beastie wrote:Tal,
I did read it. It is weird but par for the course in LDS apologetics. Apologists often try to find a point that they believe they can build a case against, even if that point is minor and not relevant to the larger point the critic is making. So Plutarch believes he found a flaw - whether or not marrying a fourteen year old would be viewed as morally repugnant in the nineteenth century. In his focus on that one point, he ignores the larger point of the entire thread, and hence, begins to produce comments that appear weird and distorting by people who are reading his comments in the context of the larger point of the thread.
It is indeed weird to insist that nineteenth century people would not have found Joseph Smith behavior morally repugnant, for the many reasons that have been given on this thread. But I doubt that is really what Plutarch believes - he is just hoping that if he discredit one minor point, while ignoring the larger point, then he can discredit everything critcis say.
It's an act of desperation engaged in by people who are cornered.
Agreed. It was an odd and rather transparent attempt to limit the terms of the discussion to a peripheral issue. The other odd thing was the assertion that unless we could definitively state the legal or ethical standard by which 1840s America disapproved of Joseph's behavior, we couldn't say that it did indeed disapprove. Truly strange.