sock puppet wrote:So what is a little history alteration when you are ... Mormon, part of a movement for which revisionist history is the sine qua non.
My question is why even attempt to make this history alteration when it isn't really needed and the history is so fresh that everyone grasps the sleight-of-hand being performed.
If memory serves, Holland or Ballard or someone with a two syllable, double-L name tried saying something along the lines of Wickman a year or two ago.
Wow! Well, I am glad we can say it on this board: Wickman is a LIAR! Capital L. Capital I. Capital A. Capital R. People in my ward (including the President of a movie-theater chain who took a lot of heat for it afterward) were TOLD to give big bucks to the Yes on 8 campaign. People who NEVER would have been involved in politics otherwise. And Wickman was one of the church leaders putting the screws to the members to get them to pony up. So much for the 13th Article of Faith. What a disgusting excuse for a human being is this Wickman jerk. He's a homophobe AND a liar. Does he think the members of the church are so stupid as to forget what happened just four years ago (apparently he is correct, if only we judge by the comment posted here from the MDDB). Funny how silent the mopes are here on this issue.
"The Church is authoritarian, tribal, provincial, and founded on a loosely biblical racist frontier sex cult."--Juggler Vain "The LDS church is the Amway of religions. Even with all the soap they sell, they still manage to come away smelling dirty."--Some Schmo
Dear Elder Wickman. Thank you for providing such a fine example of Doublethink.
From Orwell's 1984:
"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink."
I'm not 100% sure he is lying, he might be lying, but I don't know where Wickman falls in the divide between Church Leaders. It is my opinion that the Church's security arm, the SCMC, has grown tremendously in power, and has been running the operational side of the Church de facto for years where interface with the public is concerned -- much like the KGB ran Moscow. The only living Church leader known to be a member of the SCMC is Elder Nelson. I suspect that L. Whitney Clayton is chief to his ends. Clayton pushed prop 8. Clayton and Nelson were the ones who signed the letter that magically appeared one day to silence Evans and his friends in Provo over the height of the proposed new MTC building. Since Evans is a BYU professor, he worked with his SP on the matter to make sure his opposition was considered secular by the Church. SPs have escalation points in Salt Lake City, and this SP clarified on several occasions that the controversy was not an ecclesiastical matter. Then one day, a letter from the First P. signed by Nelson and Clayton appeared and this same SP had to read it in Church, calling all to support the building as a matter of revealed doctrine. How could such a 180 degree turn happen? Easy, the SCMC either just stepped in, or volunteered to do the dirty work no one else wants to do. And how about a recent message board participant who achieved national recognition for an upcoming Church court? Then, suddenly, no court is scheduled. During Romney's campaign also, the newly-revealed doctrine of the Church concerning the MTC building height was magically reversed. And now, Prop 8 may be in the process of reversal, to the extent that a much more complicated campaign can be reversed.
It just might be that many of the brethren didn't really support prop 8 in the first place. I mean, world-class business people atypically have agendas outside the bottom line of money, and with all their cash pumped into City Creek, and then with a Mormon running for president, public opinion begins to matter a lot. People wonder why the Brethren aren't more concerned about what the apologists are doing. Well, I'd imagine the SCMC side of the house has a strong interest in not only apologetics, but apologetics that gets heated with critics. The non-SCMC side, which is still likely the majority, clearly have no interest in high-profile representatives of the church mud slinging with anonymous critics. All the risk here is on the Church, with practically no benefits from a PR, mall-building perspective.
But for the SCMC, this kind of apologetics is a gold mine. You have a whole community of church members serving as bait that "outs" insiders and critics for escalation to the SCMC for investigation. Recently, it seems as if the non-SCMC faction has shit-canned a lot of work by the SCMC, and certainly, there is a small band of Church-paid mathematicians at work estimating the likelihood that Romney could have won had not several of these public embarrassments happened.
In the end, it isn't obvious though which way is best to run the Church. The ultra-reactionary SCMC conservatives out to "protect" the Church through totalitarian measures stands against the more liberal faction that believes the Church essentially wins as long as it has money, and policies that are good for business, are good for God. It's not unlike many if not all large organizations. The liberal policy is likely the most profitable route, but this is not guaranteed, there is no blueprint set in stone on how to turn a cult into an international government.
Lou Midgley 08/20/2020: "...meat wad," and "cockroach" are pithy descriptions of human beings used by gemli? They were not fashioned by Professor Peterson.
LM 11/23/2018: one can explain away the soul of human beings...as...a Meat Unit, to use Professor Peterson's clever derogatory description of gemli's ideology.
"And the human knew the source of life, the woman of him, and she conceived and bore Cain, and said, 'I have procreated a man with Yahweh.'" Gen. 4:1, interior quote translated by D. Bokovoy.
I wonder if this moron really knows the truth. He's only a GA and that is far below the coveted geriatric 12. Information available to the 12 and FP are probably not avail to those below that are only GA. This serves two purposes - obviously to keep the information intact (that the Cult is really just a Cult) and two - to keep the GAs below them at a higher level of belief. If the above 12 state that the Cult had nothing to do with it - the GAs below them will also state such. They make a good living off the billions in tithing the Cult brings in - why ruin a good thing?
Wickman probably believes it to be true only because the real information has been kept from him. And he's not one to go to the Internet and really find out for himself. Too much is at stake for him as a GA.
I am sure he is lying. From an interview Oaks and Wickman gave in 2006:
ELDER WICKMAN: For openers, marriage is neither a matter of politics, nor is it a matter of social policy. Marriage is defined by the Lord Himself. It’s the one institution that is ceremoniously performed by priesthood authority in the temple [and] transcends this world. It is of such profound importance… such a core doctrine of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, of the very purpose of the creation of this earth. One hardly can get past the first page of Genesis without seeing that very clearly. It is not an institution to be tampered with by mankind, and certainly not to be tampered with by those who are doing so simply for their own purposes. There is no such thing in the Lord’s eyes as something called same-gender marriage. Homosexual behavior is and will always remain before the Lord an abominable sin. Calling it something else by virtue of some political definition does not change that reality.
ELDER OAKS: Another way to say that same thing is that the Parliament in Canada and the Congress in Washington do not have the authority to revoke the commandments of God, or to modify or amend them in any way.
"The Church is authoritarian, tribal, provincial, and founded on a loosely biblical racist frontier sex cult."--Juggler Vain "The LDS church is the Amway of religions. Even with all the soap they sell, they still manage to come away smelling dirty."--Some Schmo
Infymus wrote:I wonder if this moron really knows the truth. He's only a GA and that is far below the coveted geriatric 12. Information available to the 12 and FP are probably not avail to those below that are only GA. This serves two purposes - obviously to keep the information intact (that the Cult is really just a Cult) and two - to keep the GAs below them at a higher level of belief. If the above 12 state that the Cult had nothing to do with it - the GAs below them will also state such. They make a good living off the billions in tithing the Cult brings in - why ruin a good thing?
Wickman probably believes it to be true only because the real information has been kept from him. And he's not one to go to the Internet and really find out for himself. Too much is at stake for him as a GA.
These ignoramuses need to keep their traps shut.
Wickman was on the front lines with Oaks on this for years before Prop 8.
"The Church is authoritarian, tribal, provincial, and founded on a loosely biblical racist frontier sex cult."--Juggler Vain "The LDS church is the Amway of religions. Even with all the soap they sell, they still manage to come away smelling dirty."--Some Schmo