why me wrote: This is not very faith promoting at all. In fact, just the opposite. The tone is bias...the end result is biased and there is an agenda. It is designed to cast doubt with woulda, shoulda, and coulda.
In reality the church is not true, so the truth is not going to be faith promoting, just the opposite. This is why apologia is doomed to continue to be the major reason people leave over historical concerns. The tone I see is more then neutral enough, and much more so then almost any LDS apologia I have seen.
Sethbag wrote:This is b***s***. The church leaders aren't upset at the "tone" of the articles, but the substance.
How that substance is presented is the problem. It is presented to lead people out of the church. Thus, the problem. One can bring up what the critics say in a faith promoting bias. This site doesn't do that. It wants people to leave the church or have doubts about it. That is my opinion.
I intend to lay a foundation that will revolutionize the whole world. Joseph Smith We are “to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to provide for the widow, to dry up the tear of the orphan, to comfort the afflicted, whether in this church, or in any other, or in no church at all…” Joseph Smith
Being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction -Pope Benedict XVI
Themis wrote: So you agree that it reports the facts then? Maybe you could provide some of the bias you are referring to show how it is somehow going to lead people away, even though it is still telling them the facts. Is it really the tone you think it has, that leads people to reconsider their beliefs, or the facts being presented. I notice you again say something about why they did this or that, which you cannot possibly know, or did you read something that directly quotes them saying why they called him in.
This is not very faith promoting at all. In fact, just the opposite. The tone is bias...the end result is biased and there is an agenda. It is designed to cast doubt with woulda, shoulda, and coulda.
The cold, hard historical facts are the opposite of faith promoting. Only if you put a shmarmy spin on some of them, and leave most out, do you get a faith promoting narrative. The bias is not in the facts, it's in the LDS Church narrative.
It's seems that Why Me agrees with President Packer: "Some things that are true are not very useful." It's interesting, when defending the church's disciplinary actions, apologists often treat the church as just another organization, no different from the Unitarian church or the YMCA. "Of course if someone is trying to lead others out of the organization, they will get kicked out," they say. But the church does not claim to be just another organization. It claims to be God's Kingdom on earth and possess absolute truth. Thus, if the church is what it says it is, everything that is verifiably true will support the church's narrative and the only things that do not support the church's narrative will be verifiably false.
But, we know that the church is not primarily concerned with truth, and apologetic arguments which point out critics' lack of loyalty to the institution prove this as clear as anything.
Cylon wrote:It's seems that Why Me agrees with President Packer: "Some things that are true are not very useful." It's interesting, when defending the church's disciplinary actions, apologists often treat the church as just another organization, no different from the Unitarian church or the YMCA. "Of course if someone is trying to lead others out of the organization, they will get kicked out," they say. But the church does not claim to be just another organization. It claims to be God's Kingdom on earth and possess absolute truth. Thus, if the church is what it says it is, everything that is verifiably true will support the church's narrative and the only things that do not support the church's narrative will be verifiably false.
But, we know that the church is not primarily concerned with truth, and apologetic arguments which point out critics' lack of loyalty to the institution prove this as clear as anything.
The fact is that members of the church are leaving when they find out about the disturbing parts of its history that they should have been taught by the church but that the church chose to omit from its teachings. And many members are finding out this information from MormonThink and other pro-truth websites (even FAIR).
If the church was smart (or really lead by inspired men) maybe they'd consider beating these pro-truth websites to the punch and tell them about these things first.