Mormon apologetics in general seemed to consist of a tight-lipped refusal to even acknowledge, nevermind argue with, the "anti-Mormons".
As a result, it was easy for the "anti-Mormons" to remain the devilish phantoms bent on "contention" that we knew them to be - shifty, insidious creatures, now totally devoted to destroying God's only true church, driven by Satan. And dishonest goofballs like Ed Decker, Walter Martin, and DeeJay Nelson, who seemed to be the closest things to incarnate versions of these phantoms, didn't help disabuse my notion of what "anti-Mormons" were all about. Their "arguments", at least as I ever heard them, seemed incredibly stupid and disingenuous. "The Godmakers", a movie I watched with some born again friends in high school, was a good example.
It actually felt great to be on a winning team, a team so important that the master of all the evil in the universe, Satan himself, had selected it especially (of course) for attack. The church was the stone cut out of the mountain, taking over the globe as the "fastest growing religion in the world", and Satan's sevants, the "antis", furious pathetic losers who denied the sun existed while they were staring at it, could only be crushed by us. We were big and strong; they were small and pathetic. We told the truth; but they were liars. We would win, and they would lose. We were good, and they were bad. YEAH. I laughed along with Brigham when he said, "Whenever you try to kick Mormonism, you just kick it upstairs". Victory was inevitable.
Then something started to happen. Or at least, I started to become aware of something I had never been aware of before. As dumb as born-again critics were, there was something problematic about Mormonism, at a level far more profound than I had ever imagined. For many of us, this awareness began a decade ago once Gordon B. Hinckley began publicly lying about fundamental church doctrine, never retracting his comments, but then laughing them off as though they didn't really matter - when people have died for this religion. For many of us, this triggered a kind of vague arousal from what later seemed like a kind of somnambulant state, a glimmer of awareness that would in turn allow for greater and greater awareness.
But those increasing glimmers of awareness were very scary; it was only natural then to turn to "official", salaried, apologetic geniuses, who now actually DID seem to acknowledge some of these problems, in order to smooth over that semi-awake sense of alarm and allow ourselves to go back to sleep. But when the heavyweights were at last seen to put on the gloves and enter into the lists with "enemies", a designation which scarily seemed actually to include things like "indisputable facts", their performance turned out to be as embarrasingly inadequate - indeed, dumb and sometimes seemingly disingenuous - as that of the born-again critics I had always thought we were superior to. How could that be, since we were in the one, true church? What did this mean? Mnemonic devices? Cryptograms? "How much does anyone really know about Egyptian"? "We just need to keep searching"? "It doesn't count because it wasn't written by Joseph personally"? "The word 'salamander' simply meant 'the holy ghost' back then"? "Those areonly trivial details"? "The author doesn't have a Ph.D"? "What you are really asking is...(change the question to make it easier to answer)"? "We have to put that on the shelf"? The double-talk, the off-topic pedantry, the obliviousness to what seemed like the only relevant questions...what was this? Was I insane?
I feel now a strange mixture of sadness, fascination, and a sense of justice being served, in seeing now how wrong I was, how wrong we all were. I once imagined the church could never lose; now I see it never can win. Without immediately deleting well-taken points and relevant questions, the FAIR board - all LDS/skeptical discussion, in fact - can only drive people out of the flattering psychological state necessary for continuing to believe in things which cannot withstand even the most cursory examination. But FAIR betrays their own sense of vulnerability in those very acts of conversation termination, which can only help achieve the same end of driving people sincere about the question, "what is true?", out of a church which isn't.
FARMS seems to think it helps render foundational church claims unfalsifiable by trying to appropriate academic theories positing the impossibility of accessing knowledge, never seeming to realize that their position itself entirely undermines the Mormon concept of a "testimony", thereby destroying Mormon belief in the act of trying to save it.
In the battle of Mormonism against Truth, a truth which it over and over again is forced to denigrate and massage and proclaim as "not very useful", the truth will win, and will win inevitably. There can be no ultimate victory for Mormon apologetics, simply because Joseph did not tell the truth, and that just cannot be undone, no matter how many men are put on the team, no matter how big the budget, no matter how great the trail of academic degrees. Treasures which don't exist, can't magically be pulled from the ground, despite Joseph's great desires to do so; and facts which don't exist, can't magically be pulled from thin air, despite Mormon apologists' great desires to do so.
The Book of Abraham simply is what it is - and what it is, is not what it is supposed to be, and no church member can change that. The fundamentals of Joseph's First Vision stories just can't be magically turned into "trivialities", nor can they be reconciled, simply because...they ARE fundamentals, and they ARE different. Joseph's lies about being forced by a sword-wielding angel to "marry" and have sex with, against his will, his own foster daughters, and the wives and young daughters of his friends, just CANNOT BE MADE TRUE. And the testimonials of eleven guys in trying to establish that the inviolable laws of physics were violated, just can't be made adequate to establish such a thing, anymore than can the many sincere testimonials "establishing" that Bob Marley was the reincarnation of Joseph in Egypt and had healing powers, that Ann Lee communed with angels, that people were abducted by aliens and had sex experiments performed on them, or that they saw Bigfoot can establish that those claims are true.
The one, true church would never have to rely on secret archives, silencing questioners, apologetic arguments characterized by ad hominem aspersions, non sequitirs, selective blindness, straw men, distraction tactics like lists of typographical errors and autobiographical digressions, and so forth. Sincere notions of truth are big and bold and brave, unafraid of being challenged, unafraid of being shown to be flawed, unafraid of discussion and critical examination. It is the Soviets and the Nazis and the apartheid regime and...the Mormons...who fear light and discussion and facts, fear exposure. It is only these closed systems, who sense their own vulnerability to truth detection exercises, who act so.
It is not wishful thinking, I don't think, to recognize now that Mormon apologetics, just like all apologetic efforts for frauds, is a project destined to fail. Conversation can only help expose the fraud; if conversation is terminated, fraud is increasingly suspected, leaing to the same end. And if that conversation is terminated, then apologists have just superannuated themselves, and the apologetics ceases to exist, so conversation is continued by them, but again to the detriment of foundational claims which can't withstand discussion, leading to more censorship, and so on, like a death spiral. Maybe I don't see something now which I ought to, but for the life of me, I cannot imagine how Mormon apologetics is anything other than an inevitable losing game.
T.
http://www.exmormon.org/boards/w-agor...
| | | | What I Wanted To Make Clear During My Speech, But Didn't
| | Posted Oct 27, 2005, at 10:23 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Hi
There were a few things I wanted to make clear in my Exmo talk but didn't (I'm not that great a public speaker ha ha). So here they are, just so I can stop feeling a bit bad about not making them clear. Sorry for the blunt language.
1.) If the church is all it claims, then no sacrifice would be too great for it; but if it is not what it claims, then NO sacrifice ought to be made for it at all.
2.) If you have come to conclude that the church is a fraud, tell your children why. Stop deluding yourself, out of fear and emotional dependence on the thing, into thinking that a church which would rather see your kid come home dead from his mission, or see you go bankrupt partly because of your tithes, offerings, and time wasted on the thing while it blows billions on real estate and radio stations, really is "the best thing out there", and that you ought to just let them believe it "because it's good for them".
Can your kids hear good things taught at a Mormon church service? Of course. Does that justify lying through omission to your children because you've bought the cult scare tactics about them turning into drug addicts if they don't swear slavish obedience to some village magician's successor as president of a fraudulent "one, true church"? NO, mis amigos! De ninguna manera! (no way). You can hear "good things" pretty much ANYWHERE (I know this may be hard to believe for those born and raised in the church in Utah...); and there is absolutely no reason why good, true things need to be mixed up with nonsense which may actually be very harmful. Is it really so crazy to imagine that virtue is its own reward? Yes, if you're an active apostate, like one of these Sunstoner types who knows it's a fraud but just keeps wishing "the church would get with it" or whatever. One of the few straightforward things Gordon B. Hinckley has summoned the courage to emit in the past decade is this statement: "either it is a fraud, or it is not". And if it is, it ought to be treated as one.
Every day your child grows older constructing him or herself, and learning how to make sense of the world, on a completely fraudulent foundation, making all his/her most important decisions based on comments no more divinely inspired than those of Brian David Mitchell's, the more you set him or her up for crushing disappointment. Why do this? The sooner they find out, the easier it will be. So my opinion for what it's worth is, we do our jobs as parents and prepare our children for a happy, responsible life by ceasing to ape JS and GBH in letting them think a lie is the truth, and the truth is a lie.
I'm not saying we necessarily force our children to stop going. If we explain to our children why we believe that Santa's not real, but they still want to send letters to him, what are we going to do? But at least we will have done your part. Doesn't that make sense?
I'm completely sick of getting emails from people telling me how they just can't level with their children about the church because it will "upset them". Duh - of course it will upset them. Is there nothing worse than being upset for awhile? If your daughter's dating some guy you find out is a convicted felon, do you keep quiet because she'll be upset? Our children being upset is a lot better than them wasting the only life they have, that I know of, devoting themselves to a freakazoidal cult run by guys like the duplicitous Gordon Hinckley, the silly egomaniac Thomas Monson, and the odd, angry Elder Packer, who would probably rather see his own son dead, as Joseph Fielding Smith once said about his own sons, than acknowledge he was a homosexual?
Besides, the sooner kids know, the easier it will be for them to handle it. And would we keep it quiet if it meant our children getting killed for the thing? The odds are overwhelming that they never would have to die for the thing, but that isn't because missionaries still aren't serving in very dangerous places, and taking gross risks for it out of an exaggerated sense of invincibility.
But Gordon B. Hinckley did, and does, take that risk with the members; and because neither he nor any church leader will open the archives up for fear of "damaging" information getting out (what should there be to fear?), I regard them all as complicit in the murder or suffering of everyone who has paid a price for this church. Everyone who has ever stonewalled or obfuscated or outrightly lied for the thing is. The General Authorities all ought to be ashamed of themselves, demanding that members vow to be honest with their fellow men, when they don't even know the meaning of the word, and would rather see people dead than be so. The whole attitude is elitist, literally, to a potentially lethal degree. And these are the humble (salaried) servants of a man who supposedly gave HIS life for others, and who said "the truth shall make you free", and "do unto others as you would have them do unto you"? The sick truth is that Mormon leadership and apologists, in their allegiance to the organization over truth (however personally amiable they might be as individuals), make a mockery of the very man they claim as "the first Mormon". What a sick, unfunny joke.
We raised our children, with the best of intentions, in a cult, or cult-like organization, teaching them that the way to please us and win approval from their peers, was to get up in front of 200 people once a month, and LIE, by announcing that they "knew" something which they didn't know. We taught them to bear false witness, as did Elder Packer in his "Candle" monstrosity, to be dishonest with their fellow men, and that really sucks, and I say we ought to try to undo the damage by leveling with them now. And once we do, then let them make their own decisions.
3.) More broadly, and lastly, I remain completely unable to find any validity to the argument, first spun out by Plato and carried on in our own time by a few Straussians, Stalinists, Nazis, religious leaders, etc., that humans are so completely stupid as to require being force-fed consciously crafted lies to function healthily. But even if that were the case, I should say that no man has the right to presume that another requires lies; if lies really are necessary for life, then each man ought to, and presumably would very naturally, unconsciously create his own. And maybe we do anyway in some ways, even in the most liberal of environments.
But for us to consciously create a myth, or come to see a myth for what it is, and then, out of some sense of our superiority, some sense of our "right to rule because *we get it*", impose it on sincere others whose only crime is to trust us, is to take away their freedom, to bind them to us through fraud, to perpetuate our own advantage over them, to make war really upon our fellow man. It is to set them up for bitter disappointment once they come to see, like us, the myth for what it is. But this is rather like the attitude I sense in certain church leaders (and hear anecdotal evidence of). But it is just wrong.
And by the way, for Boyd K. Packer, who calls himself an apostle of Jesus Christ, to draw moral equivalence between not gratuitously insulting overweight church office building ladies, and withholding facts from people who are devoting their entire lives to a church based on claims those facts might disprove, really says a lot about how totally immoral Mormon (or other such organizations') "morality" can get.
I just can't see why truth should need lies to sustain it, and if someone can tell me why, I am happy to listen. Maybe there is something about the whole Mormon theory of "'truth' creation and management" I'm missing...
Out for now,
T.
http://www.exmormon.org/boards/w-agor...
| | | | Newsflash: LDS Church Revises Teaching on War in Heaven
| | Posted Oct 26, 2005, at 10:18 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | AP - Salt Lake City
LDS leaders today announced a change in their theology regarding pre-earth life.
"For decades, we taught that the reason blacks were black and inferior to whites was because they were less valiant than we were in the war in heaven", commented Pres. Boyd K. Packer. "But one question always bothered us - what about the Japs and Chinamen? Hence, the Lord has seen fit to give us a new proclamation".
The church's new "Proclamation on the War in Heaven" discusses pre-earth life among members of the planet's three main races: Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid. It explains for the first time the hitherto mysterious role played before birth by those born of Mongoloid descent. "As information has accumulated demonstrating that those of Mongoloid descent routinely outperform both Caucasoids and Negroids in IQ tests, so has the need increased for a theological explanation", said Packer. "It is kind of like how we had to change the Hemispheric Theory to the Limited Geography Theory once we found out the Hill Cumorah wasn't jam packed full of bones and swords and things. Well, what with all this oriental stuff we know now, we finally have an explanation".
The proclamation claims that before human life on earth, there was a gigantic, intra-galactic battle fought near a star called Kolob between an army captained by Jesus, and an army captained by his evil spirit brother, Lucifer. Those born of Negroid descent, while cheering for Jesus's side, functioned "little better than the crows on Dumbo", according to the proclamation, while "our own white and delightsome ancestors proudly fought as lions". "Our Mongoloid allies", continues the proclamation, "having a special facility for detail and mathematics, bravely coordinated logistics for our various sorties and expeditions over to Satan's territory. They were also heavily involved in code-breaking efforts. The Spirit has whispered that Lucifer had his own kind of Enigma machine like the Nazis invented, except it used audio recordings somehow, and Satan spoke in Navajo like on 'Windtalkers'. Without the Mongoloids, all would have been lost". As a result of their bravery, Mongoloids have been allowed to keep their superior mathematical and analytical skills during their "second estate".
The unexpected inclusion of Sasquatch in the proclamation has provoked acclaim by Mormons in southern Utah. "Ever since my great, great grandaddy Jacob Hamblin saw Bigfoot we wondered 'bout him", said DeFloyd R. Hamblin of Hurricane. "Well, now we know where he come from. He was Satan's main field general, kind of like Rommel 'cep' dumber, and that's why he got cursed s' bad".
Barry Gertsen of liberal Mormon magazine "Sunstone" complained that "this is just like the brethren: they focus on humanity's three great races, but never mention anything about less prominent, but no less important people: midgets, congenital unidexters, hermaphrodites, conjoined twins like Chang and Eng Bunker, pituitary gland explosions like Andre the Giant, blind deaf mutes like Helen Keller, and the Heinz 57 types like Tiger Woods or Nicole Ritchie. What about them? Why are they always left out? What did they do in the battle? This all seems really hierarchical to me".
"There are always critics", smiled Pres. Gordon B. Hinckley at the press conference. "They always have their say. But the Lord's work will continue. It cannot be stopped. It is his work."
In a related story, sources inside church headquarters confirmed that language holding a "Jewish cabal" responsible for the war in heaven was dropped after certain draft committee members lobbied for a "Muslim uprising" to be cited as the cause instead. Both sides compromised by dropping all references to either version of the story. "We all wound up pretty happy with the story just the way it is", concluded Elder Dallin H. Oaks. "We might have to tweak it here and there depending on the survival and growth needs of the church, but we think it will do for now. Maybe instead of Muslims or Jews, we can put something in about the J-Dubs instead. Who knows where it will go? That's the beauty of...'continuing revelation'".
http://www.exmormon.org/boards/w-agor...
| | | | FARMS Versus The Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints: The Two Cumorahs Theory
| | Posted Oct 26, 2005, at 09:45 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | A number of us have mentioned on here, over the months, the many ways in which contemporary Mormon defense efforts undermine the
very church they're trying to defend. In order to keep believing in one church claim, defenders ask us to employ reasoning which
torpedoes another fundamental church claim; yet, they don't seem to notice.
One of these church-torpedoing theories is
promoted by John Sorenson, who, to hear amateur LDS apologists tell it, is a world-famous, highly respected archaeologist
responsible for the most spectacular developments in his field since Heinrich Schliemann started digging up Hissarlik and
discovered the lost city of Troy. (By the way, if there are any other Homer fans out there, check out amateur Robert
Bittlestone's new book on the archaeology of The Odyssey, entitled "Odysseus Unbound".)
Anyway, Dr. Sorenson is
probably best known for his Limited Geography Theory. While this theory requires us to believe that Joseph Smith was lying or
wrong when he told the saints that "there are no errors in the revelations I have given you", plus disbelieve explicit references
in the D&C; and the BOM, which in turn pretty much torpedoes everything, Dr. Sorenson believes the LGT really helps facilitate
belief that Joseph's book is in fact, a work of historical non-fiction, and in turn, belief in Joseph's church. No problem there,
right? (Am I the only one who feels depressed reading men of such education make so little sense?).
And crucial to
Dr. Sorenson's theory (itself the result of a hemispheric theory torpedoed by - what else? - physical evidence) is the claim that
there were TWO Hill Cumorahs. Why, of course - rather like there was a spaceship trailing the Haley Bopp comet, but which
Marshall Applewhite's followers couldn't see because their telescopes were "defective"...
So for those interested,
here is the text of a letter from the First Presidency via F. Michael Watson (have to maintain some possibility of deniability in
the "one, true church").
------------------------
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Office of the First Presidency
Salt Lake City, Utah 84150
October 16, 1990
Bishop Darrel L.
Brooks
Moore Ward
Oklahoma City Oklahoma South Stake
1000 Windemere
Moore, OK 73160
Dear Bishop
Brooks:
I have been asked to forward to you for acknowledgment and handling the enclosed copy of a letter to
President Gordon B. Hinckley from Ronnie Sparks of your ward. Brother Sparks inquired about the location of the Hill Cumorah
mentioned in the Book of Mormon, where the last battle between the Nephites and Lamanites took place.
The Church
has long maintained, as attested to by references in the writings of General Authorities, that the Hill Cumorah in western New
York state is the same as referenced in the Book of Mormon.
The Brethren appreciate your assistance in responding
to this inquiry, and asked that you convey to Brother Sparks their commendation for his gospel study.
Sincerely
yours,
(signed)
F. Michael Watson
Secretary to the First Presidency
--------
Now go
straight over to FARMS and read through the "two Cumorah" articles. See http://farms.byu.edu/results.php?st=1&q;=two+cumorahs .
Now read over these, all of which are
totally in line with the comments from the First Presidency to the bishop above:
"The great and last battle, in which
several hundred thousand Nephites perished was on the hill Cumorah, the same hill from which the plates were taken by Joseph
Smith, the boy about whom I spoke to you the other evening." (Talk given by Apostle Orson Pratt, Feb. 11, 1872 Journal of
Discourses Vol. 14, pg. 331)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We visited the Hill Cumorah
and were accorded the courtesy of going thereon by the wife of Mr. George Sampson, a brother of Admiral Wm. Sampson, who before
his death owned the property.....We were delighted to be there. Looking over the surrounding country we remembered that two great
races of people had wound up their existence in the vicinity, had fought their last fight, and that hundreds of thousands had
been slain within sight of that hill."(Elder George Albert Smith, Conference Report, April 1906, p.56)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"These records were carried
by Ether from the hill Ramah, afterwards called Cumorah, where the Jaredites were destroyed, as well as the Nephites." (Talk
given by Apostle Orson Pratt, May 18, 1873 Journal of Discourses Vol. 16, pg. 50
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Thirty-six years prior to
this time his nation was destroyed in what we term the State of New York, around about a hill, called by that people the Hill of
Cumorah, when many hundreds of thousands of the Nephites-men, women and children, fell, during the greatest battle that they had
had with the Lamanites." (Talk given by Apostle Orson Pratt, Aug. 25, 1878 Journal of Discourses Vol. 20, pg. 62)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It will be, next Thursday
night, 54 years since the Prophet Joseph Smith, then but a lad, was permitted by the angel of the Lord to take the gold plates of
the Book of Mormon from the hill Cumorah, as it was called in ancient times, located in the State of New York. " (Talk given by
Apostle Orson Pratt, Sept. 18, 1881 Journal of Discourses Vol. 22, pg. 224)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Finally, they became so
utterly wicked, so fully ripened for destruction, that one branch of the nation, called the Nephites, gathered their entire
people around the hill Cumorah, in the State of New York , in Ontario County; and the Lamanites, the opposite army, gathered by
millions in the same region. The two nations were four years in gathering their forces, during which no fighting took place; but
at the end of that time, having marshalled all their hosts, the fighting commenced, the Lamanites coming upon the Nephites, and
destroying all of them, except a very few, who had previously deserted over to the Lamanites." (Talk given by Apostle Orson
Pratt, April 6, 1874 Journal of Discourses Vol. 17, pg. 24)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The passages which I have
quoted from the Book of Mormon and the more extended discussion of this subject by Elder B. H. Roberts which was published in The
Deseret News of March 3, 1928, definitely establish the following facts: That the Hill Cumorah, and the Hill Ramah are identical;
that it was around this hill that the armies of both the Jaredites and Nephites, fought their great last battles; that it was in
this hill that Mormon deposited all of the sacred records which had been entrusted to his care by Ammaron, except the abridgment
which he had made from the plates of Nephi, which were delivered into the hands of his' son, Moroni. We know positively that it
was in this hill that Moroni deposited the abridgment made by his father, and his own abridgment of the record of the Jaredites,
and that it was from this hill that Joseph Smith obtained possession of them. " (President Anthony W. Ivins, Conference Report,
April 1928-Morning Session)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Cumorah, the artificial hill of north America, is well calculated to stand in this generation, as a monument of
marvelous works and wonders. Around that mount died millions of the Jaredites; yea, there ended one of the greatest nations of
this earth. In that day, her inhabitants spread from sea to sea, and enjoyed national greatness and glory, nearly fifteen hundred
years. -- That people forsook the Lord and died in wickedness. There, too, fell the Nephites, after they had forgotten the Lord
that bought them. There slept the records of age after age, for hundreds of years, even until the time of the Lord." (The
Latter-day Saints' Messenger and Advocate, Vol.2, No.2, p.221)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The hill, which was known by one
division of the ancient peoples as Cumorah, by another as Ramah, is situated near Palmyra in the State of New York ." (Apostle
James E. Talmage, Articles of Faith , chapter 14)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is known that the Hill
Cumorah where the Nephites were destroyed is the hill where the Jaredites were also destroyed. This hill was known to the
Jaredites as Rama. It was approximately near to the waters of Ripliancum, which the Book of Ether says, "by interpretation, is
large, or to exceed all." Mormon adds: "And it came to pass that we did march forth to the land of Cumorah, and we did pitch our
tents round about the hill Cumorah; and it was in a land of many waters, rivers, and fountains; and here we had hope to gain
advantage over the Lamanites."
"It must be conceded that this description fits perfectly the land of Cumorah in New
York, as it has been known since the visitation of Moroni to the Prophet Joseph Smith, for the hill is in the proximity of the
Great Lakes and also in the land of many rivers and fountains. Moreover, the Prophet Joseph Smith himself is on record,
definitely declaring the present hill called Cumorah to be the exact hill spoken of in the Book of Mormon.
"Further,
the fact that all of his associates from the beginning down have spoken of it as the identical hill where Mormon and Moroni hid
the records, must carry some weight. It is difficult for a reasonable person to believe that such men as Oliver Cowdery, Brigham
Young, Parley P. Pratt, Orson Pratt, David Whitmer, and many others, could speak frequently of the Spot where the Prophet Joseph
Smith obtained the plates as the Hill Cumorah, and not be corrected by the Prophet, if that were not the fact. That they did
speak of this hill in the days of the Prophet in this definite manner is an established record of history...." (Joseph Fielding
Smith, Doctrines of Salvation , Vol.3, Bookcraft, 1956, p.232-43.)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In the western part of the state
of New York near Palmyra is a prominent hill known as the “hill Cumorah.” On July twenty-fifth of this year, as I stood on the
crest of that hill admiring with awe the breathtaking panorama which stretched out before me on every hand, my mind reverted to
the events which occurred in that vicinity some twenty-five centuries ago—events which brought to an end the great Jaredite
nation .
[Editor's Note: About 20 short paragraphs later this speaker says the following]
"This second
civilization to which I refer, the Nephites , flourished in America between 600 B.C. and A.D. 400. Their civilization came to an
end for the same reason, at the same place, and in the same manner as did the Jaredites’" (Talk given by President Marion G.
Romney in General Conference, October 4, 1975, Ensign Nov. 1975 pg. 35)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Apostle LeGrand Richards, in A
Marvelous Work and a Wonder, chapter 7, also stated that Cumorah is in New York.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Both the Nephite and Jaredite
civilizations fought their final great wars of extinction at and near the Hill Cumorah (or Ramah as the Jaredites termed it),
which hill is located between Palmyra and Manchester in the western part of the State of New York.
"Joseph Smith,
Oliver Cowdery and many of the early brethren, who were familiar with all the circumstances attending the coming forth of the
Book of Mormon in this dispensation, have left us a pointed testimony as to the identity and location of Cumorah or
Ramah."(Apostle Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, page 174-175, Bookcraft 1966)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"This time it will have to do
with so important a matter as a war of extinction of two peoples, the Nephites and the Jaredites, on the self same battle site,
with the same 'hill' marking the axis of military movements. By the Nephites this 'hill' was called the 'Hill Cumorah,' by the
Jaredites the 'Hill Ramah'; it was that same 'hill,' in which the Nephite records were deposited by Mormon and Moroni, and from
which Joseph Smith obtained the Book of Mormon, therefore the 'Mormon Hill,' of today—since the coming forth of the Book of
Mormon—near Palmyra, New York. (B.H. Roberts, Studies of the Book of Mormon, p.277)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"According to the Book of Mormon
the Hill Cumorah of the Nephites--the Ramah of the Jaredites--must be regarded as a natural monument overlooking ancient and
extensive battle fields. Around it early in the sixth century B.C., the Jaredites were destroyed. Here, also, a thousand years
later, at the dose of the fourth century A. D., the Nephites met with practical annihilation in a battle which, whether judged by
the importance of the changes it wrought in the affairs of one of the world's continents, or the number slain,a ranks as one of
the world's great battles. In view of these Book of Mormon facts one would naturally expect to find some evidences in this
section of the country for such wonderful historical events. Here one has a right to expect the evidences of military
fortifications; for, though a thousand years had elapsed between the destruction of the Nephites and the discovery of America by
the Europeans, still some military monuments would doubtless survive that length of time." (B.H. Roberts, New Witnesses for God,
Vol.3, Ch.34, p.67)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"One
of the most noted places in ancient American history was the land in which was situated the hill known to the Jaredites as Ramah
and to the Nephites as Cumorah. In its vicinity two great races were exterminated; for it was there that the last battles were
fought in the history of both peoples. There also the sacred records of the Nephites found their final resting place." (Elder
George Reynolds, The Story of the Book of Mormon, Ch.69, p.325)
(These are from Norton's website). If these guys were
really preaching false doctrine, why is their ONE CUMORAH theory endorsed by the First Presidency letter above?
Crazy.
A few other differences between the amateur Heinrich Schliemann and John Sorenson: Schliemann's theories
about Troy and Agamemnon's palace bore fruit when, after a relatively minor effort at digging, he found both places; whereas
after 180 years and literally millions of dollars spent in all kinds of disciplines for thousands of scholars, using the most
advanced technologies, to piece together the history of the American continent, there is as much evidence that the Book of Mormon
describes actual people, places, and events, as there is that Queen Elizabeth II is a shape-shifting reptilian descended from
space aliens: none. (See David Icke's website for more info on the royal family's extra-terrestrial reptilian ancestors. http://www.davidicke.com/ And now that I think about it, stay tuned for a
satirical piece in which FARMS extends a formal offer to Icke to join the staff of FARMS).
One similarity, however, is
that both Schliemann and Sorenson both acknowledge an external reality which can be discovered, since if he didn't, Sorenson
would never have had to get behind an LGT in the first place. To believe otherwise would be to believe that even if thousands of
human bones had now been recovered from the Hill Cumorah in NY state, Egyptian-like etchings had been found on nearby rocks, and
all the DNA tests had come back positive for Israelite ancestry, that John Sorenson would STILL be saying "it all happened around
the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and nowhere else, and no one should ever have thought otherwise". And I daresay, not even the Mormon
lurkers reading this could believe suc a thing. Not even John Sorenson himself can. (And by the way, lurkers - why should YOU
ignore physical evidence in approaching and evaluating the BOM, when not even John Sorenson does?).
In your searches,
you could even go to some of the sites run by Christian organizations, who seem to have a special interest in things Mormon
because of their belief that Mormons will go to hell for believing in the wrong Jesus (whatever). Check out, for example, http://www.irr.org/mit/bomarch1.html .
But the best
thing would probably be to open up the BOM and D&C; yourself, and read through all the applicable references, and then wonder why
Sorenson et al never adequately confront these obvious problems in any of their articles (that I've noticed, anyway). You can
find the LDS standard works at www.lds.org. In evaluating the anthropological implications of the LGT, pay special attention to
scriptures like D&C; 19:27, II Nephi 30:3-6, etc. Also get a copy of The Encyclopedia of JS's Teachings, available at Deseret
Book, and start looking up things like "The Book of Mormon", "Lamanites", "Jews", etc.
Pres. Benson used to say that
people get the governments they deserve. Is it possible that churches get the apologetics they deserve? It must be completely
unbelievable, to anyone not emotionally dependent on the church being true, that any church which countenances such confusion and
contradiction could ever be "true". It's all the weirder since the same church's First Presidency is both affirming the One
Cumorah Theory, AND funding guys to promote the Two Cumorah Theory...
But in Mormonism, anything can become anything,
can't it? Black can equal white, and not equal white, and there not be any problem there (see Orwell's "1984").
Nuts.
T.
http://www.exmormon.org/boards/w-agor...
| | | | Does Mormon Belief Cause Insanity?
| | Posted Oct 25, 2005, at 11:18 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | A close relative of mind told me some months ago that even if there were no plates, God and Jesus didn't appear to Joseph, and Peter, James and John didn't appear either to bequeath the priesthood to him, that "the church would still be true".
Van Hale continues to proclaim that the church is true, despite acknowledging that the Book of Mormon is not a translation of an ancient record, which of course necessarily means that either he believes that the angel Moroni was lying, or that there was no angel Moroni and Joseph Smith was lying. Yet, "the church is still true".
LDS historian Davis Bitton delivers an essay in which he claims that a testimony of the church doesn't depend on a testimony of the history of the church, despite the fact that, given that the foundational events of the church ALL HAPPENED IN THE PAST, and thus exist under the category of "history", this is a logical impossibility. He even advocates playing mind games with yourself prior to reading church historical documents so as not to have your faith damaged, e.g., imagining the worst thing you could find out about Joseph before research so that you are always pleasantly surprised.
Daniel Peterson acknowledges that the Old Testament is a "re-imagination" of Israelite history by a later Israelite historian, despite the O.T. being a canonized portion of LDS scripture, and despite JS never proclaiming it as such though he produced an "inspired" revision of it (although Joseph, oddly considering his gargantuan sexual appetite, did take the opportunity of declaring that the Song of Solomon wasn't inspired scripture); but DCP will not acknowledge that another canonized portion of LDS scripture, the Pearl of Great Price, might likewise be a "re-imagination" of Abrahamic history, or the BOM a "re-imagination" of American history by a would-be American historian named Joseph Smith. All the more peculiar is that the only reason DCP acknowledges this about the OT is the voluminous evidence that it is, in fact, a "reimagination" - but the voluminous evidence weighing in favour of the BOM being a "re-imagination" of American history by a later American historian, and also in favour of the PGP beinga "re-imagination", have been rendered non-existent and therefore entirely untroubling to him. (Talk about the fallacy of "special reasoning"...).
So, "the church is still true".
Dallin Oaks twists hiself into pretzels trying to create rationales for believing mutually contradictory or flat-out bizarre church claims, and even once went so far as to claim that he would still believe if his superiors decided that the BOM wasn't to be considered historical anymore. So for Dallin, as for my relative, even if Joseph had lied about the BOM, "the church would still be true".
Both amateur and professional church defenders post messages on boards and send personal emails to guys like me which, almost without exception, make no sense, or as little I should say, as the rancourous ramblings of Nation of Islam defenders, right wing populist conspiracy theorists, alien-made crop circle believers, etc.
And rank and file members all throughout the church, like me for years, are creating the most absurd alternative realities in their minds in order to keep on believing in something which no one, not DCP nor Gordon Hinckley himself, can even explain coherently in the end, and which quite apart from external reality could never possibly be true given its many internal inconsistencies...
So my question is: At what point should people - not just within Mormonism, but in any group like it whose beliefs just, in the end, cannot sustain contact with reality but in which we are so emotionally invested we can't admit that to ourselves and so declare war on our own minds - kind of be considered officially nuts?
T.
http://www.exmormon.org/boards/w-agor...
| | | | Interesting Chat With A Lady At Mcdonald's Today
| | Posted Oct 19, 2005, at 08:05 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | It's funny. Now that I'm no longer a Mormon, I'm starting to hear things about how people perceive Mormons that I rarely did before.
One example: Today at McDonald's I got to chatting with a lady while our kids were going nuts in the play tube things. After about an hour, I mentioned that my wife and I had been Mormons. She went on to tell me that she found out a few years ago that an insurance company she and her husband had had some dealings with, had been quietly deducting money from her bank account each month. She had never given her consent for any such thing and was pretty mad. She began trying to track down some responsible party at the executive level to demand that the money, which she regarded as having been taken by fraud, be returned to her. She said this search left her frustrated, but she finally got hold of someone.
By the time she got them on the phone, she was furious at how vapid and dishonest the people she had spoken seemed to be, and she said that she blurted out to them, "This company must be run by Mormons, because no one else seems to do business like this". She found in fact that the insurance company was based in Salt Lake City and owned by the church (or run by Mormons, I don't remember exactly what she said). She then called them and said, "If I don't get back every penny of the money you took out of my account within the hour, I am going straight to the media". She said within the hour every penny was back into her account.
Her comments brought to mind a conversation I had with a fellow while still a TBM a few years ago, in which he said that he and his company had gotten involved with a business based in Utah staffed with Mormons, and that they had all gotten totally shafted by this company. He said, "they're brutal, totally corrupt. I found out later Utah's a horrible place to do business for just that reason". At the time it kind of got my back up.
One follow up: the lady I mentioned also said she had gotten a phone call one day from someone offering to send her free videos for the family. She asked them whether the videos came from a particular church, and she said that the girl on the phone never did admit that they came from any particular church, so she said, "Sure, no problem". Then when she got them, of course, they were from the Mormon church. She said she sent them back since she felt the church had been dishonest in presenting them ("Are you honest with your fellow man?"). She kept saying, "that is one screwed up cult". I almost said, "If you think the video pitch was screwed up, you should try logging on to the FARMS site one night", but I just kind of said, "Yeah...".
Anyway, all this has left me wondering about just what kind of reputation, if any, the church has among average Americans and Canadians. Other than the evangelicals, I always thought the church was fairly well-respected by normal people. Now I'm kind of wondering if I was wrong...
http://www.exmormon.org/boards/w-agor...
| | | | One Suggestion For Those Who Wish To Communicate With LDS Apologists
| | Posted Oct 10, 2005, at 12:02 PM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | The LDS church presents itself as being founded on true stories, and being the one, true church of Jesus Christ. In short, it claims to be about truth.
Before anyone begins discussing fossils and chiasmus and "reformed Egyptian" and facsimiles with LDS apologists, I suggest being really upfront with them at the beginning. Ask, "if, by some terrible chance, Joseph Smith hadn't told the truth about his experiences, would you want to know about it?".
Because the whole project of being a Mormon is supposedly about "the truth", there is absolutely no reason that I can imagine for a member not instantly answering, "yes, of course", to that question. If they do answer in this way, then some kind of rational conversation can probably ensue, as long as you sincerely feel the same way about your own conclusions.
But if, as you will probably find, your apologist penpal declines to answer this question, then, if my experience is anything to go by, you are wasting your time. If someone wouldn't want to know if they were wrong, then nothing you say matters, no amount of evidence matters, one hundred Ph.D's don't matter, and you are dealing with someone who has consciously chosen fantasy over fact, and for whom argument is merely a means of perpetuating belief in that fantasy. So why waste time serving as fodder for someone's willfully embraced delusions?
Just say, "Before we chat, I'd like to know if you'd even want to know if Joseph had invented his stories", and then go from there.
Good luck,
T.
http://www.exmormon.org/boards/w-agor...
| | | | The Exmos, Episode Three: Jews, Anglicans, and Bloody Noses
| | Posted Oct 10, 2005, at 09:17 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | (Another episode of the Exmos, in which a ten member former Mormon family tries to adjust to post cult life in a new city).
(Papa Bachman in kitchen. Phone rings. He spies Caller ID. It's Annette, the Jewish friend from the nearby island we just moved from. He pushes "talk".)
T: "Shalom"
Annette: "Ha ha ha! How did you know it was me? Ha ha".
T: (Savouring for a moment, like young Joseph Smith, the thought that someone thought he possessed supernatural powers)
"I've got incredible 'Judar'".
Annette: "'Judar'?"
T: "Yeah. It's like 'Gaydar', when you can sense if someone's homosexual. This is the ability to sense if there's someone Jewish around. I made up the word myself. It was nothing, really..." (blushes with pride). (About to blurt out really unfunny joke about my Judar capabilities being a result of my German ancestry, but stifle it).
Annette: "Well, listen. Is your wife around? I'm coming into town and I want to take her to the synagogue today for the New Year's service."
T: (Stifle further urge to adopt a George Wallace drawl and say: "Well, I don't know what the hell kinda calendar 'you people' think you're on, but around here, New Year's Day in in JANUARY".)
After agreeing to go, Tracy begins to freak out. "Look at this house - it's a mess. There are boxes everywhere. I can't go to this thing, I don't have time. I have to go to Home Depot. But I don't even know Annette's number. Can you call the mosque and leave a message?"
T: "The synagogue". Clearly this whole thing was unfamiliar territory to my wife, born and raised in Lancashire, England.
Tracy: "The synagogue I mean."
So then I think..."wait a second. My wife, just the other night, was talking about how hopeless it seemed being able to make new friends. 'People think I'm a loon when I tell them I have eight children', etc. This trip to the synagogue would be perfect for her. She's gotta go. But now she says she won't go, so she can go get some shelves or something at Home Depot. What am I supposed to do?"
I decided to steal the Explorer keys so she couldn't leave. The priesthood in action! "I know what's better for you, than you do, honey! Isn't that great?!" Still, I couldn't resist, further adding credence to the Louis Midgley theory of "You haven't really changed at all, Talmage Bachman". But who cares? My wife needs friends. So I stole the keys.
"Give me the keys! I need to go! I have to get shelves!"
T: "Not until you listen to me for thirty seconds".
Tracy: "Stop it! Hand them over! I'm going to be late!"
T: "Late to Home Depot? What, do you have an appointment?"
Finally she starts laughing. Good. Breakthrough. "I have to go! Fine, I'll listen to you".
She sat down next to me on the bench. Oh yeah. Now was my chance to exert some of my Luman Walters Joseph Smith mesmeric magic on her. I lowered my voice, like Milton Erickson (arcane hypnotism reference), soothingly, and started massaging her shoulders a bit. I figured I knew what she wanted - permission, absolution.
"Listen to me..." (rub shoulders)
"You don't really need to get shelves within the next hour, do you?"
"No..."
"And we've been working awfully hard at getting this place together, haven't we?"
"Yes..."
"And you need to get out and meet some people, don't you?"
"Yes...that feels good". (Keep rubbing)
"Tracy, it's okay if you go to the synagogue. I want you to go. You deserve time by yourself. I'll make sure the kids put all their stuff away when they get home from school. I want you to go and have a great time with Annette. You'll meet new people. Will you go?"
"Hmmm....okay".
Bullseye. After the service, Tracy and Annette and Howard and their kids come over to our new place. We decide to order pizza. Howard orders a large Canadian bacon/sausage. I wondered if the rationalizaton process was the same one Mormons use while they're pounding down hamburgers and quaffing Cokes watching the (Sunday) Super Bowl. For the first time, though, I don't care. Who cares? Did the Creator of the universe really ban pork for all time?
That night, Tracy tells me about the service. "It was really moving. The rabbi talked a lot about how God is a God of peace and love, and they said a prayer for universal peace".
I nearly spat out my juice. I knew Dan Peterson would be with me on this one. "'Jehovah' a 'God of peace'?! Ha! I mean, I knew this place was a Reform synagogue, but I didn't know Reform meant so reformed that they don't even read their own scriptures anymore!". Right then I caught myself - I could tell I was spoiling the moment for Tracy (call it a hunch). I recovered.
"I mean, ahem, wow, cool. Yeah, world peace. It's, like, really, cool. That's really cool. Cool." I think I managed to smooth it over.
"Yes, it was really nice, and the people were really friendly. All the women loved Hawthorne" (our seven month old baby). "It's amazing how much deeper and touching non-Mormon religious services seem. I'm really glad I went. Thanks for convincing me to go."
"No problem". (Whew). "Maybe you'll be able to hook up with some of the ladies you met."
"Yes, maybe".
That was a couple of days ago. This morning Tracy asked if we could all go to the local Anglican church for the Canadian Thanksgiving ceremony. One boy was at his friend's house and three had rugby, but the rest of us went. I don't really feel any desire to go to any church now, but my wife wants social support and a moral environment, and the Anglican church is certainly far lower down on the BS scale than the Mormon church, so what the heck. This will be only the second time I've attended a church service since my last Sunday in the Mormon church (the other one was a Unitarian service in Vancouver).
Anyway, this church is small, very cozy. They had candles lit in the windows, and the priest and youth pastors were wearing white robes with crosses on the front. A couple of times there was a bit of a procession where the priests were carrying large scepters or something, and with those white robes, it looked strangely like a Ku Klux Klan rally. Scenes from D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" flashed through my mind, and the tune from Billie Holiday's eerie "Strange Fruit" started playing in the back of my head...
The priest spoke. He had a Belfast accent. Figures. This guy's probably like Ian Paisly or something, I thought. All of a sudden I imagined him lapsing into a diatribe about how the Catholics were "breedin' like rabbits for the pope!". Then I remembered seeing Gerry Adams on the Larry King show after Clinton gave him that Visa, looking like the cat who'd just eaten the canary, and the dirty little smug mug of Martin McGuinness, and then Trimble and John Major and George Mitchell...
STOP!
I should be focusing on this service, trying to absorb something uplifting, and I'm deconstructing the Northern Ireland Peace Process. Focus...focus...focus...
"Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow" (classic. Love it). Sing along.) Even though I'd had a tough time focusing, having detoured mentally into everything from George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party to the big prize being give to the Australian guy who figured out stomach ulcers were a bacterial infection to the recent defeat of the Red Sox, I still thought the service was more inspiring than a Mormon service. It turns out the priest wasn't like Ian Paisley at all. The service was pretty nice.
Thanksgiving Dinner at home. Nice. After dinner, a chance to get out in the neighbourhood and meet some of the kids' new friends, and maybe even their parents. Ashton got out the hockey gear, and his new friend, Philip, a bespectacled only child of Karen Carpenter-like thinness and delicacy, came along to play.
Philip insisted on being in goal, but wouldn't put on a mask. Ashton told him he'd better. Philip said, "I don't like masks". So, as I was the adult there, I said, "Philip, you'd better put the mask on. You could really get hurt".
"But I can't see when I have the mask on".
"At least you won't get hurt, though".
So, protesting about his blindness, he put the mask on. Right after he said ready, I snapped a wrist shot, which he couldn't see to block because of the mask he'd just put on, and the ball hit him right in the nuts. GAH!
"OWWWWW!!! AAAAAHHHH!"
Philip was laying on the concrete face down, moaning, his hands underneath, clutching his crotch. "I couldn't see...I couldn't see...oooohhhhhh...".
"Way to go, Dad", said Matthias.
"Hey, it was an accident, okay?! Philip, are you alright?...Philip?"
"OOOO-OOHHHH-OWWWWWW...."
After a few minutes, Philip stood up, still shaken, and announced he didn't want to play goalie anymore. We decided instead to have a scrimmmage just firing on an open net.
My street hockey stick has a pretty fine curve on it, perfect for those Joe Sakic wrist shots, so after Philip and Ashton scored, I got the ball (one of those hard plastic orange hockey balls), spun around, and let a shot fly. But it turned out that Philip had moved right in front of the goal crease with his back toward me. He began to turn around right as the ball approached him, and, no lie, it hit him right square on the nose, knocking him backwards, blood spattering everywhere. NOT AGAIN! He staggers on to the nearby grass with his hands to face, bleeding, falls on to his knees, crying. "AAAHHHAAAA....MY NOSE....I CAN'T FEEL MY NOSE....WHAT'S HAPPENING TO ME?....I'm bleeding!..."
Tracy had just shown up with the little kids. Great, now I look like even more of an idiot. Tracy ordered Ashton to run get Kleenex from the house. We run over to where he is.
"Philip", she says. "Have you ever had a nosebleed before?"
"No..OWWWWWWW....MY NOSE....I'M BLEEDING!!!!"
For a second there I thought, "you've never had a nosebleed before? What kind of weird kid are you?", but I managed to remain silent and solicitous of his welfare.
"It's going to stop bleeding in a second, don't worry. Just tilt your head back".
Philip tilted his head back. "I can't feel my nose! Is it okay?! Are my glasses broken?"
"No, just bent".
"MY NOSE IS BENT?! OOOOHHH."
"No, your glasses, your glasses. Just calm down, it's going to be fine".
So, eager though we are to get off to a good start in our new neighbourhood, I met our new neighbours, Philip's parents, for the first time bringing home their crying, bleeding son, having nailed him first right in the penis and then right in the nose with a hard plastic hockey ball.
And when his mother asked me what had happened (to her only son), what else could I say? "I, um, well, it all happened so fast, but I spun around and shot and he was in the goal crease...and he was hit in the nose by the ball" (passive verb tense, i.e., "mistakes were made").
"Oh, it was you?"
"Yeah...sorry. I, he, it just.......sorry about that".
Then she said: "Philip hasn't had many adventures like this". The tone of her voice caught my ear. I thought for a moment I almost detected a kind of thrill in it, as though she was going to add, in an upper-class British accent (plum in her cheek with trilled r's), "I have long read of children who have such adventures, why, in novels by American authors such as those of Mark Twain, in which engagement in fisticuffs and other such raucous amusements is at times indulged in. There of course is also something of this even in our own marvelous Dickens. And now, at long last, such an adventure has come upon our own little Phillippe. Phillippe! Come show mother your wound! My, but you have had an *adventure*, haven't you? Yes, you have!".
But she didn't.
So, so far, two of my neighbours probably hate me, plus their kid, and I haven't really clicked big-time with anyone yet, though the soccer team guys are pretty nice. Fortunately, it looks like Tracy is starting to ease into things, as are the kids.
Out for now,
T.
http://www.exmormon.org/boards/w-agor...
| | | | Dan Peterson And "Ignored" FARMS Arguments
| | Posted Oct 7, 2005, at 07:05 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Hi all
I just got a chance to log on as per my RFM addiction requirements and saw Polygamy Porter's interesting post on Dan Peterson's comment that FARMS arguments are not so much rejected as ignored. So, I thought I'd drop a few comment for what they're worth.
First of all, I'd like to say for the record (in the small chance that anyone in cyberspace cares) that, for all the silly things he might say, I appreciate Daniel Peterson a lot more than I do Hinckley, Monson, Faust, and the other guys running the church, for two reasons: Dan Peterson actually responds to you, and he is actually doing what Joseph Fielding Smith did for years, which was try to explain this g*%$#@ thing in a way that moves beyond Monsonian/Paul H. Dunnian fictions, Hinckley's disingenuous PR spins, and typical platitudes. That explaining what Mormonism is (without saying the words "loyalty cult") in the end is an impossible task is kind of beside the point - Dan at least is still trying.
The First Presidency issued a statement through The Ensign a couple of years ago telling everyone to stop writing to them asking for doctrinal clarification, and recommended that they go instead to their bishops. Anyone who has ever gone to a Mormon bishop for doctrinal clarification will be able to appreciate the true nature of this recommendation: an attempt at evading all responsibility for precisely what they, in their OWN WORDS, are responsible for: "declaring doctrine". There is not one Mormon bishop on this planet can explain, with ANY degree of authoritativeness, any doctrinal point that anyone would ever ask about (not least because their relatively lowly position precludes authoritative pronouncement, and also because Mormonism defies explanation in the end as anything other than a loyalty cult). I've attended wards all over this planet, and the end of pretty much every conversation has been, "We don't know all the answers, and we have to just put some of this stuff on the shelf. I encourage, though, to pray and receive your own answers...") (i.e., invent your own version of what you'd like Mormonism to be, and then keep your mouth shut). The "ask the bishop" strategy is nothing more than a stonewalling.
But Dan Peterson, while I think he inadvertently has done quite a lot of damage to the very cause he tries so hard to defend, at least acknowledges your existence when you write to him. I don't know if he posts still, but for years you could post on the FAIR board, and he'd actually come back and try to get you, in effect, to stop asking "stupid" questions and stuff, not really focus in on your point and instead try to dazzle you and others with thought-terminating cliches and ten dollar words which, I guess, really impress people from starry-eyed fanatics from Utah County (sorry).
Meager, similarly insulting fare for sure, but in an institution like the LDS church, the corporate culture of which (in fealty to the personality of its founding CEO) requires a disavowal of any responsibility whatsoever for what it stands for, having the biggest bully on the schoolyard actually pay attention to you long enough to stick your head in a toilet and flush it (rather than stare right through you as though you don't exist) might be something worth feeling a tad grateful for. It's like putting out your CD and getting a very unfair review from Spin magazine. It sucks, but in a way it beats being completely ignored.
Not that I'm waxing nostalgic. Not even Dan Peterson, as far as I can tell, can straightforwardly answer many (any?) of the most basic questions people ought to ask about Mormonism.
But anyway, what I'm getting at is this. Daniel complains that FARMS arguments are not so much rejected as ignored. I think that is probably true. It is tempting now to think that FARMS writers are aware of why this might be, but I have come to doubt this is the case.
In fact, I once got an email from a FARMS writer (not Dan) stating very emphatically and sincerely that the reason for the dismissal/ignoring of FARMS arguments by people on the RFM board was that...(get ready for this)...
That those arguments were so convincing, that it threw we who (he thought) wished the church to be fraudulent simply so we could live a life of hedonism, into a state of "cognitive dissonance" (his words); and so ignoring them was a coping strategy for us.
He said that this is what I did.
My response was to ask him which convincing arguments he might be referring to, since I hadn't been able to find any; perhaps tellingly, he never cited any in response. He just repeated his original charge. As a former ideological fanatic myself, I resisted the temptation for scorn and passed over his comment from then on with a kind of (as I thought) charitable silence.
FARMS writers, it almost seems, sometimes are fairly bewildered at how their output is ignored. I might be able to shed some light on this, though, unqualified however as I am. But I think it might be something like this.
"Scholarship" implies participation in an ongoing discussion, not only with people who see the world exactly as we do, but with those who see it in contrary terms. Scholars don't write out their theories in private, compile evidences for their truthfulness in private, and then burn them all without ever mentioning them to anyone. In trying to discern reality, we take turns talking about how we think it is, and then people elaborate on, or take issue with, or agree with, what we've said. In this respect, I don't see scholarship as practiced by formally credentialed scholars as fundamentally different than guys sitting in a bar dissecting every last element of the last Vancouver Canucks game, including line-up, line changes, penalty kill strategies, etc.
But part of being a respected participant in such dialogue/inquiry requires the participant's willingness to operate within certain boundaries which appear to be expressions of an independent reality. For example, in discussing the Canucks, our understanding is not increased if Dave keeps saying things like, "If the Canucks really want to win, they need to put seven men on the ice", since hockey forbids having seven men on the ice at a time. Or, if Dave keeps saying, "But you can't rule out the possiblity that it was Wayne Gretzky, masquerading as Markus Naslund, who really shot that puck. And I think it WAS Gretzky, and that's why it didn't go in - Gretzky's too old to be playing for the Canucks". If we kept explaining to Dave that if he wanted to join in our chats, he'd have to keep such weird flights of fancy out and actually focus on the reality at hand, and he couldn't or wouldn't accept that stipulation, at some point we would start ignoring him. And this is what has happened with FARMS.
FARMS writers, and Mormon apologists in general (really, all ideologues) operate under "Hinckley's Dictum", articulated in so many words in an Ensign article a couple of years ago: "When evidence supports our belief, it counts; when it doesn't support out belief, it does not count".
How can FARMS writers be surprised when they come to be ignored by others, when this is their modus operandi?
My answer is this: What if they don't see that this is their modus operandi at all? What if they are completely unaware that they are downgrading in importance evidence which, to everyone else who is emotionally unattached to Mormon theories, seems crucially important? And what if, when they are confronted with this, they don't really understand what is being said, so that even in the act of responding to criticism, they themselves are totally blind to what it most devastating in that criticism? If this is the case, it doesn't really matter in the end whether ideologues are consciously declaring war on the norms of discourse, or unconsciously flaunting them - the result will be the same: what they say in the end will be ignored.
I think this is particularly tragic because FARMS writers obviously are very creative thinkers (creativity being a requisite for theorizing), who, as far as I can see, might very well have been able to come up with things which really blessed the human race. Instead, they have spend (cumulatively) tens of thousands of hours undertaking "scholarship" which in reality isn't scholarship at all (since by Dan Peterson's own admission FARMS is pretty much completely ignored) but "religious belief reinforcement" (call it "RBR"). To make it worse, if Mormonism is not what it claims, and if it isn't "the best thing out there" as so many of us used to convince ourselves was the case, then all their work seems to be pretty much a total waste of time. All those mental energies, all that sacrifice for grad school...and for what?
For what?
For any mature FARMS writer to come to admit that, for whatever else it might be, Mormonism cannot be what it claims, would be an act of such incredible heroism and humility, that it should be lauded by everyone on this planet. It is hard to say, "I have been wrong". It is harder when we must say that to the whole world. It is harder when to say it means we lose many of our best friends, harder when to say it means we must try to become someone new, harder when all those former friends now think we are evil and demented, harder still when it hurts us, or even destroys us, financially. But most of all, to say "I have been wrong" would be to concede that, in a heartbreaking way, our talents and energies and time have been misused, perhaps in some ways totally wasted.
Anyway, I might say that, for the sake of FARMS writers themselves, perhaps more scholars should criticize their output; but this would be completely pointless anyway, since I doubt any of them would ever even want to know if they were wrong (for the reasons I mentioned), and never would concede, no matter what, that terrible first error. And as long as that is the case, they will act so as to ensure that they will continue to be ignored.
Too bad.
T.
Hi everyone (crickets chirping)
Post script:
Since Dan Peterson seems to lament the lack of criticism (without seeming to understand why no one bothers to criticize, i.e., it's pointless), here is a little starter criticism.
Mormon apologetic arguments seem to proceed on the assumption that those who doubt that Mormonism is what it claims bear the burden of proof.
Here is why Mormons bear the burden of proof, not skeptics.
Foundational Mormon claims require us to believe that the laws of physics, as we know them and have always observed them to work without exception, have been violated. Moreover, the basis on which one is asked to believe those laws were violated is a mixture of personal testimonials and personal feelings. But not only have the laws of physics never before been shown to have been violated, but personal testimonials and feelings are inadequate ways of establishing any such thing. In other words, it is far more likely that physical laws were not violated, but that some people merely thought they were, than that they were in fact violated.
As an example, millions of people now have watched the magician Criss Angel on TV hypnotize people and make them float in mid air. The people standing right next to Criss are amazed; they see no wires, no mirrors, nothing. And we at home are similarly amazed. Many millions of us have "seen" someone levitate. We could all bear testimony that Criss Angel can make someone levitate. We have seen it with our own eyes. Does that make it so?
Which is more likely - that Criss Angel can suspend the workings of gravity, or that he is performing an illusion of some kind? If you're a devout, committed "angelist", Criss Angel has just proven he is a prophet, with access to the power of God, and a million witnesses become irrefutable proof that in fact President Angel can suspend gravity. And all the angelists therefore might start stating that all the skeptics out there bear the burden of proving that Criss Angel did NOT make someone float. But all of them would still be wrong, for the truth is, that it is far more likely that people can not levitate, than that they can, and under close inspection, in fact we would find that Criss Angel would fail every single critical test of his levitational powers.
So as a preliminary criticism, I might say that FARMS and all Mormon apologists ought to stop proceeding as though the world had the burden of proof just because they wish to believe they do, and concede at the outset that any person, including themselves, defending a claim which requires us to believe that the laws of physics have been violated, automatically and unavoidably bears the burden of proof in establishing that claim, for the simple reason that there is no good reason to believe that physical laws ever have been violated, and innumerable good reasons to believe they never have been, and never will be.
Rather than weaken a position which could hardly be weaker (so weak it is ignored by everyone on the planet but Mormons and recovering Mormons), I think this kind of concession would help start to attract some kind of attention to apologetic arguments. It would signal that Daniel Peterson isn't the guy at the conference on the paranormal alleging that even though some university students did make "many" crop circles, that that doesn't mean that aliens didn't make some of them, or one of them, and since the "alien creator" theory can't be ruled out, and he has felt strongly that aliens did make the crop circles, that the burden of proof is on all those who doubt the Alien Creator Theory. Literally, this is what Mormon apologetic arguments kind of boil down, and in the end, people just don't have time to seriously engage with people like this. True believers look askance at all of the most reliable methods of discovering truth, don't really explain why it is justified that they should, and then just start announcing "the truth" without any good arguments supporting it, as though out of charity they were giving all the "alien crop circle" or Mormon doubters a chance to accept the truth here in mortality...
Another criticism:
Mormon apologists are defending something which most people believe is untrue. Because of this, Mormon apologists, if they wish to cease being ignored, MUST demonstrate that they would be willing to know if Mormonism weren't what it claims (one way of doing this is for them to propose how Mormonism could be falsified [and it must be falsifiable in that claims about physical reality constitute part of Mormonism]).
It often seems, however, that the FARMS folks have imbibed (without realizing?) Carl Schmitt-like attitudes about "struggle" (kampf) being pretty much the whole story of human society and activity. The story of man, the political animal, is the story of war, and all the story there should be. It is war for war's sake, and victory just because someone has to win and someone has to lose. I think this accounts for the tendency that some of us have noticed - that Mormon apologists just seem to want to argue, argue forever, just to argue...there seems no chance of them ever conceding that anyone else might be on to something about their most cherished beliefs. Life has become simply about fighting to keep on believing what they believe, rather than examining it, and then re-examining it, to see whether they really ought to have believed it in the first place.
The Hobbes-inspired Carl Schmitt/FARMS position is in the end a fundamentally anti-rationalist position. It is not the position of anyone who believes there is a truth independent of human wish, and who wishes to find it no matter how much damage that search may do to his ego and pocketbook. This attitude seems to render the question of the purpose of debate an absurdity, since the debate itself is the point, a contest of wills, life as a believing agent equalling war. But those whose attention FARMS might enjoy, for all their faults, seem to view debate not as an end in itself, but as a necessary means of achieving another goal altogether - namely, the acquisition of truth/discovery of reality. This discrepancy in attitude makes it very easy for non-Mormons to simply ignore Mormon apologetic arguments, rather than dissect them and reject them: the project seems totally pointless. And right now, it IS totally pointless.
I don't think there is anything apostate about conceding upfront that Mormons bear the burden of proof, nor do I think there is anything apostate about saying, "...and if I am wrong about Mormonism, I should like to know about it". Indeed, a number of prominent Mormons have expressed views rather similar to this, from Orson Pratt to J. Reuben Clark to Hugh B. Brown. So why not? Perhaps this might get the train rolling for FARMS.
For all I can tell, Daniel Peterson seems to regard himself as a modern Sisyphus, destined to keep repeating things over and over which he believes totally answer the skeptics of Mormonism. He seems to have no conception of why they don't, or why the same questions keep getting asked. Maybe a few key changes in approach might clear away some of the clouds and help him and other Mormons see how they could better defend the beliefs they are so committed to. Concede where the burden lies, and propose a sensible means of falsifying Mormonism (since even GBH concedes the possibility that it is "either a fraud, or it is not".)
Just a thought,
T.
http://www.exmormon.org/boards/w-agor...
| | | | Official First Presidency statement on "the negro": Attn. Logic Chopper and all FAIR-board folks
| | Posted Sep 29, 2005, at 07:17 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | It is now common for members of the church to describe as mysterious the church's official positions on "the negro". This isn't really surprising - as soon as the papyri turned up, all of a sudden the Book of Abraham became "mysterious", just as now the whereabouts of the Lamanites has become "mysterious", etc., etc. This is the intermediate stage of the act of "putting it on the shelf" - what was once clear becomes out of focus, and finally, is purged from memory and consciousness altogether.
Logic Chopper, a few weeks ago, accused me of lying when I said that I'd had posts quoting the First Presidency deleted from the FAIR board. How odd. What else would he expect in a church for which "history" is always simply a means to perpetuating belief? Just last night, unpacking, I found "Truth Restored", which states that polygamy was so essential to Mormon doctrine and history that no discussion of Mormonism could ever neglect to discuss it - and then right after that (no lie), I found the latest Brigham Young EQ manual, which lies through omission regarding Brigham's teaching of and obedience to this doctrine.
Anyway, as it happens, I also found a few of the quotes on race which I posted on the FAIR board a couple of years ago, which, if I remember correctly, were the ones that were deleted immediately. So here they are for Logic Chopper and all his buddies to view. I also invite he and his buddies to post them without comment on the FAIR board. Perhaps that Jeffersonian democrat Juliann will welcome an acknowledgement of the legacy of completely stupid racial theorizing by men with a seer stone sitting in their vault.
This is from the First Presidency, as quoted in that inspiring classic, "Mormonism and the Negro":
"The POSITION OF THE CHURCH regarding the negro may be understood when another DOCTRINE of the church is kept in mind, namely, THAT THE CONDUCT OF SPIRITS IN THE PREMORTAL EXISTENCE HAS SOME DETERMINING EFFECT upon the conditions of mortality...among the handicaps, failure of the right to enjoy in mortality the blessings of the priesthood, is a handicap which spirits are willing to assume in order that they might come to earth". (First Presidency, 8/17/51).
The First Presidency says this was the position of the church. If it wasn't, then the First Presidency led church members astray. And if they did, then the First Presidency isn't telling the truth when they say God won't let them. That equals a bit of trouble.
If it was, however, the position of the church, then there is nothing mysterious about Mormon doctrines on race and the denial of the priesthood to blacks, and it might as well be acknowledged by those wishing to defend the church. If you don't acknowledge it, church defenders will be presumed to be ignorant or disingenuous.
Here's another one from a letter by the First Presidency to a concerned Mormon, quoted in the same book:
"The basic element of your ideas and concepts seems to be that all God's children stand in equal positions before Him in all things...some of God's children were assigned SUPERIOR POSITIONS before the world was formed. We are aware that some higher critics do not accept this, BUT THE CHURCH DOES.
"Your position seems to lose sight of the revelations of the Lord touching the pre-existence of our spirits, the rebellion in heaven, and the doctrines that our birth into this life, and the advantages under which we may be born, HAVE A RELATIONSHIP IN THE LIFE HERETOFORE.
"Furthermore, your ideas, as we understand them, apear to contemplate the intermarriage of the Negro and White races, a concept which has heretofore been MOST REPUGNANT TO MOST NORMAL-MINDED PEOPLE... (yikes)
"We are not unmindful of the fact that there is a growing tendency, particularly among educators, as it manifests itself in this area, toward the breaking down of race barriers in the matter of intermarriage between whites and blacks, but it does not have the sanction of the church and is CONTRARY TO CHURCH DOCTRINE". (First Presidency, 7/17/47, "Mormonisn and the Negro", pages 46-47).
"Contrary to church doctrine". Not policy - "doctrine".
And here is a final one on the dangers of miscegenation:
"If we attempt to preserve the differences and particular virtues of other races - given to them by heaven - then we are serving the Creator and His laws, for we are thus carrying out a more religious work than those contentious academic circles...
Guess which First Presidency member said that?
If you guessed Hitler's top medical advisor and racial propagandist Walter Gross, you guessed correctly.
I guess my last comment would be to undetake the presumption of recommending a new handle for "Logic Chopper". How about, "I Am In Total Denial About What Mormonism Has Meant, And Continues To Mean, Because Once I Acknowledge That, I Won't Be Able To Believe It Anymore, And Then My Life Will Implode Because I Am Completely Dependent On It Emotionally. Without It Nothing Would Make Sense And I Would Cease To Exist".
But chin up, LC - most of us have been there, too.
Sieg Heil (not),
T.
http://www.exmormon.org/boards/w-agor...
| | | | The Exmos, Episode Two
| | Posted Sep 28, 2005, at 08:54 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Got some time this morning...
(Sound theme music)
("Tune in while former fanatical members of the Mormongemeinschaft try to become normal after realizing their entire lives were built on a fraud").
(Kitchen, filled with unpacked boxes, phone rings).
Nora: "Hi, is this Tal? Yes, I got your email about soccer. As a matter of fact, we are still looking for players. Do you want to come down to practice?"
Me: "Wow, yeah, sure, I mean, yeah, okay."
Pause
Nora: "Is there something wrong?"
Me: "Well, I'm curious - are you the team registrar or something?"
Nora: "Actually I'm the coach".
*ALARM*
Me: "Is this a co-ed team?"
Nora: "No, it's all guys, but they didn't have a coach and I volunteered."
(Right then, the cult starts echoing in the back of my mind..."but if I join a team with a female coach, then it's possible that you and I could wind up alone together, like in a car riding home from a game. And if that happens, then there is a VERY good chance we might end up having sex, just like President Kimball said. That's why I had to run away from Katie Holmes that one night - we talked just she and I, and that meant we were about to have sex...Just please promise me you'll stop me from having sex with you...").
Me: (After nanosecond pause - shake head). "Okay, I'll come down to the practice".
Arrive at practice.
Nora: "So, you haven't played in a while, you said." ("Awhile" meant, not since seventh grade P.E. - not that she knew that).
"You think you can get the hang of it again and figure this out?"
NANOSECOND PAUSE (Almost blurt out: "Hey babe - I just figured out that Joseph Smith's bizarro authoritarian cult of self-aggrandizement and the byzantine, contradiction-filled idiocy which passes as Mormon theology is a fraud, despite having been raised by the Mormon Ilse Koch in a hermetically-sealed psychological box in which I was rendered incapable of recognizing any fact, no matter how obvious, which suggested we were all temporarily nuts. You think I can't figure out how to put a ball in a goal? Gimme that g****** thing."
Instead, I said:
"Sure".
We played a quick scrimmage. I got the ball from Mongo and was being checked by Nora. I put a move on this girl (backwards right kick to my left foot) that left her standing there like a plant needing watering, booted it and scored. Maradona! It's literally the only move I know - but after that she thought I was lying and that I'd been playing for years. (This impression would quickly be dispelled, by the way). So, she invited me to play on the team.
Only hesitation is that all the guys are in their early twenties. I don't think there's anyone over thirty. Resisted the temptation to ask them all, "What's it like being a young man who isn't devoting his life to a stupid religious cult?".
Age difference is kind of awkward. Thought about what it would be like, socially, in a new ward...membership peppered liberally with frustrated multi-level marketing salesmen, herbalist chiropractors, 300 pound high councilmen delivering lectures on the Word of Wisdom for thirty minutes overtime, eager young RM's who still think Dan Peterson's really blown all the skeptics right off the planet because Grant Palmer doesn't have a Ph.D., mindless RS Monson-groupies cooing over his latest exaggerated story about a kid getting crushed by a train but not before he gives a four-leaf clover to his mommy, all of us kind of insinctively keeping an eye on each other, all of us keeping a kind of ledger tracking member righteousness and how we all rank up, all of us devoting our lives to trying to keep believing in something which, fundamentally, does not warrant any belief whatsoever. That, truly, would be hell....Suddenly, the fact that I've got ten years on all the guys doesn't make me feel that awkward anymore. (Incidentally, I was invited to try out for an over thirty team too, but they were all in their mid-forties, which was even more awkward...).
But about kids...
Now, with no YM Scouts YW journal writing time worrying about canning peaches early morning seminary Sundays filled with rote memorization of fictions standing with an arm extended shouting "Sieg heil" after "Follow the Prophet", etc., lots of free time for kids...goal has been, get kids involved in something each one of them is truly passionate about...
Jed, 13, expresses passionate interest in "blowing things up". Excellent! Last night I take him to Army Cadets. He is considering joining if he can find an artillery division. Dad swells pride. "I always dreamed of this, like when an enemy gots blowed up good and then all that smoke clears that's my boy standing there 'cause he blowed up everything". Wipe tear from eye.
Ashton: jock. Gets on local Silver soccer team (not bad for never having had proper soccer instruction), and signs up for year-long soccer tutorials so he can advance to the Gold team next year.
Matthias: Muscular, stocky. Is joining local Velox U-12 rugby team and is very excited.
Enoch: excelling at soccer
Lael: taking piano and dance
Sundays: We spend an hour or two of time together doing something fun. Last Sunday we went to an English style Fish and Chip shop in Estevan Village near Oak Bay (Victoria, BC by the way). We swapped stories and laughed a lot. I told the kids a story about Mongo (not his real name), the guy on my soccer team who has an anger problem (he tried to beat up a guy at the game that day and was immediately kicked off the team. They thought it was really funny). Tracy met another young mother there with four kids. They swapped numbers and agreed to get together.
Turns out all the people on here, and on the ex-JW's site, etc., were right - there is life outside of "one true" religious organizations, and so far, though there are some tough moments, it's really a blast. Who knew?
If the church were all it claimed, no sacrifice would be too great for it. But since it isn't, as far as I can see it isn't worth making any sacrifice for, and isn't worth subjecting our kids to its lies solely because we're afraid if we leave, they'll most likely turn into drug addicts and prostitutes or something. Every cult says the same thing - and every cult's wrong.
Hope everyone else is having their own great adventure.
See ya at Exmo '05!
T.
http://www.exmormon.org/boards/w-agor...
| | | | Why The FARMS Ph.D's Don't Matter
| | Posted Aug 31, 2005, at 07:19 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Imagine this: You and your six year old need to get from San Jose to San Francisco to visit a specialist, but as a recently relocated Manhattanite, you have no driver's license. Your new neighbour Rosa, who has a license, volunteers to drive you.
But the day before you leave, you are out walking with your daughter, and you see Rosa, holding a can of Schlitz in one hand, speed through a red light, run a stop sign, change lanes in the middle of the intersection while turning left, drive over the curb, knocking over a trashcan, then jam on the brakes in the middle of the street.
When you inform Rosa that you don't trust her her driving, she blows her stack. She says, "YOU no even HAVE no driver's license! How dare you? You are snob. You saying Dominican Republic no good?"
"No, I'm not saying Domin-"
"Yes you are. You are racist snob. You are 'anti-Dominican'! And if you so good at drivin' lessee you drive!"
"But Rosa, that's not really the point-"
----
To get a driver's license, one has to pass a series of tests showing that s/he has mastered all the information and techniques necessary for responsible driving. To the extent the driver anchors his driving to those facts and techniques, that training has had value. Her driver's licenses matters.
To get a Ph.D., one has to pass through a series of tests showing that s/he has mastered the best information, protocols, methodological tools, etc., our race has hit upon to help further understanding of the world we live in. To the extent that the doctor anchors his claims about reality to those facts, protocols, and methodological tools (even in the case of arguing correctly that some aspect of them is flawed), his training has had value for humankind. Knowledge will increase. Their doctoral degrees matter.
And conversely, to the extent that that doctor frees his claims about reality from facts, protocols, and seemingly very fruitful methodologies, his training loses value for humankind. His doctoral degree ceases to matter.
There is no difference I can see between Rosa, the licensed driver who in effect gives the finger to her training by ignoring it, and in so doing gives the finger to every other driver and pedestrian she comes in contact with, and a man with a Ph.D in effect giving the finger to all the facts, protocols, and methodologies, he was once trained in by proudly ignoring them whenever they happen to prove false whatever he might like to believe, and who by so doing also gives the finger to the rest of humankind by announcing that the burden of proof is forever on THEM, to prove to HIS satisfaction, that his (already falsified) pet theories are incorrect - something which of course is now an impossibility since the theorizer has already abandoned attachment to facts.
This is what no amateur LDS apologist wishes to see: the FARMS Ph.D's don't matter, because the very holders of them have made them not matter. It has nothing to do with the fact they're LDS, no more than Rosa's driver's license not mattering has anything to do with the fact she's from the Dominican Republic. Neither the Ph.D nor the DL matter, because the holders of them have made them cease to matter through their own behaviour.
This is why everything I said above would be true whether the Ph.D or driver were Catholic or atheist or black or Chinese. And if the day ever comes when a fantastic apologetic piece appears from a Catholic chemist really showing that in fact, the wafer LITERALLY, as per the doctrine of transubstantiation, transforms into the flesh of Jesus (i.e., one can actually show that the wafer undergoes compositional transformation, and DNA tests now show the wafer to be of Semitic ancestry, etc.), I'll be the first to clap.
Likewise, if the day ever comes that a FARMS piece really does establish that, as Joseph once said, upon baptism, a new Mormon's blood LITERALLY changes into the "blood of Abraham", i.e., that his ritualistic adoption into the house of Israel signals a real, physiological change to the genetic information found in his body (see Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, page I can't remember), I'll also be the first to clap.
Ph.D. or not, merely claiming that these things are the case isn't good enough, and we have every right and reason to doubt them, just as much as we might the claim that the Jaredites made it over in enclosed, disc-shaped boats which could flip over, or that they were lighted with glowing stones, or that the Book of Breathings has something to do with the Israelite patriarch Abraham, or any other extraordinary LDS claim.
And yet, FARMS Ph.D's, and their fans, seem unable to fathom how non-Ph.D's could ever have the audacity to question FARMS pronouncements. They view this reluctance as a symptom of pride.
I think they may have it backwards. It is only pride which could lead a man to believe that he and his group, alone, were God's covenant people, and that their view of God, religion, and the universe alone was the absolute truth; only pride which could lead a man to feel put out that someone doesn't accept, on his testimony, that everything he claims is absolutely true, DESPITE the fact that he can produce NO real evidence, other than personal testimonials (i.e., "no real evidence") that his view is anything other than as much opinion as anyone else's belief about such things; only pride that could lead him to state that his "scholarship" meets the standards of that being done by other Ph.D's, when in fact it doesn't; only pride that would lead him to literally believe that despite all this, the burden of proof is on everyone else to prove him wrong; and only pride that would lead him to expect us to regard his own opinions with the same seriousness with which we approach those informed by facts and comprising testable propositions. And I might add, only pride that would lead him to label anyone who dares question him as proud.
You don't need pride, or a Ph.D., to notice in FARMS scholarship distraction tactics, obfuscations, irrelevant personal insults, non-acknowledgement of the most important issues, pedantry, non sequitirs, etc. You only need eyes and a brain (No wonder Egyptologist Robert Ritner once took occasion, in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, to publicly make clear that the work of John Gee, his former pupil, doesn't meet the standards of scholarship he was taught while at Yale).
Rather than continue to demand that everyone defer to them because of their degrees, despite their flaunting of everything that those Ph.D's are supposed to signify, I think the church they, oddly enough, still think they're defending effectively might be better served by them doing the same things that every other Ph.D on this planet has done to achieve standing as reliable and credible.
Religion or not, exempting themselves from these requirements on grounds that "they're already right" or whatever, and that therefore, everyone else has the burden of proof, only makes them look like fanatical, egomaniacal idiots, worthy of being ignored altogether.
If Rosa and the FARMS guys want the world to respect their formal credentials, they should do what it takes to earn that respect, rather than demanding it while doing everything possible to lose it. In the meantime, they have no one to blame but themselves for not having it.
Just how I see things,
T.
http://www.exmormon.org/boards/w-agor...
| | | | A New Low In Apologetic Thought: The Charge Of "Fundamentalism"
| | Posted Aug 28, 2005, at 06:46 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | For some reason or other, church defenders seem to believe that charging anyone who quotes LDS scriptures or First Presidency statements as being a "fundamentalist" is a really good idea, and that it goes a long way toward protecting belief that Joseph Smith always told the truth.
I first became familiar with this approach about a year ago when I visited the FAIR board. It seemed that Daniel Peterson's explanation of my apostacy went something like this:
Tal, very mistakenly, thought Mormonism was a fundamentalist religion;
And when he found out that it wasn't, he figured that this meant that (his mistaken idea of) Mormonism, which he had confused with real Mormonism, was false, and so he left.
I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that the people who brought us the tapir loan word theory would think this was a real "gotcha" strategy, yet still, I was. And here once again recently, reading Logic Chopper's echo of this, I felt that same kind of surprise...and it is hard not to wonder: how bad does it get? Where will they bottom out?
I think debating whether Mormonism is a fundamentalist religion, or whether questioners qualify as "fundamentalists", is largely a waste of time, since I think the only relevant question is: Is Mormonism true, i.e, did Joseph tell the truth about his experiences? Forcing a digression by starting to accuse questioners seems much like just another red herring, and I'm not really sure why it seems like a great approach to the FAIR board folks. All that really matters is, Is the thing true?
Pertinent to finding an answer to this, is the fact that Mormonism makes certain specific claims about the nature of physical reality which present themselves as relevant and literal. Also pertinent is the fact that almost without exception, those (nearing 200 year old) Mormon claims are at odds with everything the human race now understands about physical reality. I would like to know how noticing that discrepancy justifies being accused of religious fundamentalism, or how this silly accusation in any way answers the question of how we are to reconcile completely falsified claims with reality...?
A quick example of what I mean, which came up with Logic Chopper. It is neither a fundamentalist nor non-fundamentalist opinion, but simply an irrefutable fact, that Mormonism's scriptural canon claims that Adam was the progenitor of the human race, and that he lived not more than 6000 years ago (see the Book of Moses Chapter 1, D&C; 107, etc.).
If there were any doubt about this, it is resolved by another irrefutable fact - the irrefutable fact that this teaching was confirmed to be literal and doctrinal in an official First Presidency statement, issued under Joseph F. Smith, reprinted not only in the appendix to the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, but in the recent "Teachings of Joseph F. Smith" EQ manual, and in the Feb. 2002 Ensign:
"It is held by some that Adam was not the first man upon this earth, and that the original human being was a development from lower orders of the animal creation. These, however, are the theories of men. The word of the Lord declares that Adam was 'the first man of all men' (Moses 1:34), and we are therefore in duty bound to regard him as the primal parent of our race." (see below for link)
This issue has some importance, because if in fact it is the case that human beings were on the planet prior to 4000 B.C., and even one of whom was an ancestor to a present human being, then it appears to be one piece of evidence that, for whatever else it may be, Mormonism is not what it claims.
And needless to say, whether or not one is a "fundamentalist" (whatever we might take that to mean), the fact is that the question of what to make of this item of Mormon doctrine is raised by no other party than the church itself, since the whole world can find this doctrine within the church's scriptures, official First Presidency statements, and see that the church very recently has re-affirmed it in it official manual and magazine.
Further, since there is not much doubt now that there were fully-developed human beings on this planet long before 4000 B.C., some of whom were our ancestors, the church - if it is what it claims to be - really ought to have some kind of explanation for this: but no apostle, and certainly no apologist, that I know of, can give one.
How can that be?
This should be easy for the one, true church, run by living prophets: How are we supposed to reconcile the claims that prior to 5700 years ago, there was no death of any kind, neither human nor vegetable, on this planet, and that the whole of humanity as it now exists, the Mongoloid, Negroid, and Caucasoid races with all our variations, all six billion of us, were ALL spawned by one couple living in Missouri right around that time, with the fact that...all creation shouts in unison that our earth was populated many tens of thousands of years ago, and that in fact there WAS death long, long before anyone ever lived in Missouri a few millenia ago?
Calling people "religious fundamentalists" who wonder this, or simply announcing this was all supposed to be allegorical (contradicting the First Presidency), or suggesting that members just put it on the shelf (i.e., "render yourself unconscious"), or claiming "it isn't relevant to our salvation", does no good - none of these approaches erases the meaning and substance of the official First Presidency statement nor the scriptures to which it refers. And therefore, how on earth can this point not weigh against the church's claims for itself? Calling someone a fundamentalist is no answer to this, needless to say. Pretty telling that that's the best they can do.
The church raises the question, but the church has no answer. How can that be, if it is all it claims?
T.
See the official First Presidency statement, "The Origin of Man", at:
http://library.lds.org/nxt/gateway.dl...
http://www.exmormon.org/boards/w-agor...
| | | | Diving Into The "Encyclopedia Of Mormonism"...turns Out There's Some Sex Advice There
| | Posted Aug 22, 2005, at 07:57 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Yesterday at the public library I happened upon the Encyclopedia of Mormonism. I never did buy this, so I was kind of curious. Wow lol. Pick any two or three entries, and there'd be enough material there to keep this board occupied for a month. A lot of it read like a parody of Mormon apologetic writing - the siege overtones, moral standing through victimhood, zero sense of humour and overweening self-importance, completely glaring omissions (no entry for "polyandry", nor any mention of it at all in connection with Joseph's unique version of ancient Semitic marital arrangements, and only one specific reference [Fanny Alger] to one of Joseph's "wives", etc.) Another kind of funny thing were the euphemisms in a lot of the articles.
Like, speaking of plural marriage, check this euphemism out. This is from page 1092:
"Evidence for the practice of plural marriage during the 1830's is scant. Only a few knew about the still unwritten revelation" (i.e., "the non-existent 'revelation'") "and perhaps the only known plural marriage was that between Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger. Nonetheless there were rumors, harbingers of challenges to come.
"In April 1839, Joseph Smith emerged from six months' imprisonment in Liberty Jail with a..." (LOL) "...with a sense of URGENCY about COMPLETING HIS MISSION".
Maybe it's me, but I thought that was pretty funny. After six months in the slammer, I BET the voracious Joseph felt a "sense of urgency" about "completing" the particular mission of...having sex with as many women as possible (of course, after the appropriate priesthood ceremony). It'd be like locking Vince Neil up in a monastery for six months and then letting him out at the annual Motley Crue fan club party in Las Vegas.
Come to think of it, I think this euphemism might of value for all those TBM lurkers who feel reluctant to say something to their spouse like, "honey, I'm really horny". Following the kinder, gentler language of the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, you can now express this sentiment by saying in the robotic drone of Mormon GA's:
"You look like a choice daughter of Janice Kapp Perry tonight. As a result, I am really feeling a sense of urgency about 'completing my mission'. I can either 'complete my mission' right now, or in one hour. Which would you prefer? In an hour?
"Just to be clear, then - in one hour, will you follow the example of Fanny Alger, Zina Huntington, the Webb sisters, and so many other elect ladies, and allow me to 'complete my mission'? Thank you. Your compliance with this request will be greatly appreciated. You have my assurance that as per Pres. Packer's repeated warnings, I shall 'keep it natural'."
The Book of Abraham stuff is pretty classic, too.
Anyone else familiar with the Encyclopedia of Mormonism?
http://www.exmormon.org/boards/w-agor...
| | | | Real Life Exmo Song Lyrics For Upcoming Album, With Projected FARRMS Review
| | Posted Aug 22, 2005, at 07:52 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | FARMS writer Michael Reed suggested on another thread that I team up with Richard Abanes, who apparently sings, and do an anti-Mormon CD. All I can say is that if Richard's material is anything like all the other born again pop/rock I've heard, I will have to pass...My own's dodgy enough!
Besides, since all reality I think qualifies as "anti-Mormon", every CD ever made which doesn't explicitly try to cast Joseph's tales as true qualifies as "anti-Mormon", just like every new insight would from the fields of astronomy, anthropology, history, linguistics, physics, Egyptology, genetics, zoology, botany, political science, literature, philosophy, neuroscience, biology, and almost every field of study. It's no wonder we all kind of shared a paranoid siege-mentality - it wasn't a fantasy that we were surrounded by "enemies": all of reality is the enemy!
Anyway, I thought it was quite sporting of Michael, who seems like a very amiable chap, to make such a suggestion. So, I here present the lyrics of a little tune I dashed off called "Cherrie". It's dedicated to all the missionaries who sincerely brought people into the Utopia of Mormonism before we knew that, just like every other utopian scheme, it was a fraud...It has a sad ending, but I'll come up with a few cheerier ones soon enough in other tunes. Below the lyrics is my own rendition of the forthcoming FARMS review.
--
Cherrie
I was young, and I was bold
Swallowed all that I was told
And I met Cherry and took hold
Of her wondering mind...
Cherry laughed, I squeezed her hand
I said, “Come visit my promised land
"Where we are one, and they are 'other'
Where we are one, unlike any other
Cherrie
“It’s somewhere special, somewhere bright
Where knowledge flows like sweetest wine
And love comes tumbling from the skies
And surrounds us all...
“Where we are one - and they are 'other'
Yeah we are one - unlike any other
Cherrie
“There is no ambiguity in the light
There is no disingenuity in the smiles
In the smiles”
So once I found I’d been deceived
I spoke up, but she wouldn’t see
Her eyes were closed, her ears were sealed
All because of me...
She said
"We are one, and they are 'other'
Yeah we are one, unlike any other..."
--
FARMS Review of Tal Bachman's song, "Cherrie"; Feb. 16, 2006
Well, now we've seen it all. 172 years ago, Howe and Hurlbut joined forces to publish the first anti-Mormon book. Now, their successor in the twisted world of anti-Mormonism, 'ex-Mormon' singer Tal Bachman, has now managed the feat of publishing the first ever anti-Mormon pop song - not that it will be rivalling "The Nutcracker" or "Moonlight Sonata" anytime soon. (It is in fact indistinguishable from the common run of bland radio fare.) Bachman's rantings on the notorious 'Recovery from Mormonism' board are well-known to internet surfers. This song, however, will mark the first time his uninformed opinions will be accessible to a wider audience. As such, we will take a closer look at the lyrics of 'Cherrie', and at Bachman's authority to comment on the gospel.
The first thing to say is that Bachman's song seems to presume that Mormonism, in some fashion or another, represents a utopianism. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. As apostle Bruce R. McConkie said once, "Mormonism is not a utopianism". Other LDS scholars have repeatedly made this point in recent years. For example, BYU professor of history and occasional FARMS contributor Dr. Garloy H. Jensen published a paper in Oct., 2005 entitled, "Mormonism Is Not A Utopianism", in which he showed conclusively that Mormonism is not a utopianism. Similarly, in the last Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, chemist Jeff Lindsay summarized his findings on this question in his article entitled, "Mormonism Is Not A Utopianism". Concluded Lindsay:
"After an extensive review of Mormonism, I can say unequivocally that...Mormonism is not a utopianism".
Has Bachman not read these conclusive arguments on the Mormon utopianism question? If so, why is he ignoring them? Is he unaware that this question has been settled already, and that the answer is...Mormonism is not a utopianism? If he is unaware, what does that say about his credibility as a commentator? If he IS aware that this question has been settled in the negative, why is he suppressing this? Bachman either has some homework to do, or some admissions to make about his dishonesty, because the verdict is in: Mormonism is not a utopianism.
It is simply untrue, for example, that Joseph Smith dabbled in, or organized, utopian economic schemes. Early saints did practice something called "the United Order", but this was not a utopian economic scheme at all. It was rather, something called "the United Order", which was in fact, not a utopian economic scheme. Even a quick glance at the authoritative conclusions of contemporary LDS scholarship would confirm this fact; obviously, however, Bachman has no interest in facts.
It is also untrue that Mormonism ever portrayed itself as the solution to the ills of humanity, or that it was ever church doctrine that the Melchizedek priesthood conferred upon the Lord's prophet the right to dictate in all things spiritual and temporal. It is also untrue that Mormonism has ever outlined the contours of some "ideal" man or woman, or polity, in ANY respect, or that the concept of "Zion" refers to anything in particular, Bachman's sly insinuations to the contrary. Similarly misleading is his insinuation that the church claims that obedience to the gospel makes people happy.
But perhaps what is most egregious about Bachman's misleading characterization of Mormonism is the suggestion that there is something "exclusive" in the minds of members about church membership. Does he not know that we now refer to non-Mormons as "friends of other faiths"? Is he not aware of the tremendous ecumenical efforts undertaken by Pres. Hinckley over the past decade? Is he not aware that Mormons join with members of other faiths all over the world in charity work and community activism on moral issues? LDS leaders have repeatedly invited "ALL men to come unto Christ", and that Bachman can seriously suggest that there is some element of exclusivity in the way Mormons view themselves is only further indication that he has an axe to grind.
Not that this should be much of a surprise. He is, after all, involved in the music industry, a field not known for encouraging fealty to the gospel. Which temptations struck Bachman as most attractive, or which he took occasion to indulge in and rationalize we will probably never know; what we do know is that he seems to be quite happy to have escaped the dreary yoke of his temple covenants. We only wish he would not subject us to his rationalizations for this decision over the airwaves.
Bachman, it should be noted, has no formal degree in music, none in poetry or literature, none in history, and none in anything else we can discover. Evidently, he still feels qualified, for reasons we have yet to fathom, to comment on the gospel, and seems to feel he is under no obligation to acquire academic credentials for forming the opinions he has. This says more than we ever could about his own opinion of himself. He seems unbothered by the fact that a multitude of LDS scholars with Ph.D's are still active and have found nothing which suggests to them anything amiss in the church's foundational claims.
Members should rest assured that there is nothing new here. The old canard that Mormonism is just another utopian fraud is simply repeated here by Bachman (who seems to think he is the first to characterize Mormonism in this way, when he is not), as though merely repeating it would make it true. Unfortunately for Bachman, LDS scholars have demonstrated the falsity of this charge long ago through their conclusion that...Mormonism is not a utopianism.
We look forward to the day when those intent on destroying the church, like Bachman, shrink their egos, earn Ph.D's before they form opinions, and do their homework before repeating bogus claims which, as noted, have long ago been refuted by LDS scholars.
Don't expect this one to win any Grammys or Bancroft prizes.
FARMS
http://www.exmormon.org/boards/w-agor...
Editor Note: Please realize this is a spoof! Thank you!
| | | | Goodbye Apocalypse
| | Posted Aug 22, 2005, at 07:51 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | After a lifetime of practicing it as a devout Mormon, I have come to loathe apocalyptic thinking. Apocalyptic thinking, as in: "These are the latter-days, and things are getting worse...there are wars and rumours of wars...there is disease, plague, pestilence...the earth will ripen in iniquity...it will be consumed with fire...the wicked will be devoured...two men will be working in a field, and one shall be taken...catastrophe is inevitable", etc.
Really?
Which is more likely - that apocalyptic thought is the product of supernaturally-revealed, perfect information of the future, or a product of human psychology?
It is difficult not to attribute belief in the inevitability of horrific, doomsday scenarios to human psychology, given our daily fascination with the macabre. This manifests itself in everything from the bedtime stories we favour, to the movies we like, to slowing down at roadside accidents to get a better view, to watching crime footage on the evening news, and which books we read (Stephen King, Anne Rice, the Brothers Grimm, Edgar Allan Poe, etc.). And the number of apocalyptic prophecies made over the past several hundred years, all of which have failed, doesn't help any, either.
There is a myth which afflicts men and women, liberals and conservatives, atheists and theists alike, and that is that there was once a Golden Age, now sadly lost; and we are now inevitably heading for disaster.
The Golden Age might be the 1950's in some formulations; it might be Adam and Eve's time in the Garden of Eden; it might be (following Rousseau) the time when non-greedy, "noble savages" like the native Americans lived harmoniously with each other and with nature, not using anything but what they needed and sharing everything; for DaVinci Code aficionados, it might be when society was largely matriarchal, and therefore kindler and gentler, etc.
But alas!, so the story goes, sin - or technology - or the Catholic church - (plug in culprit) - caused a departure from that Golden Age, and now here we are, in effect hurtling inevitably toward "the end times", the final apocalypse. (And...if only we could all go back to how things were...!).
In the story, the apocalypse can be global nuclear war, or environmental catastrophe from our own greed, or running out of space on the globe due to overpopulation, or Jesus killing all the wicked, etc.
It seems to me that this view of history rests on the presumption that all human life is being played out according to some pre-existing blueprint, writ somewhere in the stars, by fate, or divine will, or something. But even if that were the case, how would we ever know about it? If anyone knew what was written in the stars, how would we even know that they did? Certainly, no human yet has shown anything like a great batting average in predicting the future; and just not doing so anymore, the strategy of current Mormon "prophets", doesn't really raise the average, anymore than a guy who struck out nine out of ten times increases his batting average by refusing to get up to bat anymore.
For those struggling with how to make sense of the world after their stint in Mormonism, a stint which necessarily imbues our view of human history with apocalyptic fears ("we must pay tithing or we will be burned to death when Jesus comes!", "We'd better get started our own food storage!", etc.) and leads us to be pessimistic in certain important ways, let me just mention a couple of things.
Democracy has been spreading for over 200 years (just since 1980, 80 countries have moved from the non-democratic column to the democratic). The earth's population now has more control than ever in human history over who governs them, and how. This has led not to more wars, but to less, as democratic regimes are far more reluctant to initiate war as non-democratic, the power of the leaders of which are untied to popular will. Traffic accidents, the rate of which as it happens is also decreasing, now kill more humans than does any form of combat.
Other than the accumulation of greenhouse gas emissions, virtually all environmental trends are positive.
Food supply has never been safer: you are less likely now to contract disease through water, meat, vegetables, fruits, etc., than ever in human history. (When's the last time you had dysentery?)
One hundred years ago, life expectancy was 41 years. Now, amongst Americans, it is 77 years - almost double. The average life span around the globe is likewise increasing. Also, the worldwide rate of suicide is declining, suggesting something generally positive about emotional states.
Infant mortality continues its decline (in the US, 45% since 1980). Advances in medicine have eradicated, or severely limited the influence of, diseases which only 100 years ago were killing our ancestors. Common infections are taken care of in a week with a course of antibiotics. Immunizations virtually eliminate the risk of contracting things like polio, a disease which even in the 1950's was still crippling and killing people.
It might even be argued that people are getting smarter. IQ rates have risen, around the world and amongst all races, about 20 points in under a century. For all the lamenting we do about lousy education, more humans have access to education, and better education, than ever in human history. This is just as true within the US as it is in Canada, Zambia, India, or Norway.
In the US, the divorce rate is declining. (Aren't families supposed to be more threatened and fragile than ever?)
Smoking is waning in popularity, as is illegal drug use. Crime is also on a decade-long downward trend. (How does this fit with the "ripening iniquity" we're supposed to be seeing "in these, the latter-days"?)
The overall living standard of people around the globe continues to increase (though at different paces), to the point where an average New Zealander, American, or German has access to a quality of travel, housing, clothing, food, recreation, etc., which monarchs only a century ago couldn't even fathom. Janitors can now get from Venice, Italy, to Venice, California, in a matter of hours without risking death from typhoid, etc., back to their houses with air conditioning, a satellite dish, a refrigerator and freezer, central heating, a fireplace and pool table, etc.
Far from incinerating us all, the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the US ended peacefully. Nuclear arsenals continue to be gradually diminished. How do we square this with all the Book of Revelations babble we heard in the eighties in LDS institute and seminary classes?
What's amazing is we could go on for pages, because by almost every index of human well-being, the human race is better off than ever, despite all the problems we are still struggling to solve. There was supposed to be plagues - but there are fewer plagues than ever (AIDS being an exception, though even the rate of AIDS infection everywhere but Africa is now in decline).
There was supposed to be wars and rumours of wars, but as Worldwatch notes, there are fewer wars and casualties per global population than ever these days, and the trend is downward.
There was supposed to be widespread famine, but a smaller percentage of the world's population suffers from starvation and its effects than ever, and that percentage is also dwindling.
There was supposed to be ripening iniquity, but wife beating is down; child beating is down; slavery has almost been abolished; murder and rape are decreasing; illegal drug use is declining; family stability is solid throughout Asia, and is on an upward trend in the US; adultery more than ever in human history is regarded as completely unacceptable; voluntary charitable donations remain high...
So it seems to me that if there is any trend in human history, that trend is positive to an unprecedented degree. And while Mormon leaders occasionally acknowledge all this, and try (pathetically) to cast all these advances as evidence that Joseph Smith's church really was a restoration of the Mormon church which Jesus, the first Mormon, started in Palestine 2000 years ago, the fact is that airplanes, penicillin, increasingly non-invasive surgical techniques, immunizations, air bags, seat belts, aspirin, lasik surgery, pasteurization, liberal democracy, universal suffrage, the near-total abolition of slavery around the world, epidurals, heart transplants, rights against self-incrimination, 911 amublances on call, cochlear implants, cell phones, Amber alerts, and every other stupefying blessing we now enjoy, ALL would have existed whether or not Joseph ever started his religion or not, or indeed, whether he ever had existed or not.
Moreover, for all those silly "Mormonizing" attempts, the fact is that Mormonism IS an apocalyptic cult ("latter-day saints"), and couldn't really be otherwise without severing itself from its own roots, and from Christianity. Just not "emphasizing" this anymore isn't enough; the D&C; and early Mormon prophets were crystal clear on this, and it's all still there on the record books, and in the scriptures.
And since this is the case, as far as I can see, Mormonism never will be able to tell the story of mankind so far, and all its advancements, as anything other than part of a long slide into widespread cataclysmic, apocalyptic misery and destruction (prior of course to the welcome return of that first Mormon, Jesus of Nazareth, after which the earth will, finally, go back to something like that Golden Age, receiving its "paradaisical glory").
But maybe, just maybe, there never was a "Golden Age" to begin with, except in our imaginations. Maybe the idea that there was, is a Wordsworthian understanding of our OWN journeys as individuals from a state of innocence as babies, to a state where we can comprehend malicious motives, and even sometimes indulge our own.
And perhaps a sense of our own inevitable death is somehow exaggerated by us into an inevitable global apocalypse. Maybe we just exaggerate and then project our own story - innocence, fall from innocence, destruction - on to the whole story of humanity; as though we take our own story, which can't help but be linear, and then wrongly infer from it that the past, present, and future history of the entire human race is also necessarily linear and must follow the same pattern - innocence, fall from innocence, destruction - as ours did.
The knowledge that Joseph invented his stories, however, absolves us from trying to believe in something for which there is no evidence, namely, that the history of the human race has already been inevitably written, and that it will get far, far worse, before it becomes Edenic. I might add that it absolves from viewing what appeaer to be genuine improvements in human life, even amazing improvements, as just blips along a long road to decline and catastrophe.
All I really see right now is a human race trying to solve problems, and overall succeeding more than ever before; and where that ends, I'm not sure. But I feel pretty sure that whatever that end is, it's not inevitable, and in no way necessarily cataclysmic. "Fate" looks more than ever like a cop-out, an unconsciously-generated delusion meant to absolve us from our own potential roles in affecting the future of our race. Maybe "fate" is only "the future we make". Maybe the only "blueprint" is...us.
http://www.exmormon.org/boards/w-agor...
| | | | Attention Church Employee Board Spies
| | Posted Aug 22, 2005, at 07:40 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | I have a great idea for all you guys paid by the church ("NOT FROM TITHING MONIES!") to sit around all day monitoring boards like this one.
No doubt you are anxious to report something spectacular, give a heads up to church leaders and earn some recognition. Here is a free scoop.
It may be that at some point in the next nine months (could be in a month even), I have occasion to begin giving interviews in all forms of media - print, TV, radio, all around North America. Of course, that may not happen, given how volatile the music industry is these days, but it's up to you to calculate that risk.
When those interviews occur, the church "issue" will come up. And when it does come up, I will be announcing repeatedly that one example of the way that the church in the end shows absolutely no respect for its word or its members is that despite me trying to be the good guy and going along with the church's requests vis-a-vis the name removal process - namely, going through local leaders rather than sending a letter directly to SLC - I have yet to receive any confirmation from the church whatsoever that they have honoured my request, made about a year ago, to remove the names of me and all of my family from its membership roles, since we have all resigned our membership.
As an added bonus, here is my mailing address so you can hand it directly to Greg Dodge himself, so he can mail the confirmation letter out to me pronto, before you start reading about this in USA Today:
T. Bachman
P.O. Box 506
Ganges, BC
V8K 2W2 Canada
Feel free to send me a thank you card, whoever jumps on this first!
http://www.exmormon.org/boards/w-agor...
| | | | My True, Twisted Monson-Esque Story About Little Kids And Baseball
| | Posted Aug 12, 2005, at 09:23 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Hi
I just thought I'd post this true little story. I think it might be the closest to a Monson-esque story I have. It's just that it has a very unMonsonian twist at the end.
After I found that last smoking gun and realized Joseph had invented his stories, I was completely crushed. I began thinking really deeply about what my life had even all been about. What had I even accomplished? I had sired lots of children, but...I don't know - like, raccoons can do that, you know? It doesn't take any special talent to copulate. One three minute song? It seemed utterly trivial. What had I really ever done that was meaningful?
Well, one of the things that I did end up feeling a bit good about was that I had volunteered to coach a local Little League team a year earlier. Long story short is that, unbeknownst to me, the two jerks who ran the program had taken out all the worst kids on their respective teams, put them on this third team, and that was the one they'd asked me to coach. This bugged me because it meant that we'd be getting blown out every game, which of course began happening right from the first game, and this really made the little kids feel terrible, and also, because I hate losing. (The kids were nine and ten, and since the island we live on doesn't have a proper program, most of them had never played before).
At our first practice - this is true - I began by saying, as a joke, "So...who can tell me which one of these is first base?" The only one who knew was my son Ashton. No lie, I had kids there whose mothers had bought them those stupid plastic gloves FOR THE WRONG HAND, who didn't know any rules, didn't know third from first, couldn't throw, couldn't catch, couldn't hit, nothing. It was awful.
When I first agreed to coach, I swore a vow to myself that we'd go undefeated. I felt I'd be a lot better coach than the other two guys and that I could really whip the boys into shape. Once I realized what the other guys had done with the teams, my only goal became trying to figure out how to reduce the scores from like 20-0, to 10-0.
(One of the things I did, after racking my brain trying to think of ANY edge, was that I drove to Sports Traders in Victoria and bought the top of the line $200 dollar Worth Little League bat, made of the super alloy. When I got back and showed it to my cousin, I remember he just started laughing and said, "Wow - someone really hates losing". At the next practice, I produced the "magic bat" with all the ceremony of a Samurai displaying his sword. You should have seen the kids' eyes ha ha. I think it helped the kids psychologically as well, since it did start to boost their confidence, and they did start hitting better and better.)
One other thing I should mention is that a lot of the boys came from broken homes, and had no dads around. This made me especially conscious to try to set a good example while I was trying to teach them how to play, how to win, and even how to lose without getting totally demoralized.
Well, after many hours of practicing and explaining and cajoling and "big brothering", do you know that, one glorious afternoon, our dreams came true, and we actually managed to beat one of the other teams? I hadn't wanted to lose one, but now I was thrilled to have only won one. Just one. It was great. It was the only game we won all season, but at the time it seemed like more of an achievement than climbing Everest.
So, a year after all this, feeling like my life had been something of a blank, I thought back on those few months and all the laughs and hanging out we'd done together, and I actually permitted myself to think, "Well...heck. Maybe THAT was something. The other guys didn't even want those kids on their teams; they couldn't do anything, but I took them on anyway and together we learned how to play, learned about being on a team and winning and losing, and a had a great time doing it. Maybe I did make a difference with those little kids. Maybe I did do something for them that no one else on that island could have done, that in some small way, will always mean something to them, something they'll always remember".
So about a week later, I went to pick up my kids from karate, and I spotted one of the boys from the team there at the gym. Right on! I felt a kind of glow almost. So I instinctively broke into a big smile and went up to Conrad, held my hand out and said, "Conrad! how ya doin', man?!"
And he looked at me and said:
"Who are you?"
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
And I'm like, "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO----AUUUUUGGGGHHHHHH!!!!" Ha ha ha ha
True story.
I bet that's how, in reality, most of Monson's stories actually turned out, but he just puts a little of that Paul H. Dunn spin on 'em and gives them happy endings! LIAR!
lol
T.
http://www.exmormon.org/boards/w-agor...
| | | | Mormonism, The Death Cult
| | Posted Aug 11, 2005, at 07:23 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Mormonism is, in the end, a death cult.
Now, just before all you TBM lurkers start feeling pride at being so unique and "peculiar" (in the Petrine sense), or glorying in "persecution", I ought to point out that there is nothing unique about any genuine cult being a death cult, for in the name of life, every single one of them ends up worshipping death in their own way: Islam, Nazism, the J Dubs, the Jonestown people, the Solar Temple people, the Heaven's Gate people, the Mormons, all of them. I might say that if anything is sacred, life is, and therefore, all of those cults constitute the ultimate in blasphemy, Mormonism not excepted.
That Mormonism is a death cult in the end is true in many senses, broad and specific. For example, the ultimate sacrament ritual, symbolized by the partaking of the bread and water, is the sacrifice of Christ's body as a means of uniting all (worthy) humankind together, and humankind with God. And as Paul makes clear (in an almost gleeful kind of way), each human being must re-enact Christ's sacrifice not just through taking the bread and water, but through the annihilation of his/her own humanity, that is, the "crucifixion of their own flesh" (see, e.g., Galatians 5, Romans 6, etc.). While Mormonism seeks to sidestep the blatantly macabre aspects of the Catholic focus on crucifixion and death by cheerily offering up glib slogans about worshipping the “risen” Christ versus the slain Christ and refusing to place crosses on its churches, at its core it posits the same things as Catholicism and all Christianity does: there was once a golden age of innocence and virtue - the human race fell - it is only through the human sacrifice/deicide of Jesus of Nazareth that we can begin to overcome natural filthiness.
But Joseph’s cult, as in so many other ways, takes this to a whole new level of weirdness and invidiousness. We have as Mormons the obligation of murdering all those parts of our humanity which can’t in the end squeeze into the church’s unusually constricting mould of the “ideal” male and female. In other words, cult righteousness equals de-humanization. The “natural man is an enemy to God”. Feminists must become Mollies. “Los machos” must give up the motorcycle tours, Metallica, and Maxim magazine, and Ned Flanderize themselves. Those with some sense of autonomy must overcome their “rebelliousness” and submit every last aspect of their lives to priesthood “authority”. Homosexuals must become heterosexuals, or at least, are required to spend their lives killing off what now appears to be an innate proclivity. Males and females who would rather remain childless must overcome this “wicked tendency”, and reproduce. Those who see wisdom in waiting to marry, see wrongly - they must marry when they are young. Theydon’t know what is best for them.
Social liberals must become social conservatives. Those women who think they might be more attractive with two earrings in an ear, those men who fancy tattoos, must not indulge themselves. We must kill off our own tastes, our own innate predispositions, our own feelings and longings and ambitions and dreams and conclusions - our own conscience - everything that makes us the miracles we are. Each one of us is a “self” - and we must kill off that self. We must turn ourselves into fodder for the machine, just to keep it going. In a cult, no one is an end in and of his/herself. No one is a "fellow human being, period" - we are all means, means to some end. We are not humans to be loved and embraced just as we are; we are “people who have yet to achieve what they should”. Evaluation of how far we have, and everyone else has to go to achieve whatever end we imagine each should be achieving, then becomes the prism through which all social life is experienced. In allowing this, we cut ourselves from the ability to feel that “philanthropos”, or brotherly/sisterly love, which was what the whole cult was supposed to be about in the first place. But they never are in the end about that, because they are all frauds. In the end, they are about the destruction of all that could be considered humanity, since the realization of the selfish ambitions and stupid delusions of the cult leader is completely incompatible with the existence of humanity, with the preservation of human nature. Humanity must be annihilated.
Once I longed to be a martyr for the church (in Argentina, on my mission). When that didn’t pan out and I returned home, I myself undertook to effect just that demolition of my own uniqueness and character in its service. I hardened myself against embarrassment when asked in public about polygamy or temple garments or man’s eventual deification. I censored my thoughts, my words, my own feelings. I read the Heber C. Kimball and Jedediah Grant sermons in which they proclaimed proudly that they loved the prophet more than they had ever loved any of their wives. They announced that any wife of theirs who would disobey the prophet would be ejected from their families. I knew that was where my own devotion to the church had to be. I had taken a vow of consecration; I had to be willing to sacrifice anything - all my money, my children, my wife, my life - for the cult. And guess what? I made it, to a surprising degree. I myself, just as all others have, became the happy agent of the destruction of my own humanity. So, my children weren’t “my children” so much as they were “future priesthood holders”, “future Eagle scouts”, “future missionaries”, “future married-in-the-temple people”, etc. They were everything but what they themselves, through the miraculous course of nature, were: unique, breathtakingly complex wonders of creation, valuable in their own right, HUMAN BEINGS whose worth had NO tie to their future “progress” within some sterile, sicko sect piggybacking on to Christianity while demonizing every other manifestation of it in its founding documents. When I looked at my children, I saw them in a way as expressions of my own ego. They would not fail. They would become righteous Mormons. That to a large degree was why I loved them. They were means to the end of me ultimately believing that I'd been a fantastic father, evidenced by my children having become just as much slaves to the thing as I had become.
Light outside the cult illuminates, in the most flattering way, all those cliches we used to laugh at so much, or in some cases, used to Mormonize. “Each one of us is a miracle”, “Everyone is special”, “All we have is each other”, “Love makes the world go round”, even lifetime criminal Rodney King’s much-mocked question: “Why can’t we all just get along?”. That now seems like the greatest question ever asked, and one we probably ought to be searching out an answer for. (And no, the answer is not, “because we are not all Mormon, or Jehovah’s Witness, or Muslim”, etc.). Questions like “How do we get John and Mary to better serve the church?” (that is, “how do we get them to more fully annihilate their natures so as to further the ends of my cult?”) have now, deo gratias, been replaced by questions which do NOT rest on the completely fallacious assumptions of cult fanatisicm (like the infinite malleability of human nature, absolute knowledge via feelings, the solution for all life’s problems is global conversionto Mormonism, etc.).
Once we begin to see that, really, all we do have is each other, and that the ceiling of our own mortal consciousness prohibits clear answers about the purpose of life, who or what might be running the universe, etc., we begin to ask questions like, “How can we live so as to get along better with each other? How do we best alleviate suffering? How do we most effectively bless the lives of our fellow human beings? How can I help leave the world a better place than I found it?”. What is so peculiar now is that it is precisely THOSE questions which yield the best chance of leading to answers which will truly help life to flourish, to be lived to its full potential. It is the insatiable demands and mean, cheap, petty questions of cults based on claims which have NO evidence to support them, like those of Mormonism, which seem to do the most damage to life.
How can that be? In the name of life, they destroy life; in the name of the ideal, they grind you up, and then leave you behind like so much dross. And God help you if you ever reveal that you have come to believe that the Mormon project is misguided, and based on Joseph’s original deceptions. Daniel Peterson has devoted his entire life to the church. What would happen if he ever expressed doubt? His fellow colleagues would first express “sadness”, and then go about the job of smearing his character, metaphorically killing him. They'd have to, to keep themselves in that psychological state upon which we grew so dependent. It wouldn't matter if he was right - in fact, the more correct he was, the more vicious the attacks would be.
In the end, the church doesn’t care about any life except its own. It views as its mortal foe every aspect of humanity which it cannot control. In fact, in this sense, the entire cosmos, the whole structure of reality, is “anti-Mormon” (since Mormonism is out of alignment with what it purports to be synonymous with: truth and reality) and so we should cease to be surprised when the church murders historical facts for Joseph, as it does on its new website, murders archaeological and genetic and linguistic facts for the Book of Mormon, murders - through all the anti-depressant prescriptions handed out by LDS Social Service headshrinkers - the conscience of women who keep sensing there is something wrong, or who acknowledge to themselves that they are miserable, etc., etc.
And of course, in the end, it doesn’t even really care at all when its missionaries are literally murdered for it. The church ignored the many death threats issued by Bolivian terrorists against Mormon missionaries; it ignored the bombs left at La Paz chapels; it ignored the firebombing; and left the missionaries there in La Paz. Then, after the assassination of Elders Ball and Wilson, the church left its missionaries there just the same as always, just as they had after the warnings started coming in. And Hinckley went to Wilson’s funeral, once his bullet-riddled body arrived back in Utah in a coffin, and said, “It doesn’t really matter how long we live in this life”, and then left, accompanied by his bodyguards.
The Mormon church, for all its shiny, happy photo models, can only survive when all that we would associate with being truly human, and all we would associate with reality, is killed off. It must eradicate to stay alive, and the sooner I cease hearing about grown men cowing to the threats of their wives and agreeing to keep quiet, when their children are being brainwashed and having all that is potentially most unique and valuable about them sucked out of them, just to serve Joseph's cult, the better. The truth deserves better than that, and so do our children, for Mormonism is a cult and a fraud, and a million smiles and barbecues and fake friends won't change that.
Just my 200 cents,
T.
http://www.exmormon.org/boards/w-agor...
| | | | Formal Invitation To All Exmos, To The First Ever "Tal Bachman Cult Classic Softball Tourney And Dinner", This Sunday
| | Posted Aug 6, 2005, at 08:20 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Tired of the mystery, my friends?
Still wondering whether a mentally ill-equipped ex-cult member musician could possibly schedule the first ever "Cult Classic Softball Tourney"?
Well, wonder no more! The angel Quintina appeared to me with a flaming sword, and threatened to kill me if I didn't actually bring this thing home, just like that angel threatened to kill Joseph if he didn't have sex with his friends' wives and daughters. So here it is:
An INFORMAL softball game, hosted by moi and Kelly Jean, will be held at 4 PM at the park (I think it's called Griffith Park) adjacent to Kelly Jean's house, THIS SUNDAY, August 7th. You will have to email Kelly Jean at SABLA@aol.com to get her address and the instructions to get there. ("We desire all to receive it. All arise. Shout Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!".) Please come and play in my first ever Cult Classic Softball Tourney; don't be intimidated if you don't really know what you're doing. Just bring a mitt and let's have fun (please, someone local bring a bat!).
After the game, we'll be revving up the barbecue at KJ's house and hanging till whenever.
NOTE: This is REPLACING my original idea of meeting at Houston's that night. Sorry for the confusion. I only just found out I was going down there to LA, and only just got the idea for the Cult Classic, etc. Next year I will get it majorly organized well ahead of time. (I'm going to invite the ex-J Dubs, ex-Moonies, and ex-Scientologists to come for a round robin tournament against us next year). But this year, it'll just be us.
I'm looking forward to getting off this %&*$# remote island I live on, and actually meeting a bunch of you in person. (Thank you Kelly Jean for volunteering your place!).
See you on Sunday,
| | | | Another Pathetic FARMS "Review": "One Nation Under Gods"
| | Posted Aug 1, 2005, at 07:18 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | After ingesting half a bottle of Tums, I took a chance on zipping over to the FARMS website to see what the latest from the church's best and brightest was. The first - and only - thing I read was what purports to be a review of Richard Abanes' "One Nation Under Gods" in a recent FARMS review. I really recommend that lurkers, trying to make sense of whether the church is really a fraud or not, read Abanes' book, and then read the church's attempted torpedoing of it.
Readers can read the review here: http://farms.byu.edu/display.php?tabl...
They can order Abanes' book here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1568...
Otherwise, you can probably find it at your local Barnes and Noble or Borders.
This "review" of Abanes' book focuses on two "problems": that Abanes takes quotes "out of context" in seeking to establish that Joseph Smith was, physically, sometimes violent and bully-like; and that Abanes asserts that early Mormons viewed Joseph's characters as being "on a par" with that of Jesus Christ. In supporting these complaints, FARMS author Michael Reed describes the misuse of anecdotes describing Joseph's fondness for "strong man" contests of the day, such as stick-pulling. He also lists a number of quotations from Joseph and others acknowledging that Joseph was in fact, not perfect, as Jesus was reputed to be.
I think there is a number of reasons why some people would regard this review as fairly lame. Here are a few.
Number one, Abanes' book constitutes a full-on broadside against Mormon claims that Joseph Smith was a man who told the truth about his "experiences" (the homicidal polygamy-enforcing angels, etc.), was a prophet, and that the Mormon church is the only "true", divinely authorized church on earth. To make the case for the fraudulent nature of Mormonism, Abanes surveys a vast body of historical research, the main facts of which I doubt would be disputed by even most Mormon historians, at least in private.
That a review of a book like this, published in a church-funded organ, could focus only on two issues of such relatively small importance will strike some readers as perhaps disturbing in and of itself. It is reminiscent of Johnny Cochrane focusing on the size of a leather glove in the OJ case, when there is a vast body of evidence which points directly to the guilt of his client. In the case of the borderline-retarded OJ jury, this tactic worked; the question is, for normal humans wishing to find out if their lives are based on a fraud or not, will similar tactics also work? I'm not so sure. At the least, this kind of garbage from FARMS seems to betray a fairly low regard for the intelligence of FARMS readers.
Besides, what Reed doesn't really take up in the midst of his complaints about Abanes' supposed error is this: Despite whatever mistakes Abanes has made in aligning his evidences, was Joseph Smith, in reality, something of a bully, physically? Did he have a temper? Did he get in fights?
Even the most superficial familiarity with Mormon history will provoke questions about Reed's handling of this issue, for the simple reason that Joseph of course did get into quite a few fights, and most definitely was not averse to physically bullying others. All my books are packed up at the moment, but just off the top of my head, he once got into a knock-down, drag out punch-up with his own brother William. (I think, actually, that it was during this fight that William finally blurted that if Joseph didn't stop, he would reveal "where the golden plates actually came from", after which Joseph desisted - but I can't remember for sure.)
Another case comes to mind, described in one of the anecdotes in Deseret Book's "They Knew The Prophet", of Joseph punching out a guy who was rude to one his waitresses (secret lovers?) at the Mansion House, and then throwing him into the street.
Another one that comes to mind is the big freaking bulldog that Joseph kept with him, I think on Zion's Camp, which kept biting guys. When one of the men (Sylvester?) complained too hard about Joseph's psycho dog, Joseph threatened to beat him up if he laid a hand on the beast.
And what about the time that Joseph, supposedly jokingly, broke a guy's leg (or arm)? Might have been Benjamin F. Johnson. That's also in "They Knew the Prophet". Does anyone have any idea how hard it is to break another guy's leg?
Add to this Joseph's fondness for "wrestling matches", and the boasting which inevitably followed any victory, and all the "strong man" competitions he loved - the Indian leg wrestling, the stick-pulling, etc.; PLUS, the truly defamatory and insulting language that emanated from his mouth whenever anyone dared challenge his status, no matter how true their comments were (see, e.g., the speech in which he labels Wm. Law a "perjurer" for alleging that Joseph had more than one wife), PLUS his apparent habit of issuing threats to "blacken the character" of women who refused his clandestine offers of sex (Sarah Pratt);
PLUS, the REALITY that his goons ended up doing just that to Nancy Rigdon; PLUS the reality that his little Danite vigilante band swore an oath to do the prophet's bidding whether he was "right or wrong", after which Hosea Stout nearly killed a guy in Nauvoo, Porter Rockwell sought to kill Lilburn Boggs, after which Joseph literally feted him, etc., etc.
PLUS, the fact that Joseph puts into section 132 that his wife will be "DESTROYED" if she dares oppose his ongoing acquisition of virgin sexual conquests ; plus the fact that Joseph scares girls (even married women) into having sex with him by saying that if they refuse his offer, their exaltation may be in jeopardy; PLUS, the fact that at least in one case (Martha Brotherton's), Joseph LOCKED HER IN A ROOM until she would consent!
PLUS the fact that Joseph, in deliberate violation of his own church's procedures, secretly excommunicated William Law, etc., etc., etc., and you inevitably emerge with a picture of Joseph as very much a bully, physical and otherwise.
And indeed, I might even say that that legacy continues on in the sometimes truly shameful bullying tactics employed by church apologetic writers, the thrust of which is to silence anyone who would dare threaten their ability to keep believing in their favourite bully's increasingly exposed lies. Character assassination, and the slyest of insinuations, is no problem for these defenders of Christ's true faith. They're just kind of keeping the bully Joseph's legacy alive.
Reed's criticisms of Abanes would be more effective if he acknowledged that there is very good reason to believe that Joseph Smith in fact was a man who often had difficulty controlling his emotions (he was quick to tears, often quick to anger [was it Parley who said that challenges to his authority would 'rouse the lion in him at once'?], quick to laugh, quick to fall besotted with other pretty girls, etc.); and further, that there is overwhelming reason to believe that Joseph was a bully at times. A better defense would be to take the "so what?" approach - not hope that FARMS readers are as dumb as OJ jurors, and they don't know about Joseph's history of employing physical intimidation, scare tactics, and character assassination to "keep the thing going".
And about the "character of Jesus" thing. Who was it that said they had more to boast about than even Jesus? It was none other than Joseph Smith himself. Does Reed acknowledge this? Of course not. In true spiritual Stalinism fashion, that little item apparently has been erased from the past. ("It just wouldn't do to be upfront about these issues, when an accusation that Abanes is a liar will suffice for all of our retarded subscribers, would it?").
It is certainly possible to find many excuses for Joseph's often sociopathic behaviour from early members, and acknowledgements that he wasn't perfect. It is also possible to find about the same number of starstruck confessions of adoration from those early members. Remember, these are guys who thought Joseph was so incapable of error, that they didn't doubt but that Joseph really HAD to have sex with their WIVES AND DAUGHTERS or else he'd be killed by a homicidal angel! Come on! That Reed doesn't really put this thing into perspective brings his own credibility into far more question than his own comments do to Abanes'.
I mentioned "They Knew the Prophet" above; a quick tour through that book will reveal dozens of breathless descriptions of "the man who communed with Jehovah", ones that most people on this planet would view as betraying nothing short of an almost animal awe.
I mean, to view thing more broadly just for a second, how many other self-styled Christian churches include in their congregational hymnbooks, so many (or any) hymns praising their religion's founder? Really? Why doesn't Michael Reed answer that one? Right next to a hymn praising Jesus, is a hymn praising Joseph Smith. Outside in the hallway, right next to the painting of Jesus, is a painting of Joseph. In the Ensign, right next to the article on Jesus, is the article on L. Ron, I mean, Joseph. In the church magazine two Decembers ago, there was an entire article saying, "Just because in December we celebrate the birth of Jesus, doesn't mean that we should forget that December was also the month Joseph Smith was born in", and then listed a whole bunch of quotes in praise to the man. Now the church has a website devoted entirely to Joseph Smith - but NONE devoted to Jesus.
I mean, this is the thing with Reed - OF COURSE he can find quotes from members that admit that Joseph wasn't perfect. You could hardly not find them when the guy bankrupted so many of them and got caught even then in so many lies. But at the same time, then as now, the whole gaze of Mormondom falls nearly as much on Joseph as it does on Jesus; and if the truth be told, in many cases, more so. So Reed's comments in a way seem like petty, almost disingenuous, quibbling. The reality is, you can still walk into a Mormon sacrament meeting anywhere on this planet, and hear a lot more about Joseph Smith and his literary productions than you do about Jesus's sacrifice. And the same is true for EQ meetings, GD meetings, Youth Conferences, firesides, and RS meetings.
It is sobering, when first beginning to wonder if we have been had, to read through Mormon apologetic literature; and I continue to have every reason to believe that the many hundreds of people who have now concluded the church is a fraud are telling the truth when they say that the lameness, and seeming disingenuity, of so much church apologetic writing, is what helped convince them more than anything that something was wrong once they began researching in earnest. Certainly that was true in my own case - the church stuff was even scarier than the skeptical stuff, since it only made it clear that in the end, there really wasn't any answer, other than fraud.
When my cousin, another guy who risked his life a number of times for the church on his mission to New York South, began wondering as well, it was garbage from guys like Millett and Joseph Fielding McConkie which really started to do him in. Those lurkers still in the throes of delusion may attribute this to a "loss of the spirit"; but the reality is, that not even Gordon B. Hinckley himself can offer any kind of coherent defense of Mormonism, and he has proven that time and time again. Not that I fault him for it, for how can anyone defend the indefensible? How can anyone turn a conscienceless, sex-addled, megalomaniac rogue into a Christian man of God? How can anyone, no matter with how many degrees, make "A" equal "not A"? It's just not possible. No amount of character assassinations will do it. You just can't make lies into truths. Reality, despite all our efforts as Mormons, just can't be overcome.
Click Here For Original Link Or Thread.
| | | | AP Newsflash: Church Announces Release of Church-owned Anti-Depressant
| | Posted Jul 29, 2005, at 08:41 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | AP - Salt Lake City
Richard Turley, spokesman for Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, today announced the imminent release of a new anti-depressant developed by researchers at Huntsman Chemical on behalf of the church. The drug, called LatterDaze, will be available by October 2005 through Mormon bishoprics. Mormon women will be encouraged to switch to the church-distributed drug as soon as their current prescriptions for other so-called "Gentile-brand AD's" expire. Projected per pill cost for LatterDaze is $18.
"Initially we had a hard time with the FDA trials", noted Turley. "People who were obviously anti-Mormons within the FDA refused to conduct the trials as the Lord directed they should be conducted - on active Mormon women only, since it is only they who will be given the drug. But after Senators Hatch and Bennett got involved at our request, the trials got back on track. We are pleased to report a near 100% success rate".
LatterDaze reportedly induces a state in which the female subject will cease speaking, smile perpetually, and strictly obey all instructions given by what Huntsman researcher LeRay G. Jensen calls her "controller".
"In most cases, husbands will be the 'controllers'", said Jensen. "The drug is designed to produce an almost immediate addiction, as well as a Stockholm Syndrome-like affection for the distributor of the drug, or 'controller'. This is why women will have access to the drug only through their husbands, kind of like they only have access to the celestial kingdom through them."
Jensen explained that the drug may be obtained by the request of a husband to the couple's bishop. "We look forward to a whole new era of Mormon female", said Jensen.
Spokesman Turley added, "we are already hearing the hue and cry about 'Stepford' this and 'Stepford' that; but we answered this objection long ago. Mormon women have their free agency, and always have, the end". Asked how a woman who is convinced she has a religious obligation on penalty of damnation to take LatterDaze may really be said to possess free agency, Turley responded, "I don't want to debate theology with you. The fact of the matter is, the church's enemies never miss an opportunity to take everything out of context and make the church look bad. The fact is, Mormon women have free agency, whether they're on drugs or not. The end".
In response to the allegation that the high rate of anti-depressant usage among Mormon women is in some way connected to Mormonism itself, Turley said, "nothing could be further from the truth. Our whole religion is about happiness. There the matter should rest for the church's enemies".
When asked how that answered the allegation, Turley refused to comment. "I think I already said that there the matter should rest".
In an apparently related story, rumours are beginning to emerge from sources at the church's office building that 2006 lesson manuals will contain a new "emphasis" on the eternal and indispensable nature of polygamy.
Click Here For Original Link Or Thread.
| | | | Bad News For Mormonism, Once Again: The Latest From Non-fake Archaelogists: "America Colonized 40,000 Years Ago"
| | Posted Jul 28, 2005, at 11:56 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | http://www.physorg.com/news4937.html
I read another article on this find in the July 9-15 edition of New Scientist, and thought I'd pass it on here.
To summarize, accumulating evidence indicates that the colonization of America (indeed, the planet) took place tens of thousands of years before God placed Adam and Eve - according to Mormon scripture, the SOLE PROGENITORS of the human race - in Jackson County, Missouri a little over 5500 years ago. One can only wonder how this will affect John Sorenson's "Shifting Goalposts Theory" I mean "Limited Geography Theory". My guess is that he's probably close to done with the whole thing, and will pass away still insisting - despite his own lifelong commitment to fashioning theories in direct response to physical evidence (though he and others have convinced themselves it is only in response to a more careful reading of the BOM than Moroni, Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, John Taylor, BH Roberts, Heber J. Grant, the Holy Ghost, Jesus, etc., ever undertook) - that "a faith in the Book of Mormon can only come through faith in the Book of Mormon". Yah. Brilliant.
There is something heartbreakingly just in the relentless onslaught of reality. It smashes hopes and visions and commitments and longings. It cares nothing for dogma, for feelings, for professional reputations, for anyone saving face; and while its apprehension must always be characterized by provisionality and as-yet-uneliminated-error, overall our apprehension of that reality continues to grow, and to pass more and more tests as the decades and centuries roll on. And even with the constant effort to revise Mormon claims in order to save them from total incredibility, the process doesn't seem to be able to keep up to reality's tidal wave.
The scriptural claims, the astronomical claims, the anthropological claims, the credibility claims, the archaeological claims, the biological claims, the linguistic claims, the dietary claims, the social claims, the epistemological claims, the historical claims, the growth claims, the prophetic claims, everything, everything, is squeezed and battered; and Mormonism shrinks and twists and mutates in response, its salaried apologists at the forefront of the re-moulding efforts, to try to keep it alive; but it is a goner, as much as the RLDS church was, for it too premised itself on claims that simply did not represent reality. Joseph HAD taken plural wives, and in the end, there was just no way to make that go away.
Likewise I think it will be with the LDS, though it will take longer, and though just as with the RLDS, there will always be a few diehards. But, I think overall, it is a goner. Even the mere existence of the LGT (something inconceivable if physical evidence had actually supported Joseph and Jesus' original claims for the BOM) signifies that there is something really wrong.
Besides, all those remoulding efforts themselves launch body blows against the thing. The LGT, for example, rests on the (unelucidated) claim that Mormon prophets very much DID "lead the church astray" on an issue irremovably central to the whole project of Mormonism, namely, who is the Book of Mormon about?, a question inseparable from the book's own explanation of its raison d'etre.
The LGT is a theory which exists in response to physical evidence, which at the same time denigrates the validity of physical evidence. It casts aspersions on what are by far the most reliable tools for precisely the task Mormons believe themselves to be burdened with - namely, the "re-gathering of Israel" - even while it backs away from that original mission, dropping any allusions to it on its websites, in its missionary discussions, etc.
I mean, think of it - the very genetic research Mormonism is in some ways attempting to undermine, meanwhile is doing exactly what the Mormon priesthood/membership was always supposed to do, but has failed to do: catalogue the entire human race; reunite scattered families; identify lost Israelites; the whole thing. And the heart of Mormonism on this issue sits, unders crushing siege, in a few sweaty offices in Provo, Utah, representing an ever-shrinking, increasingly anachronistic, paradigm ever more antagonistic to the very reality it once claimed boldly to embrace and represent. The Lembas were lost; now they are found. Who did that? Not the Mormons. They were returned to the House of Israel because the human mind discovered a way to identify that they in fact were the descendants of cohanim. Now, THAT was genealogy. THAT was Gentiles helping to regather Israel. Who has Mormonism helped gather back into the House of Israel?
Mormons have not only backed away from the D&C; Jesus Christ's identification of Native Americans as "Jews", but now Daniel Peterson is stating in public, apparently without any sense of irony, that no one ever should have expected to find that they were in the first place. It is almost to the point of not being funny anymore; it is almost as though we are witnessing something like a new Flat Earth Society, one that we ourselves were a part of, one that continues to induce the weirdest mental states imaginable, where cause can be removed from effect, 'A' can equal 'not A', evidences can be embraced while they are rejected, yes can mean no, and no can mean yes, characters can be destroyed with glee, all to keep believing, keep believing, keep believing. "I will not forsake thee, Lord; 'Where else shall we go, Lord?'; 'The jury is still out'; 'We are surrounded by enemies'; 'They are all lying'; 'We are the covenant people'; 'Everyone must believe, must believe, must believe...'".
Regardless of our origins, we have minds, I suppose, for a reason; and that a two-bit sleight of mind (Mor. 10:3-5), such as is practiced by any common shyster, which relies on getting us to commit to a certain preliminary proposition without ever realizing we are doing so, so as to lock up our involvement in the much grander propositions which inevitably follow, should ever have siphoned off as much mental energy as Joseph's has for the past 200 years, is really a tragedy. If we have a moral duty to bless the lives of others, Joseph's church has vastly underperformed, for you don't need his lies to know that you shouldn't drink or smoke to excess, or destroy your family for sport, etc., and it has sapped the mental energies of many talented and creative Mormon thinkers and scholars, so far in now, that it is very doubtful that they will ever get out.
So, chalk me up for Team Reality. I wish it to purge me of every last incorrect idea I have, as much as I wish it to hurry up with the flushing out of Mormonism, and every other grandiose misrepresentation of reality started by some conscienceless, would-be alpha male and his confederates. The sooner the better.
Sick of such trash,
T.
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| | | | Is It Just Me, Or Is Anyone Else Thinking Of Starting Their Own Religion?
| | Posted Jul 27, 2005, at 11:37 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | A couple of nights ago I saw a documentary on Raelianism. Rael is a dude - I think he's from Switzerland - who started his own religion a few decades ago. He claims to have visited outer space and spoken with the aliens who populated this planet. The guy hasn't worked a day in the past thirty years as a consequence, and hangs out all day having sex with these knock-out babes who he calls "The Order of Angels".
L. Ron Hubbard invented Scientology, and similarly made loads of bucks. His holy name will now live on forever in the minds of his followers, who swear he has changed their lives for the better.
Joseph Smith went from socially ostracized, impoverished, village magician, to the head of a 3000 man private army, presidential candidate, and a legitimate shot at becoming a theocratic dictator. His followers still sing "Praise to the Man".
Deepak Chopra - fraud; Swaggart - fraud; Peter Popoff - fraud; Joseph Smith, David Koresh, Jim Jones, Hubbard, Bagwan Sri Rajneesh, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Rael, etc., all these guys are frauds. YET, what do they have in common?
They are all praised as man gods, in effect worshipped by men and women alike who give them money and time. People hang on their words, feel blessed by their teachings.
By contrast, I languish in near obscurity on a remote island, my royalty checks dwindling, a CD postponed yet again by a faceless record company (it's happened a hundred times over the past five years), with a zillion ideas buzzing around in my head. Is it time to start my own religion? The Kinks had an album called "Give the People What They Want" - and the people want lies - should I, we, give them what they want? How tough is it to spin some yarn, and then demand obedience? Once my little ditty broke at radio five years ago, I started getting fan letters from women who actually ascribed to me all kinds of supernatural powers. If you claim otherwise, some of them get really upset. It's like deification and deicide all over again. People want miracle and mystery and authority. I guess The Grand Inquisitor was right.
People, they, we, want to hear that someone, somewhere, has contact with the realm above ours, that our guilt may be removed, that we are special, etc. Many don't seem really to care whether it's true or not, only whether they can maintain belief that it is (see Davis Bitton's essay on the FAIR board).
One little problem I'm having still is the conscience thing. Joseph, for example, seemed unencumbered by conscience save for a few possible incidents - he was just like Machiavelli's prince, or Stalin or Castro. He got things done, dammit. I have this fear that I'm more like Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov - even if I could steel myself against all the pressures of my own conscience and act, I'd probably never stop feeling guilty about it afterward. I'm like one of Nietzsche's untermenschen - I just can't seem to create my own "horizons". I can't manage anymore to lie to myself, and then forget I have; and I can't stomach deceiving people. I can't shake the feeling that there is something grand and eternal out there, up there, so how can I actually *invent* it?
As a joke, some buddies and I once began creating our own religion in high school. There was a guardian spirit, a female sprite named Quintina, who functioned as a cross between one of Cinderella's fairy godmother's and the Holy Ghost; there was Zloy, the mystery that is the center of all existence; and various grades of enlightenment, an enlightenment which could only be had about aspects around the periphery of Zloy, if that makes any sense. What's funny now is that over the course of a few weeks, as we kept hammering the thing out, the whole theology actually started to make a lot of sense!
Could I, we, really do a lamer job than some of the other crap out there? And after all, that's where the money is...
Anyone want to collaborate?
T.
P.S. I just re-read this, and it sounds like I'm on drugs or something...
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| | | | Trapped In A Recording Studio With An Evangelical Sound Engineer
| | Posted Jul 13, 2005, at 07:34 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | I posted a couple of weeks ago about my visit to the Scientology headquarters in LA. Below is a brief account of finding myself in a recording studio with an evangelical Christian engineer acquaintance of mine a few days ago.
The recording session wound down, and as I was getting ready to start packing up, C. said, "So...how's it, you know...going?"
Me: "Umm...fine. What do you mean?"
Then he says, "You know...with...The Man".
Me: "'The Man'?"
C.: "The Man.....you know............Jesus".
Me: "Well, it's going about the same as the last time you asked me" (the last time we worked together).
I said I had a hard time believing that Jesus was really all Christians now claimed him to be.
He said:
"And I understand that, I understand that. Hey, I know what you're like. I get that. I know you're not a feelings guy. You want to have all the i's dotted and the t's crossed - AND THAT'S OKAY. THAT'S THE WAY JESUS MADE YOU! The world needs people like that, who think it's all logic and facts and stuff. I get that. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that - BUT, I'm just thinking, if you can just...not complicate this...just...see, this is simple. You don't need all this thinking. I think you're overthinking this. I'm just gonna tell you, okay, I mean, you get home, and...and...in your heart..."
And I'm thinking, "Here it comes...". And sure enough, he said:
"...you get home tonight...and I - I CHALLENGE YOU - I challenge you to just stop all the thinking and get down on your knees and just say, 'Lord - make your presence known in my life'. This is simple, you're complicating it. Just pray, just ten seconds, 'Lord, if you are there, please come into my life', just that. And, and I promise you that if you do that, HE WILL. Jesus will come into your life. I've heard people talk about this kind of thing and they say it's just completely AMAZING what happens."
So I said, "I'm not really certain that makes a lot of sense to me right now. C...Besides, I really do already feel at peace, more than ever (I thought, why cloud that with fairy tales?). And I don't think I've ever said I don't believe there's something out there. I do think there probably is something out there, though I don't know what...".
C.: "But if you just let Jesus into your life...", etc.
At one point, I said, "I'm curious, C. - why do you think Jesus of Nazareth is the son of God?"
C: "Because the Bible says he is".
Me: "So, why do you believe the Bible when it says that?"
C.: "Because the Bible is the only book that tells the story of Jesus".
So I say, "C., I don't know if I can explain this to you, but I have a few concerns. One of my concerns is that when you're talking about this kind of thing, your arguments all kind of seem circular to me. Like, you just said that the reason you believe in the Bible is because it says Jesus is the Son of God, and also, that the reason you believe that Jesus is the Son of God because is it says so in the Bible. Do you know what I mean?"
C.: "Hey, I hear ya, I hear ya. But see, right there, you're complicating things again. You just have to give it up. You have to give that up to the Big Man. If you just pray, I promise you, for ten seconds, 'Jesus, if you're there, come into life', dude - it will be amazing".
Me: "How am I supposed to stop thinking? And furthermore, on what grounds should I believe I even have a moral obligation to? Are you really asking me to believe that the very creator who created my consciousness, is himself incompatible with it?"
C.: "Hey, I hear ya. But it says in the Bible, let all men come unto me. He says, 'Follow me'. You know, when you just get down, just for ten seconds: 'Lord, come into my life'...it all comes together. And I challenge you - I challenge you - to do that. I challenge you."
After a few minutes, he seemed to grow a bit exasperted. He said:
"If Jesus wasn't really the Son of God, how was he resurrected?"
Me: "Um, why do you believe he was resurrected?"
C.: "Because all the witnesses saw him afterward. It's right in the Bible, you can't deny it".
Me: "But why do you believe the Bible in the first place?"
C.: "Because it's the only book that even tells us about the resurrection!"
Me: "Yeah, but...aw, never mind".
C.: "Listen, you can't argue with the guys that wrote this stuff down. They were there dude. All these people were there".
Me: "C., do you believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet?"
C.: "NO".
Me: "What would you think of a book ("They Knew The Prophet") full of first hand testimonies telling all about his healings and teachings and revelations, etc., what a fantastic person he was? Would you believe then that Joseph Smith was all he claimed? No...why not? Okay, well then do you see what it's like for me?", etc.
One thing that interests me is that C. was as unable to fathom that anything was wrong internally with his arguments, as I was with mine for almost my entire life as a Mormon. That makes me wonder if I might be saying now similarly stupid things, but am as blind to it as I was five years ago.
Anyway, I don't know how to describe it, but there is a kind of psychological closedness - it almost seems like an alteration in consciousness - that spreads over the true believers in anything.
At this point, I just can't really see ever joining another church. I just can't really take Christian claims about Christ all that seriously. I try, but they seem as silly as those made by the Mormons the evangelicals seem to dislike so much. For my money, they all seem about as daft as each other. I don't know.
Anyone else been witnessed to lately?
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| | | | "Knowing" And Mormonism
| | Posted Jul 7, 2005, at 08:13 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | To say that Mormonism is a relic from a benighted past is probably too vague a statement to be of any real use to anyone. (It also makes me sound like a snob, as though I thought our own era were superior to past eras.) But I think it is true that Mormonism is just such a relic, and, snob or not, I do think our own era is superior in many ways to former eras (we have movies with cool explosions!); so, I think Mormonism is inferior, and different in nature, to many modern institutions which it claims compatibility with. One thing I think which differentiates our own era from past eras is our increasing acceptance of the notion that all human knowledge is provisional, or fallible. This notion is a product most recently of the Enlightenment, although one can trace fallibilism right back at least to the pre-Socratic Xenophanes.
I say that fallibilism stemmed most recently from the Enlightenment; but to be fair, early Enlightenment philosophers continued to claim that perfect (infallible) metaphysical knowledge was possible, though not always in convincing ways. To cite one example which may be kind of controversial, I am unable to fathom how claiming that it is "self-evident" that "all men are created equal", as Jefferson did in the Declaration of Independence, really works as a line of argument. If its truth is "self-evident", for example, it remains very mysterious why so few pre-Enlightenment thinkers should have thought so as well. Slavery had been a human institution for centuries, and even thinkers as insightful as Aristotle had accepted it as a natural occurrence.
In other words, for centuries, the claim that "some people are fit only to be slaves" had been "self-evident" - NOT that "all men are created equal". I don't know that either universal equality or a natural hierarchy of innate racial worthiness is "self-evident" at all (though of course I prefer the former position). It's only "self-evident" once you believe it, which is to say, not "self-evident" at all. Jefferson, the great rationalist, the man who (despite his posthumous baptism as a Mormon) lived in constant fear of his true religious ideas being made public, who re-wrote the New Testament deleting all references to the supernatural, himself seems to have made a claim of infallible metaphysical knowledge that (however useful) seemed to have about as little evidence supporting it as the claims of the religionists he derided as purveyors of superstition and obstacles to human progress. That Jefferson's unevidenced claims about "unalienable rights" granted by "nature's God" neatly expressed the theoretical motors of the American revolution and the Constitution, from what I can see, speaks to their allure, but not necessarily to their validity at correct intuitions about the nature of the cosmos (more on this below).
I'm not sure, but it may have been the shock occasioned by finding out that Newtonian physics, hitherto regarded as "the end of physics", was incomplete, and that there was an entirely different realm of the physical world that Newton's theories did not account for, that most helped along the erasing from Western consciousness dreams of "unimprovable" knowledge, and most helped infuse provisionality into virtually every claim, physical or metaphysical, that consciousness could afterwards entertain. And I think it is true that fallibilism - really, just a sense of modesty about the human ability to know - has very much led to great improvements in the quality of human life.
I say this because among the offspring of fallibilism are institutions and conventions of testability, and contestability; and it is only through these natural offspring that our understanding of the world really advances. I might add that I think it is true that democracy is the best system of government humans have come up with largely because it does the most toward institutionalizing the mechanisms of testability, and contestability, which so far are the best mechanisms we have for discerning reality, the truth of things. (That understanding in turn blesses our lives, alleviates suffering, prolongs life, increases our health, etc.)
It is no wonder, then, that Mormonism can get so much, so wrong, so smugly. Dallin Oaks gave a talk once where he said that the church rejects the concept of a "loyal opposition" within it. It goes without saying then that the church rejects "DISloyal opposition" as well, which means: Mormonism rejects ANY "opposition" (i.e., contests) whatsoever - which means, Dallin Oaks himself has allowed a peek past the soft focus Edelman lenses and conceded that the Mormon church in reality is a seethingly intolerant institution representing a seethingly intolerant ideology. There is no other way to describe it if Oaks is correct (which I think all would agree he is). Mormonism rejects all tests (other than the fraudulent non-"test" in Moroni); it rejects any contesting of its claims, even paying its goons (many of whom I daresay would have difficulty, despite all their boasts of academic qualification, getting hired at your local community college) to character assassinate all who might dare; it rejects any institutionalization of mechanisms of criticism or contest; and it does it all because it is a product not of modesty/fallibilism, but of infallibilism: it is The One True Way. Its members have seen The Light. The "church" knows what others do not, it has received what others have not, and so has authority that others do not. It has no need of examination from within or without, because while its individual members may be fallible, there is no chance of the "church" "going astray".
It might be noted here that one of the many ironies of Mormonism is that it OWES ITS EXISTENCE to the very kind of (open) society which does allows those mechanisms to flourish. "Parasitic" unfortunately has very strong connotations in English, but really, the church really does exist only because of the liberal, open, democratic regime, and capitalism which flourishes in those societies (a capitalism the church essentially declared war on in its earliest incarnation ["it is not meet that one man should have more than another", etc.). The church continues to totally immerse itself in the global capitalist economy, buying real estate, media companies, ranches, even blowing a billion dollars recently on the Crossroads Mall.
So, the church only exists as an institution in regimes whose institutions facilitate exactly the kinds of activities Mormon institutions attempt to squash. It reminds me of Islamic terrorists using the liberality of America to try to build up a regime and worldview which would squash that very liberality. No wonder Joseph Smith compared himself to Mohammed, and FARMS guys have pointed out the similarities between Mormonism and Islam. They are both infallibilist, authoritarian, insular, antagonistic-to-reality cults, not matter how great their membership numbers or PR.
The good news about the United States, is that despite the founding document of the United States containing what now seems an almost quaint (or non-existent) justification for a pretty radical claim, its political institutions as drawn up in the Constitution and explained in The Federalist are just about exactly what you would propose if you were not really quite sure what "the right way to live" was, what religion God wanted us all to join, what inalienable rights we might have, etc. You would check the power of government branches, make it as difficult as possible for government (which of course has a virtual monopoly on force) to use its power capriciously, and try in all cases to ensure that if politicians didn't do what citizens liked, they could be removed without bloodshed.
The bad news about Mormonism is that the rationale for its rejection of the most reliable methods of discerning reality and truth has no validity, because Joseph didn't tell the truth about his experiences. If he had, no doubt the church would display no need for the kinds of mechanisms which have served the rest of the human family so well; but of course, it does display a great need for them. It does so because Mormonism is not what it claims; it is not being directly led, alone among all religions on the planet, by the creator of the universe, or Jesus, "the real founder of the Mormon church", or anyone other than the few men at its top. It is as thoroughly mortal as any other institution, and its denials of that in the end really mean nothing.
My view may be tainted, but I see the world moving in a direction very opposite to that of the infallibilisms (is that a word?) like Mormonism. I am reluctant to become too optimistic - there are, after all, 1 billion Muslims, and 1.5 billion communist Chinese, and it remains to be seen to what degree this last bastion of Marxism, and Islam, will accomodate themselves to what the human mind - free of dogma and superstition and magical notions and delusions of perfect metaphysical knowledge, and conscious of the fallibility of the human being, the difficulties of knowing - discovers and produces. But I'm betting the unfettered mind will triumph.
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| | | | I Visited The Scientology Headquarters Today In Los Angeles
| | Posted Jul 1, 2005, at 09:43 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Since we've mused recently about similarities between Scientology and Mormonism, I thought I would post this.
I'm here in LA, and the hotel they put me in is downtown. So for the first time ever I took the LA subway to try to get to where the cool bookstores are over in Hollywood.
As it happened, I got out at the wrong stop: Vermont and Sunset. The first thing I saw when I walked out on the street was the very Scientology headquarters that Tom Cruise took Katie through not long ago. It's on Sunset and L. Ron Hubbard Avenue. No lie.
So I thought, "there's no way I can pass this up". So I walked in. The girl asked me to fill out an information paper with my name, address, etc., so they could send me "follow-up information". So I wrote down "Roger Scruton" for my name, and for my address I put "14 Thomas Hobbes Avenue, London, England". I didn't do my Austin Powers accent but I did experience the juvenile thrill of the Scientology people calling me "Roger" for the next 45 minutes.
A tall guy named Ronaldo said he would be my guide, and took me into a room, where he gave me a personality test to fill out. I filled out the first seven or eight questions and then realized there were 200 on the thing, so I said, "I don't have time to fill this all out. Do you want to just give me the tour?"
What was weird was that the whole time Ronaldo was there with me, there was some other tour guide guy whose name I can't remember kind of keeping tabs on Ronaldo. He also kept jumping into the conversation. He had very large bushy black eyebrows, and kept telling me, "hey - this is all about helping people".
Ronaldo finally wandered away, leaving me just with Eyebrow. He took me over to a glass case, inside of which were a bunch of photos of His Royal Highness L. Ron Hubbard.
"This man was a genius", said Eyebrow. "He was a professional - at the top of his game - in 29 fields. 29 fields! He was a screenwriter, a novelist, a composer" (there he pointed to the photo of L. Ron sitting in front of an organ) "a master sailor - did you know that L. Ron was licensed to sail any boat out there? He was incredible."
I said, "Well, he sure had a lot of nice ascots". In almost every photo Hubbard had on an ascot.
"Ha, well, yes, L. Ron lived in England for awhile".
I kind of wanted to say, "Hey - living in England 'for a while' does NOT mean you can wear an ascot. There are very strict rules about this kind of thing. Captain Hewitt can wear an ascot. Roger Moore, Ted Heath, Paul Johnson, people like that, maybe. Not this guy". But I just kept quiet. They seemed like they really, really, really liked "LRH", as they called him, and I still wanted to chat for a while longer.
After a few more minutes, another tour guide named Steve wandered up, and kind of edged out Eyebrow. Steve invited me into a room to talk more seriously.
He wanted to let me know that he had researched all of "LRH"'s claims, and he had never found one he could refute. LRH had not "invented" Dianetics - he had discovered Dianetics. And he had been proven right about everything.
I asked him what he would do if he ever did find a Hubbard claim that was untrue. He said he wouldn't do anything, since no one ever said Hubbard was perfect. He said he would just remember all the many things Hubbard had gotten right. Steve, by the way, had a habit of slapping his hand loudly on his desk at unpredictable moments as he was speaking.
I asked him how he felt he knew that LRH's philosophy was true. He said that everything he had observed over the previous 33 years as a member had confirmed it. It was just obvious. Anyone could know it if they just read what he said and then looked around. Interestingly, he also said he had had very moving experiences, where his perception was greatly increased, which had let him know that Hubbard was right. He didn't attribute these to God or anything - he said he could just feel himself becoming one with everything, and he knew it was true.
I asked if he wasn't worried that despite this he might be mistaken, since we are all fallible and can sometimes fool ourselves, or see things less than accurately. At this point Steve jumped out of his chair and started waving his hands frantically, saying, "Why don't you believe in anything? What's happened to you? Do you have any idea of how many people I meet like you, who don't believe in themselves anymore? Who don't have enough self-confidence to trust themselves about things? Why don't you believe in anything?"
Since Steve had a habit of interrupting me, I asked to be able to respond to this. I said that I did believe in things, and one thing I believed in was that we were fallible, and can sometimes get things wrong, and this is why it was often wise to be cautious about these kinds of judgments, and not just go on what we think we see. After all, I said, we can watch a magician turn the 8 of spades into the jack of diamonds right before our eyes; it is only our knowledge of physics which disallows us from concluding that one card didn't instantly rematerialize as another.
He just repeated that the truth of Scientology would be obvious to those who opened their eyes. He said, "If a group of people came in here and I said, 'What's going to happen to the apple when I push it off the table', they're all going to say it will fall. It's that obvious. I've seen the claims prove true over and over. When you see things happen over and over again, you just 'know'."
"But", I said, "since every sane human on earth would agree that the apple will fall off the table, but very few would agree that the truth of Scientology was obvious, is that really a good analogy?"
Steve replied that actually, there was a lot of people who would NOT agree that the apple would fall. This was kind of different than what he had been getting at before. I said, "well, even if 5% of the population thought the apple would fly into the sky, what about the other 95%? You're telling me that the truth of scientology is obvious, but very few of that 95% would agree that it was obvious at all, whereas all would say it was obvious the apple would fall. So how 'obvious' can Scientology really be?"
Steve didn't seem to like this line of questioning, so I moved on the extra-terrestrials. He didn't want to talk about this, and said that extra-terrestrials formed no part of the Scientology philosophy. This struck me as a bit hard to believe, and in fact Mark Hudson told me once that a couple of his Scientologist friends had told them in the upper levels there is quite a bit of talk about aliens.
He did say rather conspiratorially that the information communicated at the upper levels was secret because if you found about it before you had been really prepared to receive it, "it would scare people too much. It's about how the world really is, what's really going on. You have to be prepared".
Steve went on to talk at length about the "thetan" inside - the non-physical part of ourselves. I asked, "So the 'thetan' is kind of like the soul or spirit?" "Yes". "It is a conscious part of us which will go on living after death?" "Yes, you could say that". "So, you're saying it exists independently of any of the matter of our bodies..." "Yes".
So then I asked what I thought was a simple question: "So, we could remove the brain from a human, but that human - since the thetan is still inside - would still have consciousness of some kind". He said no. "But you said the thetan existed independently of the brain or any physical matter". "It does". "Then it would still be there and functioning even when the brain is gone, or at least everything but the brain stem".
Steve then said (no lie), "Well, some of these things we haven't figured out entirely yet". This struck me as something like the Scientology version of the Mormon "put it on the shelf" tactic.
I asked him how, if Scientology philosophy weren't true, he would ever know it wasn't, and in an echo of one FARMS writer I've corresponded with, he just replied that there was no way to know it wasn't, since it was true. I asked him why, if that was the case, I shouldn't put Scientology in the same category as astrology and iridiology, and he just said, "because Scientology is true".
Then he said, "Hey, what you believe is up to you. I can tell you that this stuff is true, but you have to find that out for yourself". He also said, "we've had millions join, but only a couple of dozen have ever left". That was also hard for me to believe.
As I was leaving, Steve noticed I was holding two church pamphlets. "Did you pay for those yet?" "Um, no, I thought they were complimentary. I just picked them up out front". "No - they're five bucks each". I just put them down on the counter, thanked Steve and said goodbye.
I left thinking that Ronaldo, Eyebrow, and Steve seemed to give many of the same answers (just using different terminology) a devout Mormon would. Their reverence for their founder bordered almost on worship; while announcing that the truth was obvious they had little or no evidence to support Scientology claims; as soon as one tried to clarify doctrines they would acknowledge that it was unresolved or presently mysterious and try to move on to a new topic; they used testimonials frequently; some information was "sacred", not "secret"; etc.
And it seems that as is the case with Mormonism, it is smiles on the way in, and daggers on the way out. I hope Katie really looks at this thing closely.
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| | | | Mormon Membership Numbers Hurt By The Free Market Most Of Them Laud
| | Posted Jul 1, 2005, at 09:37 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | There may be other complete idiots on here like I was, who spent quite a bit of time in a former life trying to reconcile the intoxicating United Order/almost semi-commie cheerleading of Hugh Nibley with the intoxicating laissez-faire capitalism cheerleading of Ezra Taft Benson.
Well, the internet, personal computers, and the explosion of published books and journals and their decreasing prices being products of the latter, chalk another one up for Nibley, because they seem to be striking a terrible blow against the Mormon church, as they are against other churches.
Quantifying this is difficult, and it does not look like Greg Dodge will be giving up his church salary any time soon to speak on the record about things; but if it means anything, I was at the Canadian consul's Canada Day party last night here in Los Angeles, and this guy came up and said, "Hey Tal, I'm Joel, it's great to meet you. I knew you were coming down for this so I ran a search and saw you'd left the Mormon church". He went on to say that he felt like he kind of knew what we'd gone through because he'd been raised strictly as a Jehovah's Witness.
He said he had finally gotten his family out. I asked him how, and he said that main thing had been example. He said, "in that situation, you cannot imagine anyone being really happy or at peace outside of it. So when they see you doing well, they can start to wonder". I asked him how the church as a whole was doing, and in a comment which might be of interest here, he said, "the internet is slaughtering the Jehovah's Witnesses".
Opinion time:
Free market economies undergirded by laws guaranteeing free inquiry/speech/criticism have a drastic advantage over over-regulated economies (or communal experiments) which reject free inquiry/speech/criticism, because:
There is a reality independent of our wishes or perceptions;
And the former system facilitates a greater apprehension of it, through encouraging greater, more open communication and investigation and the development of means to facilitate them.
Tentative conclusion:
Things do not look bright, in the long run, for religions like Mormonism. People can believe a lot of things for a long time, it is true. People can remain unaware of facts quite easily, or disallow themselves from putting those facts together the way most people would regard they should be.
But reality has a way of winning out in the end. Think about it this way - as members you're stuck into the indoctrination program at 18 months, when you first go to primary. You then go through years of your mother whispering into your ear at testimony meeting, Sunday School classes, early morning seminary, group belief reinforcement exercises at youth camps, testimony meetings, etc., institute, two years hermetically sealed off from your family placed in a strange location preaching the thing and concentrating on it every minute - and STILL, Mormons who have gone through this mental configuration process are recognizing the truth about the church in far greater numbers, than are never Mormons in first world countries who listen to the missionary discussions. As hard as it is, it is easier to get Mormons to recognize the truth about Mormonism, than it is to get non-Mormons to believe in the fraud that is Mormonism. That says a lot, to me. People join; but more and more people are leaving or aren't joining inthe first place. And free market economies, undergirded by democratic institutions, private property and freedom of speech laws, etc., don't seem to be going out of style.
I think it is true that the more the human mind can exercise its innate faculties, the less will superstition be a match for the truth. The Mormons, the J Dubs, and others, are finding that out the hard way.
Thank you James Madison, John Locke, Adam Smith, et al.
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| | | | Missionary Farewells And An Elder Groberg Story
| | Posted Jun 22, 2005, at 07:53 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | GBH says: "No one else in the Church has a farewell when entering a particular service. We never have a special farewell-type meeting for a newly called bishop, for a stake president, for a Relief Society president, for a General Authority, or anyone else of whom I can think. Why should we have missionary farewells?"
One answer might be - because a missionary RISKS HIS LIFE every day for the church in many areas of the world, while GA's get executive-level salaries, generous benefits packages, and are protected by a huge private security team and state of the art technology.
GBH wandered around in London for 2 1/2 years on his mission trying to convince newspaper editors to suppress pieces critical of the church, writing home to his dad complaining, and every once in awhile baptizing the odd guy who would go inactive (okay, this is an "extrapolation" from that one story he tells :P). When I had guys like that in my zones I used to freak!
After five fat decades of living off the church payroll, I'd like to see GBH or Monson or any of those guys last a single week in some of the hell holes we stayed in, for real, or do some of the stuff guys do for the church down there. Anyone who served in Latin America knows what I'm talking about. One could argue that more merits a farewell than turning 95 merits blowing hundreds of thousands of dollars on an orgy of self-congratulation.
Has GBH ever been so near fainting from heat and thirst, after riding round in 120 degree heat for hours as per the instructions of his inspired mission president, that he would in desperation dive into a swamp inhabited by crocodiles to cool off and gulp down water? My comp, Elder D*** did.
Did terrorists ever deface GBH's area meetinghouse with anti-American hate propaganda, and swear to kill GBH, right around the same time Ball and his comp got shot in Bolivia? They did us.
Did he ever spend two years in a country just a few years after it had been taken over and run by murderous military leaders who sponsored death squads? Did he ever fear for his life once hyperinflation nearly triggered a civil war? (people couldn't get food). Did he ever come two feet away from being bitten by the most lethal snake in northern Argentina? We did.
Was he ever forced to drink bug-infested, algae-ridden water in order to stay alive? We were.
Did he ever spend weeks living outside in the outback, miles from civilization, to teach Indians, sleeping in TREES at night to avoid getting killed by venomous spiders, crocodiles, etc.?
When I was the Zone Leader in Formosa, Argentina, Elder Groberg came down to visit. First let me say that when I met Aldin Porter, who was also in the Area Presidency, he was totally great, smart, humble, really seemed to care about the missionaries and how it was all going. He seemed like a really good man.
We baptized hundreds of "Lamanites" - entire villages - up there, guys who had never heard of the church before or anything, forming them all into branches and going really nuts. News of all this seemed to spread throughout our whole huge mission (the mission was like from Vancouver to Tijuana or something, massive); and with all these exciting Book of Mormon-esque stories coming from up where we were, Elder Groberg came to visit.
So we tell all these aboriginal peoples, who are destitute, but who without exaggeration had NEVER asked for money or food or "ayuda" or anything, and who as far as we could tell were all very sincere believers (thrilled that they were being returned to La Casa de Israel), that this really special guy is coming to talk to them. He is friends with the prophet; he is a holy man of God, etc.
So on the day, hundreds of aboriginal peoples - who are now convinced they are "Lamanites" - show up for this conference at the Formosa chapel, dressed in rags, little kids in tow, from all over the province. Keep in mind that these people have committed to pay their tithing, and do so, in the most meager amounts you can imagine, though I never had a problem with this at all since I was positive that the Lord would bless them a hundredfold in return.
Anyway, we go to meet up with Elder Groberg and my MP, and it turns out that, for this special "impoverished Lamanite" conference, they're staying at the finest luxury hotel in the city.
And even despite our fanaticism, this embarrassed us; some of the "Lamanite" members lived under little plastic sheets tied to stakes down by the river, or in little huts and boxes. We were mortified at the thought of any of the aboriginals seeing this. A lot of them were walking into town from the outskirts, like for miles, and we hoped none of them saw us leaving the hotel - especially since they had rented...luxury sedans.
Groberg seemed totally oblivious to why this all might seem really awkward, as did my mission president, who was a wealthy businessman from Buenos Aires (he favoured Italian suits and gold watches, etc.). He and the MP had flown in from thousands of miles away, and just seemed...I don't know...oblivious.
So, it was one of the most uncomfortable meetings of my life, sitting in the chapel in Formosa with probably three hundred plus "Lamanites", totally sincere, having made great sacrifice to get there, and then watching Groberg and my MP get up, wearing their fancy suits and watches and stuff, having driven to the church in their rented luxury sedans...
And talk about -
No lie
How the aboriginals "should not ask the church for money"; the joys of "hard work"; that everyone should work for a living, etc. At one point, my MP, wearing his Italian suit and gold watch, even quoted the verse from Acts where Peter is asked by a cripple for alms, and he says, "Silver and gold have I none, but what I have give I unto thee" (or whatever the wording is).
We had been working with these people for months, and they had never begged us for money, ever; and they worked every day just trying to stay alive. Aboriginals in Argentina were never assimilated into the population as they were in Peru and Bolivia and so many other places down there. Most Argentines have zero aboriginal descent. So these guys were really marginalized - most Argies won't give them the time of day.
And here were Groberg and my MP, both of whom were obviously amply partaking of all the best life has to offer, telling these guys, in effect - "get a job". It was just really embarrassing, completely unwarranted, and, I have to say, made them both look like ignorant buffoons.
And do you know that they drove away just as vaingloriously, and obliviously, as they had arrived?
That was near the end of my mission, and the mortifying sting of that day lingered on after I got home. So one day I decided to type up a letter to send to Salt Lake, though for the life of me now I can't remember who I wrote it to. In my letter I described in more detail some of the things that had happened that day and how disturbing some of the stuff Groberg had said and done was. In reality, it was kind of a complaint letter. This was one of only two times I can remember coming close to ever doing something like this while a member.
I finished it all, read it over...and then couldn't send it. I had sworn an oath to never speak ill of the Lord's anointed, and sealed its solemnity with a death oath in which I ritually enacted my own disembowelment and throat-slashing. That kind of puts the kibosh on the complaint letter...
My step-mother, who had left the church while I was on my mission and who I therefore knew was either really ignorant or really wicked, told me later that day that she had found the letter (I had typed it out on her computer), and that she was really disturbed by some of the things I'd described (I'm abbreviating here on this post). It sounds weird, but this embarrassed me; I had given fodder to the church's enemies. I even spluttered out a few defenses of the very guys whose behaviour had shocked us all and which I was complaining about! This all only confirmed to me the rightness of my decision to not send it. I had made a mistake. I should not have questioned.
Anyway, it's 3:20 AM here and I can't even remember how I was going to tie this in to missionary farewells (premature Alzheimer's!). I think it was something about, if anyone in this g#$@&%*n church deserves a special celebration, you'd think it would be all the young men and women who donate that time of their lives because of their sincere faith that young Joseph never, ever told a fib.
Just a thought.
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| | | | What Does GBH's Birthday Party Really Mean?
| | Posted Jun 21, 2005, at 09:24 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Let's see...
Jimmy Jensen, raised in a very average Layton, Utah home, never having traveled before, has been called to spend two years of his life in the Lima, Peru mission.
While there, he will have little access to quality health care. If he gets sick, he is in trouble. He may very well be exposed to tapeworms, cholera, food poisoning, and other illnesses.
His living quarters will most likely be atrocious, filled (as mine were) with vermin who will defecate all over his bed each day while he's out.
He will have little access to proper diet or clean water.
He will be an American in a country which for the last twenty years has seen violence regularly wrought by Maoist, anti-American terrorists, cousins of which killed two missionaries 15 years ago in Bolivia. He is a possible target.
He hasn't even had his birthday yet - he is only eighteen. His mother is worried sick. Jimmy is her oldest child and only son. She has had so many hopes and dreams for him - marriage, children, a great career. But now he will be sent to a third world country, where he will be - can't help but be - in danger. And he will be disallowed from even contacting her by phone. She can't even call him. Even if she visited there, she probably would not be allowed to visit him. He can't come home for holidays, either, even if she pays the airfare.
The one consolation might be, that all of Jimmy's relatives - uncles and cousins and best friends and grandparents and everyone - may all gather to celebrate Jimmy's selfless decision in a sacrament meeting dedicated to that purpose.
But guess what? Gordon B. Hinckley HAS BANNED MISSIONARY FAREWELLS (while he was in the First Presidency, and he has kept that ban). And just for that extra, bruising kick to Jimmy's still pubescent testicles, the extra slap in the face to mama, he has also banned informal missionary send-offs - IN JIMMY'S OWN HOME!
But when Gordon Bitner Hinckley turns 95...
WELL...
The WHOLE CITY is invited to the $300 million dollar Joseph Smith Conference Center! Hurrah! Let all 18,000 seats be filled! Roll out the streamers and the birthday cake! Light the candles! Let the organ play its triumphant fanfares! The Mormon Tabernacle choir will beamingly sing the man's praises! Television stations will cover the glorious event! Donny Osmond will perform! The Deseret News will write its articles describing the whole, grand affair! Mike Wallace will be invited to pay tribute from the podium! The Ensign will run its glossy photos! The Church News presses will roll! Gordo will turn on the "aw, shucks" routine, like Bashful next to Snow White, while Glady Knight serenades him! Members will gaze on, enthralled, entranced, in adulation! Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!
Meanwhile, in Layton, while Jimmy and his ma and dad and three little sisters are sitting there through sacrament meeting, the last Sunday before he RISKS HIS LIFE for "Gordon B. Hinckley's Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints", hardly any mention will be made of his upcoming departure.
Instead, a ten year old boy will read a story about how Joseph Smith never drank alcohol, written by his mother; an RS sister will cry for 20 minutes while she tells a faith-promoting rumour about some unknown (that is, non-existent) kid who drowned in a river and was then found later in a closet at home because an angel transported him there, and try to relate it somehow to tithing; and a high councilman with all the charisma of a comatose Richard G. Scott (or is that redundant?) will deliver a talk on "obedience" which runs 43 minutes in total, way overtime.
Jimmy's aunt, afterwards, asks his mom why they don't have missionary farewells anymore. "It would have meant so much to Jimmy. It's really brave what he's doing".
"I don't know", says Sis. Jensen. "But the First Presidency says they're not allowed anymore, and that we shouldn't even invite people over tonight to visit. Jimmy is kind of sad about it. All I know, though, is that it's our duty to obey the prophet, and we will".
How long until Arnold Friberg does up a painting for meetinghouses of the pigs from "Animal Farm" playing poker with the humans up at the farmhouse?
Comments welcome.
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,600140439,00.html
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| | | | True Exmo Has-been I Mean Rockstar Stories: My Night With Soon-to-be-scientologist Katie Holmes
| | Posted Jun 21, 2005, at 09:21 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Since Katie Holmes, soon-to-be-Scientologist and -wife of Tom Cruise, came up on here the other day, I thought I would post this.
I spent an evening with Katie Holmes and the cast of "Dawson's Creek" a few years ago at a show in North Carolina. Shawn Mullins and Paula Cole also played (and a couple of other acts). The only person I really talked to that night, other than a brief chat with Joshua Jackson at his party afterwards, was Katie.
She seemed interested in chatting, and so we spent a bit of time together backstage doing just that. She was really friendly and forthcoming.
In fact, our chat seemed to be going so well that I ended up starting to feel kind of nervous. She, like, was, like, laughing at my jokes and stuff. MAYDAY! I was married and total TBM, and she is very pretty, and she did seem, like, suprisingly friendly - even the thought of any kind of potential attraction was enough to trigger air raid sirens in my head. All of a sudden it sounded like the London Blitz up there.
Instead of being cool and just, whatever, hanging out and stuff, I ended up (this is totally true) abruptly excusing myself from our conversation, snuck out the back door of the auditorium, and ran across the street to hide out at a giant Border's books like a freaking dweeb, where I stayed for the next two hours browsing through books ("The North Carolina Barbecue Bible!") while Paula Cole and Shawn and a couple of other acts played their sets, and the cast, and Katie, continued to hang out.
I had to come back for some grand finale or something; when I did re-enter through the back, I bumped into Katie again and we exchanged a few more words, though, anticipating this possibility, I had done all I could to transform myself into Ice Man by then. Fortunately for my TBM-induced panic and excruciating Buckingham Palace-guard routine, the hustle bustle of the end put a stop to it all, and before I knew it, the evening was over and I'd said goodbye to her, I suppose, for the last time.
I can't help but feel kind of worried about her, though for all I know, she doesn't even remember me. I was on a few Scientology websites the other day, and I think they might give the Mormons a run for their money in the bizarro department. If you can believe it, their apologists seem even more vicious and crackers than Mormon apologists - and that's really saying something. The FARMS guys enjoy character assassination, regarding it as only fair; but the Scientology guys take it to a whole new level. (Maybe they, FARMS, and the Nation of Islam guys ought to get together and form one, all-comprehensive pro-cult gonzo jihadist apologetic squad. It's just not efficient having one group of guys explaining Xenu, another Kolob, and another Dr. Yacub...).
So, it is hard for me to avoid the feeling that the pretty and talented young flower I once spent an evening getting to know, has no real idea what she is getting into. You ease into these organizations step by step by step...and though the cult members are all smiles on the way in, they're all daggers on the way out. And sometimes, you wind up a total loon.
GAH.
I hope she does alright.
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| | | | How Has This Changed You Emotionally?
| | Posted Jun 16, 2005, at 07:50 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | As a member, I often tended to think of people who had left the church as being characterized almost entirely by anger. But since I knew very few people who had left, and of those, only one that I can think of ever really seemed angry, I'm not really sure where this impression came from. Maybe it was from the dudes holding signs up in front of Temple Square at conference. But then, the evangelicals can seem angry about lots of things...
Anyway, I was just curious about how the realization we'd been had has affected others emotionally; in my own case, the biggest difference I feel is a huge LOSS of anger. I often felt really frustrated and angry as a member, angry at an entire world which "just didn't get it", or who were too wicked to obey even if they did. I even felt frustrated at all the church members who didn't seem to care what the living prophets had said, and were "doing things wrong".
I had opinions about things like I do; but now I see why people might have a different impression than I do, even if I think their arguments are defective, and I can't manage to summon feelings of personal bitterness toward those I might disagree with, on that basis. This is the first time in my whole life that is true.
Back then, when I "KNEW" that "the truth was OBVIOUS", I also consequently "knew" that the only explanations for others not seeing it were willful ignorance or wickedness. This really upset me. Even in university, I argued constantly with my professors. My professors ended up hating me so much that years after I'd left I'd still hear from friends that they had bumped into Prof. So and So, and he would mention something about me. Once, for example, years after I left, the late Preston Thomas, who taught constitutional law up there in the Poli Sci department and who I argued with incessantly, said out loud at a staff party that I had been "to the right of Louis the 14th". Apparently, the other profs thought that was too kind.
I've got loads of really insane stories about how I combatted all the lefties in the holy name of Ezra Taft Benson! Now, I post on a board which appears to feature mostly left-leaning people, and in a way, I couldn't care less. I couldn't not care before; now, Jerry the Apousetate could tell me he was voting for Eleanor Holmes Norton for president - and while we might have a two minute discussion or debate or whatever, after that I'd probably just say, "Whatever bro. Have you seen the new Star Wars flick?". Ten years ago, it would have been jihad, with me lying in bed that night thinking, "What in the hell is wrong with Jerry's BRAIN? He's an idiot - screw him. Never again." I even once got in a huge row with Utah Senator Bennett in front of like thirty people - he just wasn't conservative enough! (I was a county GOP delegate).
I see sometimes the anger I once felt for those I disagreed with (i.e., posed a threat to what I wanted most in the world to believe about religion or politics) from those still in the church. It is odd now to feel it directed at me personally in some cases. And yet, I just can't summon any anger back. I feel at peace, really, for the first time in my whole life (this isn't to say I feel I have the whole world figured out). I don't really know how else to describe it; I just feel at peace. I don't feel the need to try to force everyone on the planet to see what I see anymore. I wonder if people that never laboured under the burden of trying not to notice the innumerable inconsistencies of some ideology they had already committed to have always felt this way. I wonder if they even have anything to compare it to. I felt so much turmoil always, and even felt I was doing something wrong to acknowledge to myself I was feeling it, that the last 18 months have almost seemed like I was on a high of some kind.
I'm curious to know how realizing we'd been had might have affected others emotionally.
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| | | | Christianity And The Crossroads Mall: Does The Church Really Even Qualify As A Church Anymore?
| | Posted Jun 6, 2005, at 11:22 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Does the church really qualify as a church anymore? This sounds like a stupid question. Maybe it is a stupid question. But it seems to me that the church itself has raised it. What is its answer?
The church itself has raised the question of whether it really even should qualify as a church anymore, for the same reasons that so many other Utah-based “businesses” over the years have raised the question of whether they really qualify as businesses anymore - the ostensible purpose of the thing seems less and less to reflect the real purpose of the thing.
The ostensible purpose of the church is to “bring souls unto Christ”, as the only church fully approved by, and directed personally by, the reputedly still-living Jesus of Nazareth.
And yet, on what occasion did Jesus of Nazareth incorporate his reform movement as a business, and start using the donations made by his sincere, often impoverished followers, to purchase the ancient equivalents of shopping malls, city lots and apartment buildings, television stations, ranches, BANKS, shares, etc.? On what occasion did Jesus and his disciples vote themselves annual, executive-level salaries and generous benefits packages (euphemized as “living allowances” by Mormon authorities)? And when did Jesus of Nazareth ever rescind this CATEGORICAL statement to his church “board of directors”?:
“Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth…
“NO MAN CAN SERVE TWO MASTERS: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. YE CANNOT SERVE GOD AND MAMMON”. (Matt. 6:19-24). (“Mammon” is just a transliteration into English of the Aramaic word “mamona”, which means “money” or “riches”).
When?
Can anyone, no matter how TBM of a lurker you are, really imagine that Jesus - if he returned tomorrow - could have anything to do with the Mormon church as it now exists? It is so totally incongruous with his own life and mission, that I daresay even the most fanatical member would have trouble imagining Jesus showing up briskly in a navy business suit with a file, set to preside over a Bonneville board meeting. Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor sequence, yes; the other, no.
I ask, in all fairness: What is the difference between the church's ostentatious flouting of its wealth, and departure from anything even vaguely resembling the vision outlined by the man they claim to be the sole, authorized representatives of, and the 80’s excesses of Jim and Tammy Faye Baker? From those of Robert Schuller and his “crystal palace”? From the monstrous cathedrals of the Roman church, a church which similarly couldn’t resist the lure of Mammon, and which similarly, constructed their monuments to human vanity (again, under pretence of reverence to…Jesus of Nazareth), on the backs of its poor?
If there is a difference…what is it?
The church, I am sure, now has enough MBA’s and economists working for it, to have heard of something called an “opportunity cost”. The opportunity cost of any decision is simply the opportunities lost because of it. In that sense, the cost of buying and refurbishing the Crossroads Mall, for example, isn’t just ONE BILLION DOLLARS. It is all of the alleviation of human suffering that those ONE BILLION DOLLARS would have achieved, had they not been used up in BUYING MALLS.
What is the church’s explanation for this? The Crossroads Mall cost, by my estimation, 200,000 clean water wells, something which we all take for granted, but which would save - would have saved - tens of thousands of lives in impoverished areas on this planet of ours. Not to be melodramatic, but the truth is - one billion dollars can save a lot of lives.
How many trade schools could that one billion dollars have built? How many tuitions could it have subsidized? How many farmers co-ops could it have organized? How much “good in the world today” could it have done? What would Jesus of Nazareth himself have done with one billion dollars? Would he really - really - have bought a shopping mall, and then had it refurbished?
“Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:
For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me...
Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting dfire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me."
I wrote on my other post about La Familia Q*****, in Santa Fe, Argentina, with nine kids in a two room house, being supported solely by their father who worked as a bicycle mechanic, the mother of whom wouldn’t work outside the home because of ETB’s talks, paying ten per cent of their tithing to the church. Is that fair? Is that fair, when the church is apparently so loaded with money, like a camel staggering under the weight of Ali Baba’s treasure, that it has to keep unloading it on…shopping malls? Can we really keep convincing ourselves that members like the Familia Q**** must keep on paying ten per cent of their meager income, because they need the blessings that "only ten per cent can provide"?
Is it fair for little Elizabeth Q*****, who used to run up and hug and kiss me everytime I saw her, to be gnawing - literally - on cow knees scrounged from the local butcher shop, while the church her family is taking FOOD OUT OF HER MOUTH FOR - read those last six words again - is buying shopping malls and television stations, and whose “General Authorities” (or is it “Board of Directors”?) are being chauffered around in Lincoln Town Cars and living in church-owned condos, not even having enough respect for its members to divulge what kind of salary and bonuses and health benefits they’re taking?
My wife grew up with an alcoholic father in a slum, in northern England. Trying to find enough coins to buy a tin of beans from the corner store for my wife and her brothers to share for supper, was the daily task of her mother - and guess what? Sometimes she failed in that task. Even on “good” days, my wife and her brothers went to bed hungry every night, and left for school hungry every morning. And do you know that, just like with La Familia Q****, my mother-in-law, with the best of intentions, would in effect take food out of the mouths of her children in order to pay tithes and offerings?
My father-in-law might have been an alcoholic, but at least he had the wherewithal to tell his wife she’d been “brainwashed” (his word), and to stop giving money to The Thing. But would she? Of course not. To not pay tithes and offerings was to relinquish her “fire insurance”, and as she was regularly reminded at church, Jesus was just about to return from heaven. And when that happened…well….how could she leave her children, who she loved so much, vulnerable to being fried? So…ten per cent, plus offerings, of what meager money she could ever find, had to be surreptitiously donated to the church, didn’t it? Even if it meant, falling twenty pence short for a loaf of bread.
And by the way - this is in ENGLAND. Not Botswana. England. You really end up wondering sometimes if Mormon General Authorities, for the most part, have any idea what it is like to be in these kinds of situations. They aren’t fictional - these are real people, living real lives, and they are in all parts of the world, suffering in real ways, making real sacrifices - out of love, and fear, and all those emotions we used to feel - for a church run by men who, I’m sorry, seem to be the very last ones to make any kind of serious (like, life threatening) sacrifices themselves. As I mentioned about Monson, I very seriously doubt that any of the Twelve or First Presidency had ever gone to bed hungry a day in their lives. Not so for many hundreds of thousands of members who, literally, sometimes starve themselves and their children for the sake of the church. And that is the honest truth - they starve themselves, and their children, for the church.
An argument could be made that Gordon B. Hinckley has sought to alleviate the suffering of members, by making it less burdensome on them to attend the temple by “bringing the temples to the people”.
Here is one (among many) problem with this argument.
Question: What is the ostensible purpose of the temple?
To bequeath upon members all the ordinances that they will need for their eventual exaltation and deification, in accordance with the laws of eternal progression.
Question: How on earth is that concept not entirely undermined by Gordon B. Hinckley’s DENIAL (there is no other way to put it) that it is a core part of Mormon theology that God was once a man like we are? If eternal progression is the whole point of everything, and is the eternal law of the cosmos for the righteous….like….what? You cannot deny either half of the couplet (“As man is…), without simultaneously denying the other half. So, if God once was a man…then we can become Gods. And if we can through righteousness become Gods, and the laws of heaven are in fact eternal, then God - who is nothing if not righteous - would have once been a man, too, and become God by progressing from grade to grade, just as Joseph, and all those after him until GBH, declared. I mean, take this away, and you really HAVE no Mormon theology - and….you have no purpose, really, to the endowment ceremony, other than the hollowest of rituals, one which looks increasingly to have as its only valuable feature for the church, the scaring of members into remaining active tithe payers.
What I’m saying is - with one stroke, Gordon B. Hinckley has managed the seemingly impossible feat of making the Mormon temple endowment ceremony even MORE absurd than it already was, something, which to me anyway, no longer makes sense even on the CHURCH'S own terms. It has become, like so much else under the withering touch of Gordon B. Hinckley, nothing but form and show, totally hollow and substance-less.
So…how does Hinckley really score points then, for blowing literally hundreds of millions, which could have been used to bless the lives of Mormons and non-Mormons around the world, over the past decade building new temples (not to mention conference centers)? I mean, after all that work by Ed Decker to make the endowments look ridiculous - and Gordon B. Hinckley does the job for him. Who would have ever imagined?
Gordon B. Hinckley would deserve credit if he came right out and said explicitly what it now takes, unfortunately, a full three or four seconds of thinking to grasp: he does not believe what Joseph taught in his King Follett sermon (still published by the church), and so, does not believe in core Mormon theology, the very theology that justified Joseph’s endowment ceremonies. Beyond this, he ought then to say that he does not believe, therefore, that one more penny of church money (let alone MILLIONS), whether donated directly or generated by the church's business holdings, should be used to build temples, since he believes that, in reality, they are utterly pointless.
But he doesn’t say that last bit, because, it seems, he has managed to convince himself, like Questing Beast and Thomas Stuart Ferguson and hundreds of other self-styled Mormon intellectuals, that the church is “the best thing out there”, that “everyone needs something to believe in”, that “our traditions and heritage are precious”, and that it’s quite okay for hundreds of thousands of families around the globe, to make the most heart-rending sacrifices for the church, because “it’s good for them”.
Bottom line is: the GA’s preach a cliché-ridden, self-aggrandizing-story-soaked, bland version of Christian ethics twice a year at General Conference, and at regional/stake conferences. But from what I can see, they have no one to blame but themselves for the view that the church has ceased in reality to be anything like a truly Christian church at all (not that it ever really was), and instead increasingly gives itself over to money making enterprises (though all justified - of course - with reference to “the gospel”), the profits of which are enjoyed most disproportionately by the men at the top while my friends in Argentina are still gnawing on beef cartilage for dinner; seeking the adulation of the world; the reinforcement of tradition for tradition’s sake; and shameless attempts at legacy (via temple and conference center) building.
I don’t really know if all that disqualifies the church from being, well, a church. Maybe in the end, that’s really all that being a church boils down to. All I know is, I’m glad I don’t have to be part of it anymore, or try to make all of that okay in my mind.
I believe there is a truth in the universe, and there is joy, and there is duty. I don’t know what is up in heaven, though I think there is probably something. But whatever it is, I cannot imagine now that it would ever endorse the vast majority of things which the Mormon church does, or really, what most churches do.
And I am incapable of imagining that Jesus of Nazareth, he who called the ancient Jews back to the true spirit of righteousness, the spirit of humility and love, the spirit of alleviating human suffering, would ever endorse spending
one
BILLION
dollars
(that could have done so much, for so many underprivileged people out there, Mormon and non-Mormon)
buying - and refurbishing - shopping malls!
(And I don't want to hear about how "every year, the church donates X million to charity", etc. I already know that - the entire world hears about it every time some ward in Idaho sends a box of T shirts to Romania. The POINT is - if the church has a billion dollars for MALLS, and hundreds and hundreds of millions for buildings and monuments and parks, why doesn't it have ONE BILLION PLUS HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS for alleviating human suffering? The point isn't whether the church donates money - every single business in the company donates money: GE, GM, CBS, everyone. It's how much, and its priorities. Does it do more than any other corporation? Shouldn't it - IF it is Jesus's "one, true church"?).
I would say this all was a sick joke - but it's just not funny. It isn't a joke.
It is just sick.
Glad to be gone.
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| | | | The Mormon Shell Game of "Tithing Funds"
| | Posted Jun 4, 2005, at 08:51 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | That any church decides to shift focus from charitable/humanitarian service to money making, is as legal as any business deciding to shift focus on to more ethical or social issues. But defending the church on grounds that their actions are currently legal, is about as lame as defending OJ now on grounds that he was "legally" acquitted. It's amazing how the church can so often mimic the very lawyers that the NT's Jesus criticizes so harshly, guys who take sides no matter WHAT truth or right might be...
There are two problems with this that I can see. Correct me if I'm wrong.
It seems to me that an argument can be made that the church is operating under cover of tax exempt laws which favour it over other business institutions in the project of money making. In addition, its members are not privileged to see any financial statements, as are those participating in other companies as shareholders or interested parties. I don't see how that is fair. Whether you have the words "Jesus Christ" in your organization's name or not, if you're in business, I don't see why you shouldn't have to play by the rules of business.
Number two:
Question: From whom did "the church" originally get the capital and wealth it has used to build up its business enterprises? From the members, paying their tithing. Whether those tithes were paid fifty years ago or five days ago, they have still facilitated the construction of the church's portfolio of business holdings.
If I sell drugs, and then buy a casino with the profits, and then use the profits from that casino to buy a hotel, is it really straight up for me to say that "no tithing money was used for this hotel purchase"? It makes the church look very much like it is playing a shell game. Why not just admit it? Who cares? That would be a lot less lame than pretending tithing had nothing to do with the church's ability to BUY MALLS.
I bet the General Authorities could come out and say, "We each get a million a year and take four month vacations in Hawaii because GOD TOLD US TO", and you'd have RS women crying with gratitude at the pulpit next fast Sunday, bearing their testimonies about how grateful they are to have a prophet, in "these the latter days" and stuff, and how wonderful it is that they get to rest from their incredible pressures, etc.
Not that this would render the last point moot, but even if the church argued that it is now so wealthy that all tithing monies only add up to a minute fraction of all its revenues, and are used exclusively for buildings, and it's been using solely business-generated monies to purchase more businesses for the last forty years, this raises the question of why leave in place a ten per cent tithing requirement.
I paid ten per cent of my GROSS, which added up to like thirty or forty per cent of my income after taxes, expenses, etc., as a young husband trying desperately to keep my family afloat. And I did that because of Church President Heber J. Grant's fanatical pro-tithing comments, and Joseph Fielding Smith's comments that if you PAID on gross, the Lord would bless you in gross - comments that have been allowed to stand by the church. And my vivid memories of La Familia Q*****, in Santa Fe, Argentina, with NINE KIDS crammed into a two room little brick structure, with the dad working for a pittance as a bike mechanic, with the mother staying at home because Pres. Benson had said for mothers not to work outside the home, paying ten per cent of THAT...Those kids would chew (not making this up) on cow KNEES scrounged from the local butcher for lunch. Hunks of cartilage and bone. And I bet Monson's never gone to bed hungry a day in his life.
And...the church is spending a billion dollars buying a mall. Fine - be a cult run by George Orwell's pigs in Animal Farm. BUT...can't they just give the little guys a *little* break, if the church is that wealthy? Are they really still deluding themselves that they shouldn't lower the ten per cent requirement, because families like the Q**** 's need the blessings that only ten per cent can give them"? It's one thing to say that when you're esconced in a high falutin' condo in Utah, or you just swoop in for a regional conference every year or two down in Brazil or Bolivia...but to actually live and eat and sleep and breathe with people who live perpetually on the brink of death from starvation, and then make those comments - well, I don't even think the likes of Thomas Monson could do that. I hope not.
I really hope the one billion the church is spending on their new mall meets with the approval of the ManGod the church claims now, according to Hinckley, to "worship" - the one who spoke of clothing the naked, and feeding the hungry and poor.
People are dying all over South America and Africa from drought and contaminated water. A community well costs about $5000 US to dig and get operating. That's 200,000 wells the church could have funded, which would have saved countless infant and adult lives all over the world.
Does refurbishing a shopping mall for Salt Lake City, for $1,000,000,000, really make sense in light of the church's claims for itself?
No wonder they get accused of being nothing more than a business disguised as a church. They act just like they were.
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| | | | No More Heroes
| | Posted Jun 2, 2005, at 09:32 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Males seem, to me, innately to respond more to hierarchical formations than do women. Each woman, in a way, seems to be - I don't know how to put it - like her own *universe* or something. Guys seem like they're not as much their own universe, as they are, instinctively, some dude on a football team, no matter what situation we're in. Maybe we're more primitive, I don't know. You just kind of figure out who you are through reference to where everyone else kind of is on your "team", and what your "coach", the alpha, tells you you should be, and then you go from there - and there's always a specific "goal" you're trying to achieve, with everything, even when you don't really realize it.
There is a certain comfort in being on a team, and having men above you in rank (and of course, there always is someone above you), with something to work for. We long to be action heroes, by emulating other action heroes. We were Batman and Superman - on the law enforcement team, reporting to Commissioner Gordon, etc. - as kids for Halloween; as teenagers, we put posters up on the wall of Michael Jordan or Jimmy Page; and as adults, we instinctively look up to sports heroes, bosses, politicians, movie heroes, etc.
But being a Mormon gives you, before everything else, Mormon heroes, and those are what I grew up with, above all. Packing the other day I found one of the scrapbooks I kept as a little kid. I used to cut out all the pictures of the prophets from the Friend, the Ensign, or the New Era, or the old Family Home Evening manuals, and put each picture carefully behind the plastic sheeting. The one I dug out had in it a painting of Moses, a photo of Joseph Fielding Smith, Jesus anointing his twelve disciples during his trip to America, the painting of the bearded Brigham Young, and a bunch of others.
One of the difficult things for me in acknowledging that the church wasn't what I had thought it was, was the relinquishing of all my heroes. Brigham had been a hero; Jedediah M. Grant; Wilford in England on his mission, and above all, Ezra Taft Benson. I used to wish I could meet him, and once, when I was first married, I had a dream in which I talked to Pres. Benson personally. In my dream, I asked him what career I should pursue to be of most service to the church. He said that I should pick whichever career I most liked, and just do the very best I could in it. And in a way, I still think he might have said something just like that.
But all of a sudden, I had no heroes, no one to model myself after. Who was I really supposed to be? I'd had an ideal (ETB), but it turned out the ideal wasn't that ideal at all. So now what?
The quick answer, I guessed, was "be yourself". But who was myself supposed to be? I had only ever conceived of myself with reference to the church, only really ever idolized church leaders. Knowing that Joseph hadn't told the truth meant, in a way, I had no idea who I was or supposed to be at all. How was I supposed to just fix that? I was 35, stuck on things that everyone else seemed to have gotten over when they were 20. And if I just tried to find new (non-Mormon) dudes to look up to, wasn't I just setting myself up for more potential hurt?
The truth is that for the last eighteen months, I haven't really had any heroes, at least not in the way I used to, for the first time in my life. I admire lots of people for different reasons. But the idea that certain people enjoy consistently superior access, prophet- or shaman-like, to the font of all wisdom and light, and the feelings of security one feels in submitting to the "guidance" of those men, of course, is gone. And it will never come back.
And in a way, I kind of miss this, the same way I miss the thrilling feeling of going to bed on the 24th, with the air all crispy, knowing that Santa Claus himself would soon be landing on our roof and delivering presents. It's one of the attractions of the church. By instinct, I'd like there to be those kind of men around - braver and bolder and smarter and more enlightened than I am, or others.
But it has turned out that life just isn't like that. We are all in it together, and all we have is us, and no one seems to have any better idea than anyone else about what is really going on up there. And that fact just has to be reckoned with, once you know the church isn't what it claims. It just seems like part of growing up.
Yet, little by little, I feel that sense of loss being replaced by a growing gratitude - not idol worship like before - for all those men and women throughout history, who have done so much to further the cause of human freedom. I have never really felt as grateful, for example, for the people who institutionalized in government the rejection of religious superstition and dogma, wrenching it forever from the hands of the Christianized equivalents of witch doctors cum despots, and created the truly open society which, year after year, continues to break the back of those life and thought inhibiting forces. ("Heroes" transform themselves into "great and admirable ideas" and "ideals"). The existence of the very internet we're communicating on is impossible to contemplate sans the deliberate attempt to liberate the human mind - a liberation which, however much an anachronism like the church might wish to claim as its own by vicariously baptizing the likes of James Madison and Adam Smith - is in fact the enemy ofthe church, and always will be.
So, there are plenty of people to thank, plenty I am indebted to, people who have spent their lives trying to bless the lives of others. But in a way, there are no more "mortal gods", no more heroes like I used to idolize with such starry eyes. And as I continue to try to figure things out, and come to some sense of who I really can be, and who we all really can be, I've come to the conclusion that that's not such a bad thing, after all.
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| | | | Mormon Defenders And Sociopathy
| | Posted May 15, 2005, at 08:47 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Every once in awhile I (and others on here and even some still in church) use the term "sociopathic" in connection with professional church defenders. I once got an email from a defender taking exception to my use of this word in a post on here. It probably doesn't speak well of me that I didn't even remember having used it. But when I went back and checked the post, which I think was a week or two old by that time, of course I had.
"Sociopathic" is probably a problematic word to use; it usually refers to someone who has absolutely no conscience, no sense of, or allegiance to, right and wrong. And I doubt very much that anyone at FARMS has murdered anyone, or supports bearing false witness, or thinks that child molesting is okay as long as you can get away with it. I think they would all say these actions were "wrong", not just in a conventional or legal sense, but wrong in some cosmic, absolute sense.
But church defenders, as we all did, expose themselves to the charge of sociopathy seemingly without any idea they are doing so. They can sometimes seem even hurt by this charge. But this is why they are vulnerable to being perceived this way.
As members, it is not that we reject the concept of right and wrong (we embrace it); it is that right and wrong become conceptually inseparable from "the church", to the point where "the church is wrong" is a statement which can have no meaning. It is beyond an impossibility; it simply is as incontemplatible as is the idea that the earth is a rhombus rather than a sphere.
What this adds up to is that, first, we view the concepts of right and wrong as eternal, as absolute. We tell ourselves we despise "moral relativism" and give speeches denouncing it. "Moral law is not positive law; it is natural law, best described as a fundamental property of the universe, like gravity". (So far, there is no problem internally here).
The problem is that, second, at the exact same time, we "know" that "the church" will never again apostatize from that law, or "lead the people astray" - that is, it is inseparable in the end from that unchanging moral law - but which we also know has changed its teachings on what that fundamental, eternal moral law is. Despite this, we see no problem there (those listening to us do, though). So, for us as members, when the church said the law of heaven was X, it was X; now, when it says it is not X, or we don't know necessarily that it is because X was never "official church doctrine", we believe that, too - and we see no problem there.
In fact, we "know" that anyone who claims to see a problem there is, as BY said once, either "willfully wicked or profoundly ignorant". It is not possible (in our minds) that we believe two mutually exclusive things at once - yet, every psychologist would tell us that in fact it is very common, and can be demonstrated with all kinds of empirical tests amongst even the most non-ideological people, even though incoherence means that something we believe cannot possibly be true.
But the point is, "the church" has become equivalent to "unchanging moral law", even though it keeps changing its description of what that law is. So tomorrow, if the church said definitively that the truth was never X, as it had once said was the case, but was always Y, we would "know" that the church had never actually said that X was the truth, even though we would also know it had. ("The Limited Geography Theory has always been viable, right from the early days of the church...", "It is not official church doctrine that polygamy must or will be practiced in the celestial kingdom", "Birth control is not necessarily a sin. It is simply a decision to be made between husband and wife", etc.).
We simultaneously defend moral absolutism - the doctrine that eternal moral law does not change - while defending the many differences in claims about this law made by the church, and don't notice a problem. Through the unaware disengagement of some aspect of our innate coherence detection abilities, we are able to view changing official church doctrine, and "unchanging metaphysical Truth", as synonyms, even as we are demonstrating they cannot be as long as the words in questions have any meaning. We end up locking ourselves, just like any devout racist, Marxist, Nazi, or Muslim, into a situation which purports to afford something of a God's eye view of the cosmos, but which in fact is just an (unrecognized as such) full-blown case of confirmation bias as the engine and structure of our consciousness and cognition.
And in fact, "comprehensive (religious) confirmation bias", "I have not made a mistake", and "the church is true" actually DO become totally synonymous. Committed to this end result no matter what, we end up believing at the same time things which most others would say are very much mutually contradictory. But we can't see that; and we pay no heed to the people pointing it out, precisely BECAUSE they would DISconfirm what can only now be confirmed. Psychologically, we are - without realizing - in a completely enclosed state, in which our unconscious protects us by erecting a kind of "missile defense shield" which renders non-existent, invisible, or at most, immediately risible and dismissable, ANY fact or observation or insight or conclusion which does not facilitate the perpetuation of that state.
Observers might "know" that church defenders are aware of all of the internal contradictions in how they approach particular matters, and are therefore inclined to label them "liars" or "sociopaths". But is unclear to what degree any of us were conscious of the internal contradictions while so dependent, in so many ways, on the proposition that "the church is true"/"I haven't made a mistake". It is possible to be totally unaware of incoherence (this is one reason for review by peers outside of one's own bubble, something which people who already "know" they are privy to special knowledge and authority could hardly feel the need for).
At moments, some awareness of faulty perception due to the immersion of our consciousness into the ideology might arise in our minds; but just as quickly we are content to tell ourselves that this is just a "bias" like any other "bias", and that everyone has them, and so we are no more closed or open psychologically than anyone else. But of course, this too is another misperception. While others certainly are as closed as we are, we have totally misunderstood where we are, forgotten how this latest self-delusion conflicts with what the ideology itself claims, don't contemplate where we should or could be perception-wise, and so don't even think about how we might get there.
In short, this state leads us to defend "the church" no matter what, even in the most absurd, inconsistent, counter-productive, or vicious ways, for it has become inconceivable to us that it could ever not deserve being defended - we already "know" it is incapable of misalignment with cosmic right. Whatever is good for the church, then, is good. Whatever is bad for it is bad. Whatever it stands for is good. Whatever Joseph did or didn't do has no bearing on whether the church is what it claims, or whether he is what he claimed. Joseph and his church must be defended no matter what, and all who oppose it recognized for the enemies of cosmic right they are, and "dismissed without further argument", like Peter does Lucifer in the temple movie.
For example, above I mentioned that church apologists would all say that murder, bearing false witness, and child molesting were inherently evil. And yet, none have condemned Joseph that I know of for turning a blind eye to (or more probably, encouraging) violent vigilante action against his political enemies, or his own bearing of false witness against those who spoke the truth about his sexual life, or of the 37 year old's regular sex ("marriage") with girls as young as 14 - something pretty easily demonstrated to be nearly as irregular then as now.
There is no reason to believe, after having encountered defense literature and the minds that produce it, that if diary entries in Joseph's own hand surfaced which described him sacrificing children on an altar and drinking their blood in the Kirtland Temple, that defenders would do anything other than begin simply claiming that the diaries had been forged to embarrass the prophet (for a similar approach, see BH Roberts on the Kinderhook affidavit in OHC). Dean Jessee would no doubt be trotted out, or possibly even exhumed, to bolster up the claim that we have "no reason to believe these diaries are authentic, and there we should let the matter rest".
And then, once it could no longer be denied that the diaries were authentic, without explaining their former stance, they might simply move on to defending child sacrifice through some twisted spin on Israelite atonement ritual, some complaint about how the KJV doesn't accurately translate some scripture from Leviticus, tossing in some reference to early Christian sects practicing ritual human slaughter as evidence that Jesus of Nazareth really was a Mormon, and set up the first Mormon church. And John Sorenson would probably weigh in on how this was in fact evidence that the human sacrificing Aztecs really WERE lost Jews who knew of Christ long before the Catholics showed up. And on and on and on. (I concede that church defenders might instead acknowledge that since Joseph had been revealed to have been a cannibal, that this meant they HAD made a mistake, and then resign their jobs and church memberships en masse; but considering that they have now declared war on Joseph's own words on the identity of the Book of Mormon peoples in order to just keep that pleasant psychological state going [the one dedicated to believing the very man they are admitting they now disbelieve on "the most correct book on earth"], it seems very unlikely).
Would church defenders take up the question: "What might Joseph have to do, before he could no longer be considered a prophet in the way he is claimed to be?'"? I don't think so. This might be because, this question has no answer for the believing Mormon. Even if it could be admitted that he did "make a mistake" in roasting children and eating them, no doubt, this wouldn't mean he "wasn't a prophet". We'd just have to leave that in the Lord's hands, wouldn't we? The fact is - NO serious criteria, except those whose nature inherently precludes them from ever being demonstrably met, has ever been proposed by modern church defenders on this question, that I know of; and I doubt that at any moment the task has been anything other than "defend the church", rather than "find the truth, whatever it might be, and whatever it might mean for all of us".
All of this makes it easy for those observing to see church defenders as in a particular psychological state, not peculiar to Mormonism, but necessary to it, and possibly even "sociopathic" in a way: they would do or say ANYTHING to defend the man who started their church, no matter WHAT he did or did not do, whether he ate children, didn't really hang around with Peter, James or John, was a practicing homosexual, or asked all of them to drink Kool-Aid and kill themselves, anything. Truth and "the church" were supposed to be synonyous; but in the end, the truth doesn't matter, though we keep telling ourselves it does.
All that matters is "the church", which really means, "my particular psychological state, the one which allows me to believe I have not made a mistake, have special knowledge, am in some sense spiritually superior to those outside my tribe, have special access to God", etc.
The approach toward Joseph, by the way, more than anything, is what also allows vulnerability on the cult and worship of Joseph charge. Mormons laugh at the accusation that they worship Joseph Smith; the big refutation is that "we don't pray to Joseph Smith". But this fact must be considered: Joseph Smith can NOT be held to have ever possibly fallen, by church members. This is as much as to agree with Joseph's own pronouncement that he had no law; and this is as much as to make him, very literally, a being who is under no *independent* law, but whose will is the law, whatever that will might be at any particular second, the exercise of which is the only requirement for its immediate sanctification. Listen to me, lurkers; I'm telling the truth.
This conception of Joseph is in fact at odds with the D&C; and King Follett description of God himself, since he is portrayed there as bound by pre-existing eternal laws. And what this means is that Mormon theology/belief itself makes Joseph much more than a man; in terms of the structure of sin and righteousness, celestial *nomos* itself, he is much more than the Mormon God himself.
Just think about this for a second. Joseph's Alma is made to say that were God to transgress the laws of heaven by, say, allowing mercy to rob justice, "he would cease to be God". What, I ask, would Joseph have to do, "to cease to be a prophet"? Lie? Cheat? Steal? Kill? What?
I'm not sure there is anything wouldn't be dismissed with just another slogan. There is, however, an allowance for an answer when it comes to God - but none, in our minds as members, for Joseph. The truth is that Joseph's theology itself (though we didn't realize it at the time), in at least one important way, nearly turns Joseph into the capricious but automatically justified God of Jonathan Edwards, no act of which could ever be considered grounds for losing his special, exalted status. So in this sense, Joseph is an even more powerful God than the Mormon God himself. There is no way around this.
One thing this means is that even born again Christians, people who think Jars of Clay are right up there with The Beatles, that God created planet earth one Monday through Saturday about 5500 years ago, and that Noah actually shoved two - or seven, depending on whether we like "J" or "E" better - of every single species of insect and animal on earth into his giant boat, might have more awareness in some ways of the implications of Mormon theology, than do Mormons themselves.
But back to sociopathy. It does not help that, as Trixie points out in another great thread, church defense arguments, upon inspection, routinely bear the marks of a fanatically blind, psychologically closed commitment to "the church". Reasoning is flawed; irrelevant points take center stage; citations are dodgy and misrepresented; people's credentials are attacked rather than their opinions. "The church" seems to have become life itself, a fetishized concept more visceral and motivating, for many members, even than the concept of a wandering, preaching Jesus of Nazareth himself.
Defending "the church" becomes as necessary, literally, as fighting to save one's life, one's marriage, one's own self-image, one's relationship to one's children, "right and wrong", everything. This is why, evidently, no church apologist seems to have any clue why they are so often criticized for personal attacks on those skeptical of church claims - they literally don't seem to have any idea where "person" ends, and "point" or "argument" begins. What else would we expect, though?
I think I'd beaten this one to death by the fourth paragraph, so just to finish...
If church defenders wish to avoid appearing to be sociopathic defenders of the church, and instead appear to be very smart, conscientious, CREDIBLE, and truth-loving at all costs defenders; if they wish to avoid appearing like they are in the same boat as David Icke's followers, who believe that Queen Elizabeth is a shape-shifting reptilian from another galaxy, and who will likewise do or say anything to defend their beliefs without assuming any responsibility to acknowledge reality on its own terms, I have a couple of ideas.
First, to all the people on here complaining about how FARMS doesn't submit to proper peer review, let's forget about that for now. Peer review is something that conscientious scholars who, despite their recognized and unrecognized biases, cherish, because in the end, they are more devoted to the truth than clinging on to a belief which might be totally erroneous. We're not anywhere near there as members of the church. All we want is to keep our "testimonies", keep believing.
I think church defenders need to start with more basic things first.
1.) Acknowledge the fact that, just logically, the church may be what it claims - AND, that it may not be. That alone I think would be a big deal. "It either is, or it isn't".
2.) Provide some even semi-rational theory of how it could be known if the church was NOT what it claims. They must answer, first to themselves: "I already am absolutely certain the church is all it claims. BUT, given the point of number one [above], how would I, or anyone, know if the church were NOT what it claims?". Defenders would show devotion NOT to "the church", but to the Truth they are asking us to believe it is synonymous with, by thinking hard about this question, and then proposing answers to it. These answers themselves might warrant critical scrutiny, but at least it would be a beginning.
Talking about Thomas Kuhn, and paradigms, and how Mormons have just as much right to believe Mormon claims as anyone else does theirs, should be stopped immediately. These comments just confirm the worst suspicions most people already have about Mormon defenders - that they can no longer conceive of the possibility of a divergence between the church which means so much to them, and Truth; and so are also totally unable psychologically or emotionally to conscientiously address the question of whether they really are synonymous.
3.) I think church defenders might be helped in defending the church by thinking this: If it is true that the church either is, or is not, what it claims; but I cannot even imagine how I might know that it wasn't, if by some nightmarish chance it wasn't, could that mean that my perception really IS flawed? Or that something HAS happened to me? I can think of how I would know if the Wright Brothers weren't the first to fly an airplane; why can't I think of how I would know if the church weren't what it claimed? What is wrong?
The air of sociopathy would be dispelled, Mormon apologetic minds would become able to view evidence in the ways that others do, and thus a vast increase in the persuasiveness of Mormon defense secured, I think, if defenders took a step back and seriously considered themselves from as detached a perspective as possible.
"If the church were not what it claimed....how would I even know? And if I can't think of how, what is wrong with me?", are questions that, were they to inform apologetic writings, I think would enable everyone to take Mormon arguments far more seriously, and without suspicion that the consciences of Mormon defenders had been totally co-opted by "the church".
I just stopped typing and had a quick look - this thing's so long, I can't even be bothered to go re-read the thing or edit it. I hope it makes sense because I'm going to just fly it up.
Click Here For Original Link Or Thread.
| | | | The Perils Of Exmormonism: Anger, Part 2
| | Posted May 14, 2005, at 09:37 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Just to recap - I've run out of things to say about Mormonism, so now I'm bloviating about Exmormonism. This is a continuation of the other essay on exmo anger.
In the last one, I argued that anger or resentment, after coming to believe you have been duped, is nothing extraordinary, and is common to everyone. I also mentioned that in addition to simply resenting lost opportunities, there might be a deeper reason for (in particular) exmormon anger. It may not be true at all of some people; it may be very true of others. But here is my theory about that “other reason”.
I think that we feel anger not just because we recognize that we lost opportunities devoting our lives to something uncomfortably similar to Rev. Moon’s Unification Church, but because, unconsciously, our self-image - an image based on what we would most like to believe about ourselves, including that we are intelligent and aware - has been dealt a death blow. After all, it’s not just that we missed a question on a Reader’s Digest quiz; it’s not just that we mistook A for B; we fell for one of the most outlandish and ludicrous religions of the last two centuries, one that espoused the most embarrassingly problematic (or falsifiable) positions on astrophysics, race, seeing things in seer stones or crystal balls, anthropology, language translation, prophecy, God, sex, politics, and pretty much everything else.
It is not too much to say that the charismatic Joseph’s religion nears a parody of religion. It is in essence an iglesio ad absurdum (just made that up, don’t know if it’s proper Latin), a caricature of every other religion out there, exaggerating all the right features to make it as silly - and even potentially as crazy or lethal - as possible, even right down to the almost animalistic (boundless) sexual privileges claimed by the Alpha, and permitted to those just beneath him in pack order, the peculiar early Mormon fascination with bloodshed, and the demand for unyielding obedience to the cultic authority.
And - we had no idea. That's really lame. How do we explain THAT to ourselves, while maintaining all the flattering notions which once formed the foundation of our "self"? I don’t know that we can…
And the truth is, that hurts. It hurts our pride - we turned out to be dummies at least in this one respect, in a big way. But we never thought we were dummies - we thought we were geniuses! And we just came face to face with the fact that we were more easily fooled than people we had once scorned!
So, in those first moments, smarting with wounded pride and stripped of a self-image we had become narcissistically infatuated with, and in fact, totally emotionally dependent on, we want NAMES. We want redress, revenge. “Who is responsible for this?” Joseph, Pres. Hinckley, all the General Authorities, our parents, professional church defenders, anyone and everyone else. We need someone to point the finger at (not saying they don’t deserve it). We might even go on to a bulletin board and totally let loose. In a profound, unconscious way, we were in love - with our "selves" - and enjoyed all the strangely pleasing sensations of love; but now those have been ripped from us. We want them back, unconsciously.
In those moments it would be extraordinary if we were to seriously consider to what degree we ourselves might have been responsible for having fallen for it all. This is natural; it is the same reaction we see in people who have been swindled by guys selling waterfront property in Arizona or something. The investors were in deep, pulling their friends into the big get-rich-quick secret, their greed and vanity preyed upon, ignoring even the most blatant signs that something isn’t right; and then when they finally realize the whole thing is a sham, they go from talking about the main operator like he was a god, to calling for his prosecution and incarceration, or even worse. In those first moments, the swindled investors don’t look in the mirror and say, “how did I let myself get in so deep, when there were so many signs of fraud along the way?”. They just feel angry, I think to some degree for the reasons I suggested, and want vengeance.
But however natural or justified our anger might be, I think there are big problems with indulging it in general. For example, it is common for our righteous indignation to lead us to feel that because we were the victims of an oppressor, we may grant ourselves license to be judges in our own case, and determine just what punishment we are justified in meting out to our former oppressor. Our past victimhood grants us a real kind of moral authority, in our minds. Our new opinions and behaviours are not partial or biased; to us, they are rooted in all cosmic right. And this feels good. It actually feels way too good.
For in reality, we have begun to make the same mistakes all over again. Whereas a desire for stability or “specialness” or status or intimate knowledge of God once blinded us, now anger does. But that anger, in large measure, is really only the expression of a desire to reconstruct a self-image which could plausibly be based on an idea that we are intelligent; and hurting those who we feel hurt us, verbally or otherwise, is one way of trying to achieve that, if only on an unconscious level. If the dog bites us, we feel a lot better if we can kick it back. The angry attempt to reciprocate harm is a way of trying to recapture an acceptable (that is, flattering) sense of self, and I suppose, I have been as guilty of this as anyone. But ultimately, this method is a dead end. I doubt it has led anyone to feel the peace and joy that every human being may feel, if they follow what appear to be those universal guidelines for feeling them.
Where I am going with this is to suggest that to truly beat Mormonism, we must truly beat anger (as I mean it in this essay), for it can be as enslaving and addictive and blinding to us, as Mormonism was. We will be no farther ahead than we ever were, if we don’t.
If this is correct, it raises questions like these: “Even if you are on to something, how on earth can I not feel angry when I have lost so much because of the church? I spent my life trying to overcome my own humanity as a member, but now you are suggesting I do pretty much the same thing in trying to move beyond anger. How does THAT put me any farther ahead? That’s just as unfair as the church demanding that I feel okay about my husband marrying 2000 women in the Celestial Kingdom!”
I might be mostly talking to myself by then, but I’ll try to answer these next time.
Looking forward to any comments or criticisms,
Click Here For Original Link Or Thread.
| | | | The Perils Of Exmormonism: Anger, Part One
| | Posted May 11, 2005, at 08:03 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | I've said enough about Mormonism on here; I want to try bloviating about Exmormonism now (thinking of starting a series lol).
Imagine this: You're a girl in her early twenties who's just left home, renting your own room, intent on doing right and being a great member of the church. But, you meet a young non-Mormon guy one night (call him Jim), he asks you out, you go on a few dates, nothing that serious, but then one night, one thing leads to another, and you end up making love.
As soon as it is over, your mind is flooded with regret and self-loathing; you think back to the Young Women's lesson you had once, when a high councilman brought a perfect rose, and passed it around to all the teenage boys to handle and mess around with. They picked off petals, bent it, mutilated it. After a few minutes, the high councilman held the tattered, bent rose up and told the young girls that whereas they were perfect roses now, if they ever violated the law of chastity, they would NEVER be able to recover their former pristine state, and would be just like the damaged rose they now saw. Unchastity was next in line behind denying the Holy Ghost and murder. Any mistake would retroactively add to the excruciating suffering of Jesus on the cross.
Now at home and in bed by yourself, your sobs grow heavier and heavier; you start to feel dizzy, sick with guilt, sick at irreparably damaging yourself. You had every blessing; God had anwered your prayers; and you have now committed a sin up there with the two biggest of all. You made Jesus suffer even more pain.
You can't pray; you don't want to profane Him by even addressing Him. You are damaged and filthy. And as the hours wear on, and the gravity of the heinous sin you have committed weighs down on you, you move beyond crying to a kind of numbness, as though you weren't really you anymore, as though you didn't really exist. You would cry, but there aren't any more tears, and no more will to. You are beyond that now. And in that anguished state, the darkest thoughts possible begin to take shape in your mind; and before morning comes, you have swallowed an entire bottle of aspirin, and left yourself to die.
Just before you pass out, though, you reconsider, realizing that suicide would consign you to even further eternal torment, and manage to tell the landlords, who live in the house, what you have done. You are rushed to the hospital, hovering between consciousness and endless unconsciousness, where your stomach is pumped.
After you come to, you make a decision. To help atone for your sin, you will marry Jim. In your mind, knowing all you've been taught by those you admired most in the world, it seems like the best way to try to make something right. Maybe doing so will help repair, just a bit, the irreparable - you.
So you marry him. And then you have two little children. And the young man, though not a Mormon, turns out to be a fantastic father who loves you beyond anything else.
But after a couple of years, you begin to worry about the eternal fate of you and your children. You are not sealed in God's temple - your marriage is of no worth anywhere but planet earth; and so what good is it even ON earth? Your husband is totally supportive of your church activity; yet he shows no real interest in the church at all. This is danger. And it begins to wear on you. "What will happen to me when I die? I could die any moment. What then? I will never make it to the celestial - I consciously married outside the covenant. I will never see my parents, my siblings, I won't get to live with Heavenly Father. I will be consigned to some lower kingdom, or turned into some ministering angel. Or something. But I won't get to the top. I can't receive exaltation. I WILL LOSE MY CHILDREN. Oh God, I can't lose my children, not them. I don't want to spend eternity without them."
And so it is that you decide to divorce your non-Mormon husband. Your little children, who worshipped and loved him more than any other man in the world, cry themselves to sleep every night for the next three years, begging to see their father again, not understanding what has happened to them or what you are saying to them. They have lost, forever, a part of them, who they were, the man they loved most.
And Jim, who sincerely loved you, cries, begging you for an explanation, for anything, even agreeing to go to church, take the lessons, anything. But it is done; you have made your decision. His offers are insincere anyway. You will not lose your exaltation. You will not lose your children. The truth is, he never recovers. Afterwards, he can never quite keep a job, seems listless and forlorn, totally unlike his cheery, confident former self. All he knows is they seemed to have a perfect marriage and true love, and then it was ripped from him for reasons he can't understand.
After a while of looking, you find a divorced man, very much your senior. He is not attractive, but he is a member, and is on the high council. He could get you through the veil. You make it known you are interested, he proposes, and you marry him.
As years pass, the fact that you were never really in love with him begins to affect your life. You feel unfulfilled, longing for the excitement of romance. You are still young, after all; but he is starting to close in on retirement. In frustration and despair and loneliness, you even seek solace in the arms of another man, for a brief few weeks. And now you have really done it. You plead for repentance, vow never to see him again, vow never to even think of another divorce again. You decide that all of those passions and instincts and feelings must be killed off, once and for all, forever.
You wind up a young woman, but prematurely old and tired, without the kind of love you deserve and even had, having created a legacy of heartache that you and your children are the inevitable heirs of. Life is cold. But if it is, it is your fault. You are weak. You have not been valiant. The gospel was there all along - you just didn't obey it. You wouldn't have had any problems if you had just obeyed more strictly.
And so, you make a steely vow to yourself, that you will never - never - allow yourself to feel those passions and instincts and longings again. At least you were brave once, in divorcing your non-Mormon husband and breaking up an otherwise totally happy family, for your sake, for your children's eternal sake. You sacrificed the tender feelings of Jim and your children, and the vows you made on that wedding day, for the church. At least, that was one thing you did right.
And then, you find out that Joseph Smith didn't tell the truth about his experiences.
How do you feel?
I am totally sick of hearing members of the church criticize ex-Mormons for feeling anger or bitterness (though usually this is just for the first little while). And it is not as though ex-Mormons have a monopoly on rancour; the tone one usually encounters on apologetic boards is every bit as rancourous, just minus the profanities. That's a small difference to me.
Joseph Smith didn't tell the truth about his sacred experiences; and people's lives have been totally screwed up because they didn't know that. They felt fear; they did all kinds of things because they thought God wanted them to. They obeyed the prophets when they said that birth control was a sin, never imagining that a few decades later, it wouldn't be a sin anymore. They spent their lives living in huts in the desert, visited for a few weeks each year by their polygynous husbands. They murdered. Or they just silently doubted, forever reproaching themselves for their weakness. They did all kinds of things.
And I can't believe now how inane and totally uncharitable it is for fire-breathing Mormons (like my former self) to complain about ex-Mormon anger, as though it were all the evidence one needed that people who have concluded that Joseph didn't translate (apparently invisible) golden plates with magical translation spectacles attached to a breastplate are the ones who have gone nuts. How did you, Mr. Member, feel when you got shafted on the latest Utah County get-rich-scheme? Times that by about 10,000, and that's what it's like to wake up when you're thirty or forty or fifty, and not know who you are anymore, and see a million opportunities that were ignored because you thought Joseph did tell the truth, and devoted yourself to his church. All the time away from your kids, all the career opportunities, all the time away from your spouse - and for what? Someone wasn't honest with their fellow man - and that was the young, desperate Joseph. There are always costs to believing lies. Who wouldn't feel resentmentat finding out he had been duped, and lost because of it, things he can never get back?
Anger, whether you've just gotten burned in a get-rich-scheme, or duped by any other guy - like the founder of a political party, stamp collecting club, or church - is a very natural reaction. It is not unique to Mormons or ex-Mormons. It is unique to human beings - that is, not unique at all. And the many heartbreaking stories one can read on the story board of this website alone should, I think, force even the most sociopathic defender of the essentially indefensible to hold his tongue and refrain from even more hurtful comments. You can still believe Joseph's stories, but for God's sake, show some mercy!
But there is an even deeper reason for the anger we feel, I think; but that is a topic for the next thread.
Click Here For Original Link Or Thread.
| | | | How Much Does The Church Respect Its Members?
| | Posted Apr 14, 2005, at 07:42 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | I believe that if the church really felt a sense of respect - and responsibility - for its members, it would try to bring clarity to the many internal contradictions within the world of Mormon doctrine.
Despite the delusional bleatings of salaried church defenders about how "beautifully simple" and "simply beautiful" the "gospel" is, with all the ever-present insinuations that if it doesn't seem this way to you, it means you've "lost the spirit" and your "mind is clouded with sin", the fact is that not even the president of the church, Gordon B. Hinckley, can provide a coherent explanation of even the most basic of church doctrines. It shouldn't be a surprise, then, that no one else can, despite what we all used to tell ourselves.
Church defenders like to use words like "fluid" and "open" when describing "official church doctrine"; the truth is that euphemisms can't hide the fact that it is simply embarrassingly chaotic and nonsensical, carrying dozens of internal contradictions (read "impossibilities"). I regret that, but it is the truth.
And on the Larry King Live show, after years of FARMS chaos and his own obfuscations, GBH actually said that his role was to "declare doctrine". Wow.
Then, he puts out in the Ensign last year an announcement telling members to STOP writing in letters for clarification on what "church doctrine" is. So...church members are told repeatedly that they will be held responsible for not obeying the gospel, and for teaching it to their children...but when they wonder what it is, having been provoked into wondering what it is by the very obfuscations and revisions of Gordon B. Hinckley himself, he announces NOT a final clarification...but a demand that everyone stop trying to find out what it is! "Stop asking me!"
This strikes me as very disrespectful to the many sincere members of the church, who find themselves, much like we might have, bombarded by many conflicting answers about what should be an easily answerable question - IF the church were even close to what it claimed to be. Is it really too much to ask of a guy who demands to be obeyed as CHRIST'S REGENT, that he at least stick to ONE STORY? Yes, it is. The church can't even stick to one story on their founding scripture, the Book of Mormon. It's totally embarrassing.
This screwed up situation, on a few occasions, touched me personally (this was prior to the announcement that we all stop asking "prophets" what "doctrines" we were actually supposed to believe). Once, I wrote to Dallin Oaks raising a question, in the politest way I could, about a particular church doctrine which he had spoken about; his response was to tell me to write to the First Presidency about it.
I then wrote to the First Presidency as per his request, labelling my letter in large letters, "PERSONAL & CONFIDENTIAL". Thomas Monson sent back via his secretary Michael Watson what appeared to be a form letter recommending I read a number of scriptures - which I had actually already referenced and referred to in my original letter (great). But he didn't send his letter to me. He sent it to my Branch President, along with a copy of my original letter - the one marked "PERSONAL & CONFIDENTIAL" - for my BP to read and keep.
Why, after asking me to keep confidences vis-a-vis the temple and everything else, did Thomas Monson feel no hesitation in violating MY confidence?
I'd only sent the letter to him because an apostle told me to. Why did he make a copy of it and send it someone else? To embarrass me? As though I'd done something wrong in asking for clarification on something I HAD BASED MY ENTIRE LIFE ON, and which the current president was, in some measure, then REVISING OUT OF EXISTENCE? To deter further inquiries?
AND, of course...I'm not allowed a copy of the form letter, am I? Not that I asked for one - but my BP informed me that he had been instructed to keep Monson's letter, and not give me a copy. He was only allowed to read its contents to me, which he did - over the phone, no doubt suddenly fearing that I'd gone insane, and might snatch it or something.
I was a flame-throwing (although increasingly bewildered) member at that time, all my kids named after prophets, the whole deal, holding down two very time-consuming callings - gospel doctrine teacher and counselor - and in retrospect, all I can say is that a long list could be compiled of all the ways in which the church is forever avoiding any responsibility for anything it says or does, shifting every burden, physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual, on to members, at the same time its officers (and that includes me while I was in) can act in subtly, and not so subtly, abusive or disrespectful ways. They're so reluctant to evade any responsibility - they won't even send return letters back to people. (You end up thinking of Hitler keeping all references to the extermination verbal, so there's no paper trail. Sorry for the Hitler reference, I'm kind of sick of them myself.)
This little experience was insignificant compared to those of others. And yet, it, like all the others, is just another indication of what very much appears to be a double standard - one justified, like all double standards, on one group's claim of superior authority - which is the same as saying, one group's claim of superiority over another.
I am not so much bitter as totally amazed that I was so blind for so long.
Since Hinckley has outsourced the church's public relations, something that divine revelation, one would think, would be more than enough to handle, why doesn't he outsource the task of coming up with a coherent doctrine for his church? I think, seriously, that would be one important way that the church could show genuine respect for its members.
FARMS, which appears to provide something of a cover of deniability for "doctrinal revision", has failed miserably in this task, to the point of a handicapped-kid-messing- his-pants-during-the-school-play awkwardness. I literally have no doubt in my mind that nearly anyone on this planet - outside the church - could sit down and hammer something out for the church which gets rid of most of its internal contradictions. And that includes the "Gentile Jews" over at Edelman.
Can you imagine the conversations THOSE guys have had over the past few years, dealing with the church?
I wrote a post saying Benson had been my favourite church president. Maybe I should amend that to Hinckley, since he has made it clearer than any other church president, that he does not believe himself to be a prophet in the way he is reputed to be, nor that he believes the church to be what members commonly believe it to be. And Monson...well, it's going to be interesting when he takes the reins. They say he is the most vain of all the GA's; and apparently, that's really saying something.
Anyway, it is no wonder there is such a hemorrhaging of members with these guys running the ship. Nearly every single thing about the way they run it screams, "it is not what it claims". It's totally nuts.
Out,
T. Click Here For Original Link Or Thread.
| | | | Maybe Pres. Hinckley's "big" Announcement Will Be
| | Posted Mar 29, 2005, at 07:53 AM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | Maybe Pres. Hinckley's "big" announcement will be that a decision has finally been reached about who the Book of Mormon - the church's founding scripture and "the most correct book on earth" - is actually about. I guess it's taken a few years for the seer stone to warm up.
After all, the Book of Mormon started out as a history of the "ancestors" of the American Indians, and there was no "principal" about it.
Then, as more and more evidence accumulated showing that Israelite immigrants - at the very least - could not be the sole ancestors of American aboriginals, qualifiers and modifiers began to be introduced into "official" descriptions of the relationship between the two groups.
Oddly enough, nowadays, two mutually exclusive views regarding the BOM are now being promoted by the church. One advocates belief in Joseph Smith's - and "Jesus"'s - declarations about Lehite descendants (the Hemispheric Theory), and the other advocates DISbelief in "Jesus" and Joseph's declarations (the Limited Geography Theory).
The "we don't believe Jesus or Joseph Smith because Sorenson has a graduate degree" side is comprised of FARMS writers and a few current GA's, and is promoted via articles posted on the official church website. (I guess Jesus is only an omniscient being when he is speaking as such...).
The "I declare war on reality and will believe in Joseph no matter what" view is promoted via the introductions not only to the 1980 edition of the LDS scriptures, but in the recent Doubleday edition, which includes the specific designation of the book as a history of the "PRINCIPAL ANCESTORS OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS".
For all the cranky critics of the church on here wondering why Pres. Hinckley didn't foretell the tsunami or Sept. 11, or make public the revealed mind of Jesus Christ on the Schiavo case, or on stem cell research, or on cloning, etc., I'd like to suggest that you dramatically lower your standards. How about - why doesn't Pres. Hinckely know what relationship BOM characters are supposed to have to modern aboriginals? Isn't God supposed to answer prayers, reveal the truth of "all things"? (see James 1:5, Mor. 10:3-5).
So, I'm thinking, maybe he found out, or decided, and is going to announce it! That way, his doctrinal legacy would be enhanced over "be good" and "don't wear two earrings in the same ear". It would be the perfect thing to close out his presidency with..."We finally came to a position on our own founding scripture!!!"
Credits: Tal Bachman Click Here For Original Link Or Thread.
| | | | Church Resignation Numbers
| | Posted Feb 15, 2005, at 12:23 PM. | FILED UNDER: TAL BACHMAN
| | ORIGINAL AUTHOR: n/a | | ARCHIVED BY: Infymus | |
TOP | | I spoke to a guy the other day who was a bishop not long ago, recognized the BOM was not historical, and then resigned.
Anyway, for what it's worth, this guy said that after speaking with certain sources and doing his own calculations, part of which were based on his own experience while bishop with resignations per annum, that he figures there has to be somewhere around 100,000 resignations a year.
Even a few months ago I heard all kinds of big numbers like this bandied about and kind of doubted them all (in true exmo skeptical fashion), but now I've really started to wonder. I know personally a lot who have left, but I thought maybe that was just me (I just heard two nights ago about ANOTHER family leaving over in Vancouver). Could it be true there are THAT many?
Even if it is half that number, when you realize that they almost certainly don't represent guys who have just drifted away as inactive, but rather people who have given their all to the church (stalwart members) who are leaving in many cases with their entire family, this seems like a really big deal. At the very least, that is a big blow to future growth in terms of would-have-been-Mormon progeny and branching generations...big, fertile oak trees plucking themselves out root and branch.
And since it seems that the evidence will only continue accumulating that the BOM is not 1600 years old and doesn't actually have anything to do with American aboriginals, and more and more people around the world are gaining access to information about that evidence, and that we have innate sense-making/truth detection faculties that often seem retrievable even after major pummeling, and since people more willingly fall "out of line" when they see others doing so in increasing numbers, you wonder if maybe this isn't just biased thinking, but maybe that it is really happening, and happening with increasing momentum.
When you also acknowledge that the "12 million members" figure seems problematic in many ways, and that activity rates may even be quite a bit lower than the 3.5 million number people tend to cite (is it really more like 2 or 2.4 or 2.8 or something?), and figure in the very low retention rates for new converts (which I think will only continue to sink for the reasons I cited above), so that whatever the number of resignations is represents an even huger percentage of active church membership lost, it makes you wonder even more.
This ex-bishop also said he has spoken with two different church sources, one of which is at the MTC, who said that the church is losing FORTY per cent of returned missionaries. And a mission is about the most intensive church-immersion process you can imagine. When you figure that the rates are very likely twice that for dudes who don't go on missions, that's another bad indication.
When I first realized 14 months ago the church couldn't be what it claimed, I had no idea that anything like this could be happening. Bias aside, does anyone know what is REALLY going on with church growth/decline?
Since stakes are formed by counting active members, how many average active members do stakes have, and how many stakes are there?
Credits: Tal Bachman
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