Sethbag wrote:I agree that there is some irony in his making statements about Brodie's likely thought processes, I have even more of a beef with his use of the word "process".
>snip<
This strikes at the heart of the stark difference between what we critics often say we have experienced with our loss of faith, and what mopologists ascribe to us in their own minds. We say we stopped believing, and so left the church. They say we left the church, and so stopped believing. It delegitimizes the loss of faith. The loss of faith becomes a consequence of leaving the church, rather than its cause. This fits the mopologetic narrative nicely, which has it that since there isn't a legitimate reason to stop believing, something happens to us or we do something (we sin, lose the Spirit, let Satan lead us down the primrose path, etc.) which opens us up to making an illegitimate choice, ie: changing our minds about the truth of the Book of Mormon, the First Vision, etc.
I did some more digging into how Brodie’s loss of faith affected her, and have concluded Harper’s version is so inaccurate it makes me wonder if he just assumed losing her testimony was painful in the way you describe above. I really don't know what to think.
Newell Bringhurst wrote the definitive biography of Brodie, and in a 1989
Dialoue article (link below), he said her doubts began in her late teens and she was extremely frustrated by the fact that no one in her well-known Mormon family would discuss them with her, particularly her father. Her mother was a skeptic (who eventually committed suicide by lighting herself on fire) and she encouraged Brodie’s independent streak, but she felt so constrained by Mormonism herself she didn’t really talk about it with Brodie either.
Brodie’s lingering faith fell away completely when she entered the University of Chicago. According to Bringhurst, Brodie said:
the confining aspects of the Mormon religion dropped off within a few weeks . . . .
It was like taking off a hot coat in the summertime. The sense of liberation I had at
the University of Chicago was enormously exhilarating. I felt very quickly that I
could never go back to the old life, and I never did (F. Brodie 1975, 3 ).
That’s not to say Brodie’s relationship with and feelings about the Church were benign. According to Bringhurst, she was extremely conflicted about her Church heritage, and was often angry about what she perceived to be the Church's duplicitous behavior. She admits she wrote NMKMH in "a desperate effort to come to terms with my childhood."
However, in my opinion, none of that equates to Harper's claim about a "painful reorientation process." It appears the "reorientation" itself was actually exhilarating, and therefore, as I said, I am really conflicted about Harper's article.
Steven does seem to be using a priori incorrectly, to mean an argument which one assumes to be true, rather than as an argument which requires no experiential input to be cogent. The irony here is that I think that he assumes that the church is true, and cannot be otherwise, in his own condemntation of Brodie for what he perceives is her doing the exact opposite.
That's what I meant when I wrote that he approached his article assuming the First Vision actually happened. If Brodie's approach was "a priori," so was his.
https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-cont ... N02_81.pdf