Donny on "anti-Mormon" stories

[_keithb]

The question:

I am a 13 year old LDS girl, recently baptized. This is all great but........ About a week and a half ago I stumbled onto an anti-mormon website. Some stuff they said was really confusing and scary. They said stuff like Joseph Smith was tried for money digging and that 8 years after his first vision, when GOD told him to join no church he joined the methodist church. I don't know if I want to be LDS anymore. I haven't told ANYONE not even the missionaries who taught me. I'm not sure what to do. I don't even feel like praying anymore.

Does this look and sound like a 13 year old recently baptised girl?
Is the punctuation and capitalisation reflective of how a 13 year old writes?
Or is little Donny taking the odd liberty or two...

+1

The phrase "confusing and scary" sounds like something adults write when they are trying to imitate a child speaking or writing.

When I was 13, I used the f--- word rather prolifically. I don't think that I would have told my friends that something was confusing and scary. I would have been much more likely to call it "f---ed up", or something like that.

I can only guess that other kids are similar.

Edit: Of course, I probably wouldn't have used this phrase writing to a movie star. But, I wouldn't have called something "confusing and scary" either.

[_why me]

+1

The phrase "confusing and scary" sounds like something adults write when they are trying to imitate a child speaking or writing.

When I was 13, I used the f--- word rather probably. I don't think that I would have told my friends that something was confusing and scary. I would have been much more likely to call it "f---ed up", or something like that.

I can only guess that other kids are similar.

Edit: Of course, I probably wouldn't have used this phrase writing to a movie star. But, I wouldn't have called something "confusing and scary" either.

Or someone else was taking a little liberty by posing as a 13 year old girl. Maybe a Mormon hater?

[_Mercury]

From the article.

Isn't it interesting that you cannot go onto the web and find any kind of anti-Catholic, anti-Pentecostal, anti-Baptist, or anti-Lutheran material, but there's all kinds of stuff that is "anti-Mormon."

I wonder if Donny has looked for any of the above.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=catholic+church+cult

[_keithb]

+1

The phrase "confusing and scary" sounds like something adults write when they are trying to imitate a child speaking or writing.

When I was 13, I used the f--- word rather probably. I don't think that I would have told my friends that something was confusing and scary. I would have been much more likely to call it "f---ed up", or something like that.

I can only guess that other kids are similar.

Edit: Of course, I probably wouldn't have used this phrase writing to a movie star. But, I wouldn't have called something "confusing and scary" either.

Or someone else was taking a little liberty by posing as a 13 year old girl. Maybe a Mormon hater?

I am much more inclined to think that someone on Donny's staff wrote this question than any sort of a Mormon hater.

The way I see it, there are maybe three scenarios of who wrote that question that make sense to me: 1) An actual 13 year old girl 2) Someone trolling the site or 3) Someone on Donny's staff.

For 1), this question just doesn't sound like a 13 year old girl to me. The wording is all wrong for the question, as I've already noted above. Also, the story just doesn't line up. Say that this 13 year old girl really was going to investigate the church and was being fed anti information by one of her friends. Why would they use this whole story about Joseph Smith trying to join the Methodists? It's pretty obscure, and it isn't the strongest piece of anti to use against the Mormons, not by a long shot. In fact, it's something that even I, as a lifelong member didn't know about until this thread. Why wouldn't the other kid use something from the Godmakers or something like the Book of Mormon DNA argument, for example? It just doesn't add up to me.

On 2), this also doesn't sound like someone trolling the site. If it was a former Mormon or Baptist or something of that bent, they would have phrased the question differently. Probably, they would have thrown in a whole bunch of arguments or evidence to support their point because they would have anticipated the typical Mopologetic response from Donny. Also, some random troll doesn't seem likely because, again, the Methodist thing is a pretty obscure piece of information.

So, that leads me to believe that it was almost certainly a contrived, softball question from someone on Donny's staff, or 3). What the motivation behind it was is still uncertain, and I would have to have more information to speculate on that.

tl;dr Donny trolled his own site.

[_Darth J]

Yeah, I can't see how that implies anything about what Joseph Smith was doing.

But then I also see no connection between L. Ron Hubbard's career as a science fiction writer and the inception of Scientology.

The point is simple: The Stowells found him to be an upright guy. They did not see him as you assume he was. And they had business with him. Now of course, any idiot can then attempt a comparison with an individual with bad connotations as you did. This is something that critics often do.

Ho, he thought Joseph was a great guy? Well, many thought Koresh was a great guy too! mentality.

How about....well, many were attracted to Ronald Reagan....many were attracted to Hitler too.

It doesn't quite work.

Well, you know what they say: a gift horse in the mouth is worth two in the bush.

I am not assuming anything. You do not dispute that Joseph Smith led people to believe that he could find buried treasure with his magic rock, and one of those people was Josiah Stowell. This undisputed fact necessarily means:

1. Joseph Smith was a fraud, because he knew he could not find buried treasure with a magic rock.
2. Joseph Smith was delusional, because he thought that he really could find buried treasure with a magic rock.

Or

3. You believe Joseph Smith was telling the truth, which means you are asserting that he really could find buried treasure with a magic rock.

None of those three possibilities bodes well for Mormonism's foundational claims.

Josiah Stowell's favorable opinion of Joseph Smith only means that Stowell was completely taken in by the scam. It does not prove that Joseph Smith was telling the truth---that he really could find buried treasure with a magic rock. The ad hominem fallacy applies to both positive and negative character evidence. Neither a favorable opinion of Joseph Smith's personal character nor a negative one is relevant to determining whether magic rocks really work, and whether Joseph Smith had one.

And that's why critically thinking, rational adults---a part of the Venn diagram you are not in---summarily reject arguments like yours that because some rube thinks that the perpetraor of a scam is a wonderful person, that must mean that the scam is legitimate. The misguided mentality is not in observing that many dishonest, unethical, or crazy people had admirers. The misguided mentality is in your desire to cobble together logical rules that only apply to Joseph Smith.

"Josiah Stowell admired Joseph Smith, so that proves that Joseph Smith was an honest person, because if someone has admirers, that means that the subject of the admiration is a good person. Unless it's someone who I have predetermined to be a bad person, like David Koresh. Then I reject opinions of their good character, because I already know they were bad people. So because I already decided Joseph Smith was a good person, favorable opinions of him impress me, but because I already decided David Koresh was a bad person, favorable opinions of him do not impress me. In other words, I am not critically thinking about evidence at all, but nakedly engaging in confirmation bias."

But hey, Why Me, all's fair that ends well.

[_Chap]

... You do not dispute that Joseph Smith led people to believe that he could find buried treasure with his magic rock, and one of those people was Josiah Stowell. This undisputed fact necessarily means:

1. Joseph Smith was a fraud, because he knew he could not find buried treasure with a magic rock.
2. Joseph Smith was delusional, because he thought that he really could find buried treasure with a magic rock.

Or

3. You believe Joseph Smith was telling the truth, which means you are asserting that he really could find buried treasure with a magic rock.

None of those three possibilities bodes well for Mormonism's foundational claims ...

This is one of the tired, familiar and absolutely lethal little bits of reasoning that it is more or less impossible for mopologists to deal with directly. (NB, I didn't say they could not write reams and reams of prose in an attempt to get round the issue or distract people from seeing the point clearly. That's a different matter.)

It is tired, in the same way that a parent might become tired with saying to a persistent child that there really, really is no Tooth Fairy, whatever Auntie Mary says.

It is familiar in the sense that the proposition "the earth is round" is familiar.

But that is no reason why one should not drop it into the conversation from time to time, is it?