charity wrote:Seems I have been moved up a little in the apologetics ranks and am getting more involved with real apologetics. I consider message boards sort of practice games.
"Real" apologetics? Apologetics is by definition hard-headed, no-holds-barred, never-give-an-inch defense of a chosen cause, irrespective of its ultimate truth value. You are a true partisan for Joseph Smith.
Too bad you see this all as a big game. The church teaches false things to people as truth, and inculcates in people a vision of reality that is at best a wishful thinking-laden virtual reality, and you have picked your side and now think of yourself as a noble Defender of the Faith. Too bad you're actually a Defender of the Fraud. You might, in your heart of hearts, not really comprehend the fraudulent nature of the church, but that doesn't change the reality of it. And now you've moved up in the ranks, eh? Well, congratulations - you're now a slightly bigger fish in really a very small pond, a veritable backwater in this wide world we live in.
And this means no disrespect. But what I see on message boards is two sides. No one changes jerseys at half time and joins the other team.
Sure they do, if they realize they're on the wrong team.
What's really ironic about all of this is that by far most of the critics on this board, and on MAD, were once members and believers in this stuff too. What changed is not that they were disloyal, or turncoats, or traitors. What changed is that they realized they were arguing in defense of a false system of beliefs, and once they truly recognized this, their own personal integrity forced them to own up to it, and admit the awful truth. It hasn't even two full years yet since the last time I actually defended Joseph Smith against some of the accusations about him that a brother-in-law of mine had read on the Internet. I defended the church, I excused the Church's errors, I acknowledged that a lot of problematic doctrines (like the Flood) were indefensible scientifically, and simply dead wrong, but that the church was still "true" and that the problems were all about things that didn't affect our eternal salvation.
But then I finally, truly owned up to the possibility that Joseph Smith was fundementally wrong about a lot of things, and almost certainly was making it up as he went along, on the basis of evidence I could not force myself to deny. The Book of Abraham and Joseph Smith's shameful manipulation of women and deceit around polygamy, with his wife, and the church, and the public, were the last two things that really tipped the scales for me. I read the most meaty details about these two topics at the same time, over a period of a few days, and they were the two things which together finally demonstrated to me what it was that I was helping defend.
Now that I accepted that, so many other things fell into place. Charity, you've committed yourself to the belief in, and defense of, a fraud. You may not be yourself a fraud, or a deceiver, because you appear to actually believe it. There's the
actus reus but not the
mens rea, so you are not a lier or a deceiver.
What you are is a pawn.
Mormonism ceased being a compelling topic for me when I finally came to terms with its transformation from a personality cult into a combination of a real estate company, a SuperPac, and Westboro Baptist Church. - Kishkumen