StayLDS.com Doesn't Appreciate Honest Conversation

[_Stormy Waters]

I would urge you to ask yourselves this: If you really think all this is leading people to your own higher, ex-Mormon, truth, then why do you feel compelled to deceive them to get them there?

I'll post this in case curiosity gets the better of Don and he does check this thread again.
After I had lost my faith I briefly considered approaching my own family pretending to still be a doubter and present them with the difficult issues. Why? Because I feared that once I became a full ex-Mormom they would no longer listen to me on anything about the church. I decided ultimately that it would be wrong to do so, and like I feared they don't want to talk about it all. It doesn't matter that I am family.
You know the story of the emperors new clothes? Where the tailors convince the people that if they can't see the emperors clothes they are stupid or incompetent? A similiar narrative was been woven against ex-believers. We are "lost in mists of darkness" and "deceived by satan." This is what the LDS church teaches it's members to believe about ex-Mormons
Why do people sometimes pretend to be members to try to dissuade other members? Because the well has been poisoned. Obviously that still doesn't make it right to deceive.
This reminds me of a story you told on your podcast with FAIR. Where you said that you read a book by B.H. Roberts that contained arguments critical of the Book of Mormon and that it rattled your testimony because your "guard wasn't up" because you got it at Deseret Book. That's all I'd like. I'd like members to honestly consider the arguments against Mormonism. I'd like my family to consider the arguments against Mormonism. I want them to know the rest of the story. But thanks to the well poisoning there is not a damn thing I can do. Fortunately for the church I won't sacrifice my relationship with them to make them aware of the facts the correlation committee decided they didn't need to know.

[_sock puppet]

"Future Missionary,"

... Your site frequently--in fact, usually--drops difficult information on the reader without any meaningful context to make sense of it. ...

It seems to me that there is a lot of 'difficult 'material out there that remains just as difficult, however much 'context' is added to it. This is especially the case for people (such as potential converts) who have not been brought up from childhood to accept as normal much that seems quite bizarre outside the LDS milieu.

if I was a person about to spend two years of my life trying to persuade people that the truth claims of the CoJCoLDS were so distinctively convincing that people should leave their current religious organization (which will frequently be a non-LDS Christian church) and transfer their allegiance to the CoJCoLDS, I would be grateful to anybody who told me what the evidence was that might be adduced against those truth claims, since:

1. Given the wide availability of such evidence on the internet, I want to know in advance what it was.

2. If I found I was convinced by that evidence, I would be grateful to have been spared from spending two years trying to convince people to accept falsehoods.

I hear ya, Elder, I hear ya.

[_sock puppet]

To try to undermine young people's religious faith by masquerading as a fellow believer trying to build it up is utterly despicable

You make efforts to educate someone so they no longer believe in that for which there is no evidence sound wrong.

Faith is another term for being uneducated on the topic, too often intentionally ignoring the evidence.

[_sock puppet]

Don!



You've just increased http://www.futremissionary.com's readership!
Nice one.

And I reiterate what Thews points out.
You have yet to refute a single fact displayed on MormonThink or on FutureMissionary.
Perhaps you should be asking yourself, "what is anti-Mormon about facts and why doesn't the Church tell the truth?"

And then you run away!

Facts are the greatest threat to any myth.

[_Stormy Waters]

You can bitch all you want about the dishonesty of FutureMissionary.com.
But you know what? People deserve to know the whole story before they give two years to this organization. And who is going to tell them? The church? Their parents? Will it be you Don Bradley?
They deserve the opportunity to be told the whole story and be allowed to walk away from it without judgement.
Yet I'm sure anyone who attempts to relate the whole story will be labeled anti-Mormons no matter how even handed they try to be.

[_Yoda]

They deserve the opportunity to be told the whole story and allowed to walk away from it without judgement.

That is impossible. The judgement will always be there, unfortunately.

[_Ceeboo]

This thread has taken a rather strange and sudden sharp turn!

Odd!




Peace,
Ceeboo

[_Molok]

.

[_Stormy Waters]

by the way, I won't be reading or responding to this thread.

And this before he's even given "FutureMissionary" a chance to respond. Nor I. Nor anyone else expect those that happened to be awake or live in certain time zones. Then he starts a thread on a site where there is almost no participation by anyone who is really critical of the church.

Are you seeing now why sometimes critics lie and pretend to be fellow members? Because in this instance Don Bradley will not even read much less respond to arguments against his position.

He doesn't even know who FutureMissionary is or if they would be open to critique. Maybe FutureMissionary would take suggestions and critiques and change the website accordingly. Is allowing FutureMissionary an opportunity to respond too much to ask?

Instead he just bolts and then starts to poison the well.

[_Bazooka]

"Future Missionary,"

Here is my first, though hardly my last, public message to expose you and your friends as the deceivers you are:

http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/610 ... ionarycom/

Friends,

As you know, I am generally inclined to spend more time on scholarship pertaining to the Restoration than on apologetics. However, the latest anti-Mormon tactics need to be exposed.

Many of you are probably familiar with the anti-Mormon website MormonThink, which attempts to deceive LDS readers into believing that they are reading a fair assessment of the evidence by fellow saints.

The enemies of the Church who have created the new website http://www.futuremissionary.com have cleverly taken the deception several steps further. (Indeed, this site is almost certainly created by some of the same people involved with MormonThink.) They claim to be three returned missionaries trying to help prepare future missionaries for the difficult issues they will encounter in the field. They sprinkle in some genuine-sounding advice about dealing with companions and the like, but only so they can later drop critical bombshells on unsuspecting kids preparing to go on missions.

How do I know these people are trying to tear down faith rather than build it up? Overwhelmingly, the site drops difficult information on its readers without providing any meaningful context to make sense of it. And it frequently links to the reader to obviously anti-Mormon "MormonThink" for the details. Check out the site and ask yourself why anyone would construct it this way and what kind of effect this would have on teenagers preparing for missions.

I rarely use the term "anti-Mormon." I don't even generally like to call non-believing discussants on the boards "critics." But those who would try to gain Church members' trust by pretending to be fellow saints, in order to destroy their testimonies, deserve the term "anti-Mormon" even more than long-time critics like Sandra Tanner do. (People like the Tanners have never claimed to be Mormons trying to help build up other Mormons' faith.)

Above all websites I have seen, this one would be my pick as the most blatant wolf in sheep's clothing. It aims to damage the Church's growth by deceiving its future missionaries into reading critical material. (I'm not the only one who has noticed the site's anti-Mormonism, by the way. A person promoting this site on staylds.org was booted off their board because of futuremissionary.com's evident anti-Mormon intent.)

Presumably these people believe they are leading Mormon kids away from the Church to some kind of higher truth. But I find it telling that they feel the need to do so by absolute deception.

I genuinely respect decent critics of the Church like Aaron Shafovaloff who are just honestly trying to lead us to the truth as they see it. But when I see these "futuremissionaries.com" people trying to gain LDS kids' trust by pretending to be LDS only so they can demolish their testimonies makes my blood boil.

Please (after verifying for yourselves, if you'd like) spread the word that this is not a genuine missionary preparation site but an anti-Mormon deception.

It should also be put on lists of anti-Mormon websites.

Yours Truly,

Don Bradley

I hope you like it, because I am going to do my best to spread this information far and wide.

by the way, I won't be reading or responding to this thread.

Don

I note that Don uses the phrase 'critical material' to describe information that is factually true and historically accurate.
The question still remains as to why truthful and accurate details are so damaging to the Church and were so distressing to him that Don had to hitch up his skirts and run off to the shelter of the pack...