Doctor CamNC4Me wrote:Boy, ain't that the truth. What fascinates me is... How do they keep selling this nonsense snake oil claim to the folks? You look at the comments section of Sic et Non and these people think Mr. Peterson is sprinting up and down Everest with nary a concern.
Weird.
- Doc
The issue is Doc, they are not really selling it to the folks, in all reality, they are selling it to themselves.
None of you ever deal with the true church, except to dismiss 'inconsequential me'. And dismiss is all the push back I ever get. But the point here is that the deconstruction of Mormonism was the take down of the mythology Joseph worship. He was never the gospel. He was not the truth. He was inflated to lift up the hypocrisy that dominated LDS leadership and continues to this day.
So what does that mean exactly? What have you proven? The gospel of Jesus Christ is untouched and untried and unaccomplished. It has never been treated by any called or learned LDS bullshootters. The potential of the gospel has tragically been flushed away with the take down of hero worship.
If there had been no inflation of Joseph and LDS GAs and the REAL gospel was all there was to consider Zion might have even sputtered a time or two and that sputtering might have led eventually into a real start. The corporate LDS business will never get Zion. It has left the building. They are 3 Nephi 16:TENNED for good. A bad example is all that they are left with. But don't tell them. They will never deflate themselves.
Dr. Shades wrote:If you knew the Catalyst Theory was dead on arrival, why did you try to get LDS thinkers to embrace it?
That's a good question and the answer is multilayered. For me, the Catalyst Theory was more sustainable than the Missing Roll Theory because it involved mystery and didn't require conventional Egyptology to prove its case. I had hope that new information would come to light wherein the Catalyst Theory could survive the multitude of evidences against it. I had faith it was more than just a pipedream and held on to keep my testimony intact.
I was committed to the church and an LDS marriage and had I rejected the Catalyst Theory I would have not been able to maintain a testimony. So, it was needful for me to somehow make the Catalyst Theory work and in so doing get others to get on board with me. I knew from the beginning that the Missing Roll Theory was easier to disprove than the Catalyst. I bought time and sought to avoid the inevitable.
I guess I will have to raise my hand in answer to the roll call.
I was definitely an apologist for the LDS church, primarily in the 1980's.
I taught a class in Institute at the university I attended called, "Defending the Faith."
There was no such class in the correlated materials, so I got the Institute Director (who had known me for many years by this point in spring of 1989) to sign off on the curriculum I created.
He still sat in on the first few classes to make sure I wasn't saying anything too terribly outlandish, but he eventually went away and left me to my class, which was either a vote of confidence, or a sign he found it unbearable.
(I still have those twelve classes recorded on audio-tape cassettes but have done nothing with them in the interim.)
Then in the first half of the 1990's, I had two papers published by the fledgling Journal of Book of Mormon Studies.
I would not call those papers strictly apologetic in nature, but they were certainly based on the idea that the Book of Mormon was authentic scripture, and that we could learn a lot from it if we paid more attention to what it was saying rather than repeating the same old memes.
I don't know if I fit strictly into the category of "exmo," but I would lean more to that side than to active Mormon, no mistake about that!
You prove yourself of the devil and anti-mormon every word you utter, because only the devil perverts facts to make their case.--ldsfaqs (6-24-13)
I left the Church when I was seventeen and returned many years later. I suppose the difference between myself and those who found remaining in the Church to be untenable was that I re-entered as an adult with all the life experience that entails. I had developed my own code of beliefs and so I was able to take what truths the Church had to offer and add them to my own.
Between Gospel Essentials, Gospel Doctrine classes, and message boards, I was able to gain a better understanding of Mormonism. Looking back at my own knowledge of the Church before I left made me realize how very skimpy the understanding of young missionaries must be. Seems as though the benefit of their mission was to cement their allegiance to the Church more than bringing enlightenment to the unbaptized.