Obviously this thread is aimed at my request that harmony refrain from posting in my thread. I appreciate her honoring my request and I appreciate a new thread to discuss the issue. I would like to address the OP's insinuation that what she offered up in my thread amounts to constructive criticism, or even honest criticism. If harmony would prefer I not post here then that's her prerogative, but I'd like to spell out what happened so no one is misled because they don't want to invest the time into reading my longish paper.
The following is infered by harmony to be attributes of her criticism of my paper:
harmony wrote:The criticism can be malicious and/or adverse, but it is not always nor should it automatically be assumed that it is.
harmony wrote:Criticism includes an analysis component.
I will share a few of her criticisms and then share the texts from which they are derived.
To begin with, she responds to my invitation for criticism thus:
harmony wrote:Uh huh. We'll see.
We'll see what? If I will accept criticism? I already had accepted many critiques and apologized for rude behavior. Obviously the tone of this post tells me that the winds are already blowing against me. Can I expect a fair trial?
harmony wrote:Really? Since when do members of the church have a propensity (or time!) for anything except raising their families, paying their bills, and taking care of their callings? You might qualify your statement with "some" or "a few". Because by and large, I'm pretty sure very very few members of the church are at all concerned with the early Christian church.
This was brought up by two other posters as well, and after their respectful posts I have decided to change it, but this post is full of patronization and insult. The other posts contained much more respectful language:
Bond wrote:How many LDS do you think really dig into history beyond doing their genealogies? I doubt most LDS (or any religious person for that matter) digs too deeply into early religious history. In my opinion it's too obscure an area for too many people to be interested in or to be able to comprehend. Online posters (a group of people who may pick up alot more through message boards) may have a decent knowledge of Christian history, but how much do you think the run-of-the-mill Average Joe knows about history?
I was just wondering if you should change the beginning to "A certain segment of the LDS have a propensity..." or "A certain segment of LDS academics have a propensity..." to show that a segment of the community is interested, but to distinguish that segment from the rest who may have little knowledge on the issue.
Notice the use of "in my opinion," and other qualifiers that let me know he respects my opinion, but feels I'm mistaken. The next one:
liz wrote:I agree with James on this. One other way you may want to word it is simply changing it to "Some members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints seem to have a propensity for digging through the history of the early Christian church."
That way, you're still keeping your basic premise, but clarifying it slightly.
No making judgmental statements about the quality of life of LDS people or the presence of their church in their lives, only a helpful post that only shares what they might change to improve it.
harmony wrote:"Corrupting"? Gee, Mak... tell us how you really feel! It would do your paper more good if you just said "doctors of theology" and left out your own personal feelings.
The text reads this way:
Among the motivations that might explain this habit, a common one seems to be the desire to discover hidden pockets of the “plain and precious truths” otherwise garnished from the scriptures by the corrupting doctors of theology.
I was thinking about putting quotation marks around some of it to make sure the reader was aware that my description is a paraphrase of how someone studying the church for that reason would view the situation. I can now see that it is unclear, and I will change it. I appreciate the criticism, and I don't feel this particular quote is all that patronizing, but it still comes through in the sarcasm.
harmony wrote:Well, that's good to know. I'm sure all those millions of members who've been scouring libraries for early church history will be glad to know all those efforts were in vain. Thank you, Drs Judd and Robinson.
This was the quote that inspired the above quote:
Is it really such a good idea to scour the early Church for signs of truth? Frank F. Judd and Stephen E. Robinson share the important warning that such a journey will never bear fruit. According to Dr. Robinson, “it just isn’t there!”
Harmony misinterprets the quote right off the bat, but that may be due to a clarity issue on my part. I should written "signs of now lost truth." She still manages to take a few jabs at whomever might come within view. This time it is Dr. Judd and Dr. Robinson, both very respected scholars, but harmony doesn't seem to care who they are or what they say, as long as she can taker a pot shot or two. Still, the criticism (as disrespectful as it is) made me realize that the underlying issue needs to be clarified.
harmony wrote:You're repeating yourself. I believe you said something remarkably similiar in your previous paragraph, with your "it just isn't there" remark.
The quote you reference here was not mine. It was a quote from other professors, and my paper has a much different spin on it than their thesis. I mentioned that this was my thesis statement, and it serves to show that my intention is to back up the remark made by the other scholars, but by explaining why. I am not repeating myself, I am restating and clarifying.
harmony wrote:I have bated breath, I assure you.
What possible chance does my evidence have of penetrating the ego of someone who responds to my thesis in such a manner? What will result? Constructive criticism, or the ejaculations of an emic who's only goal is to tear down anything and everythign that I put up? Let's see. . .
maklelan's paper wrote: Many outside the church take issue with the LDS stance concerning the influence of the philosophies of men on the doctrines of the church; and some of them, astonished at our presumptuous, see that same influence in our own teachings.
harmony wrote:Pot, meet Kettle. But then we really don't like meeting the Pot, when we don't even acknowledge we're the Kettle.
Whatever her statement means, it appears to be the exact same statement I made in my post. I am saying that the situation has the appearance of hypocrisy because people claim to find philosophic corruption in our church just as we claim to find it in the others. I recognize and acknowledge this fact in my statement, but harmony doesn't appear to grasop that as she repeats my point, only this time by insulting me. Not only does she only repeat my statement, but she appears unaware of the fact that the point of my paper is to refute that notion. She has weighed my argument and found it lacking before I have even shared it.
harmony wrote:Oh, and I think you mean "presumptuousness" or "presumption". You really don't mean "presumptuous".
She is perfectly correct here, and I thanked her and told her I would change it. She responded in the following manner:
harmony wrote:You're welcome. I bet that hurt.
No, actually, it did not hurt. A part of being a scholar is accepting that you don't know everything, and when someone makes this clear to you you thank them and accept the criticism. I am quite used to this and have displayed that capacity to accept criticism and responsiblity on several different occasions, but apparently the idea of admitting a mistake (even a spell-check mistake) would cut harmony to the core. I understand that it may hurt you, but it doesn't hurt me at all. Why would you say that?
harmony wrote:Ah. A scholar! A rarity indeed in the Mormon Studies field.
This was the section that inspired this response:
Many outside the church take issue with the LDS stance concerning the influence of the philosophies of men on the doctrines of the church; and some of them, astonished at our presumptuous, see that same influence in our own teachings. One such scholar discusses the hypocrisy of criticizing Hellenized Christianity while at the same time searching for parallels in the teachings of those same Hellenized Christians.
Harmony appears to be unaware of this, but the scholar I referred to was one that was "outside of the church," as the grammar makes abundantly clear. She thinks I'm talking about a Mormon scholar? The rest of the sentence explains exactly that scholar's stance, which cannot possibly be misinterpreted to be an LDS stance. She's not even reading what I'm writing!
harmony wrote:So from this section, I get the idea that you think Joseph restored what is essentially a Greek-based teaching of a pre-mortal existence? A teaching decried by and deleted from Christianity because it was considered heretical, a teaching derived from Plato and the Alexandrians... and you say Joseph restored it? Why? It wasn't part of the ancient church. So essentially you're saying Joseph either restored a non-scriptorial and non-doctrinal heresy... or he restored a teaching neither the early Christians or the Jews taught?
No, that's not what I think, and if you actually read the section you would know that. I explain every single thing that she harps on in the section under the heading that inspired this rant. Does she respond to my evidence ? No.
The next section was entitled "Eternal Matter." Harmony responded thus:
harmony wrote:I think this one is best left to the physicists and the chemists. Joseph didn't have a clue what he was talking about (and it shows) and neither did the early church fathers (and that shows too).
What does patristics have to do with modern science? Not only does she bring in any utterly irrelevant point, but she ridicules everyone invovled in my paper.
My next section, "Deification," draws this out:
harmony wrote:For this you're using a lot of non-doctrinal, non-canonized sources. Stick with the canon. At least that has weight. In case you didn't know, although I'm sure you did, Pres Hinckley relegated the KFD to "a couplet", and "we don't teach that".
The section has absolutely nothig whatsoever to do with the couplet she mentions here. In addition, the phrase is a "couplet" by definition, so it cannot be "relegated" to a couplet, as if English grammar bends to the will of President Hinckley. By the way, the King Follett Discourse (I can only assume that's what you refer to) is not what President Hinckley was talking about.
She finishes with this:
harmony wrote:Actually, the presence of such non-doctrinal essentially pagan beliefs, such as these three and others that you don't mention, in our belief systems tells me that Joseph not only didn't have a clue what he was preaching, but had lost his revelatory foundation. His one claim to revelation was the Book of Mormon. It makes me wonder if his connection with God was severed from God's end because of the whole Fanny business. Oliver may have been right.
What I presented is doctrine, and my paper shows that they are actually not pagan. Here Harmony simply reasserts her original position without addressing any evidence or even manifesting any cognition of it.
Harmony, you claim mature peopel can take criticism. I have taken it repeatedly and I have seen no one else on this board take it, especially you. You're being remarkably hypocritical and your ego's self-defense mechanism is bringing the level of your debate way down. I would love an honest and sincere response to my points above, but if all you have to say is that I'm wrong on all counts then I'd rather just leave this board. You make this a remarkably close-minded place to be.
harmony wrote:Delivery of the criticism can influence whether or not the criticism is accepted or not, even though whether the delivery is friendly or less-than-friendly, the information within the criticism has the same value. For example, on the thread about early church history, I made a comment about the lack of the word "some" in a sentence. This was met with resistence from the owner of the thread. A very similiar observation was made by Bond; the thread owner did not meet this observation with the same resistence. An almost identical comment with mine was made by Liz, about the same lack of "some", with the added weight that she is a college teacher. No resistence as of yet to Liz's comment. Thus we see a pattern: virtually identical criticism is accepted from some and resisted from others, based on who it is who delivers the message. Thus, it's not the message that's important to this unnamed poster; it's the messenger and the tone. The inability to accept criticism from all sources often results in a FARMS-style presentation, one-sided and incomplete.
Notice all of the examples of correct behavior flow from harmony, while the incorrect behavior never originates with her, but always turns her into the victim.
harmony wrote:The ability to accept criticism, even from people who aren't traditional supporters, is a sign of academic maturity.
Harmony, you have yet to accept a single word of my criticisms of your arguments, and yet I've accepted several of your criticisms, and thanked you for them. In addition to this fact, you have failed to acknowledge in any capacity whatsoever that I have ceded some of your points.