beastie wrote: What's that phrase for choosing to remain ignorant so you won't be legally liable for something? Can't remember, but that describes what's going on here, except it's a moral liability, not legal. This has pushed me over the edge in regards to choosing between incompetence or willing deception - the incompetence is so extreme it is a FORM of willing deception.
I think that the word you are looking for is 'deniability' .
Do you recall the passage in Dickens' 'Great Expectations', where Pip goes to see the lawyer Mr Jaggers, who knows very well that a criminal transported to Australia has illegally returned to London, but does not want Pip to say that in front of him:
Mr Jaggers was at his desk, but, seeing me enter, got up immediately and stood before his fire.
`Now, Pip,' said he, `be careful.'
`I will, sir,' I returned. For, coming along I had thought well of what I was going to say.
`Don't commit yourself,' said Mr Jaggers, `and don't commit any one. You understand -- any one. Don't tell me anything: I don't want to know anything; I am not curious.'
Of course I saw that he knew the man was come.
See
http://www.literature.org/authors/dicke ... er-40.htmlWe could call this way of fending off unwelcome knowledge a 'Jaggerism' if we wanted to be literary. But it really deserves no better name than plain old bad faith.
I don't care if people are Mormons or not, but I DO care when people are deliberately misled, time after time, by the same group of people.
I think that goes for a lot of people on this board. It's not so much intolerance of a person's religious belief in itself, which would be a bad thing, but an intolerance for nonsense masquerading as scholarship, pressed into the service of religious belief.
Incidentally, is there now ANY alleged evidence for horses in the Americas in Book of Mormon times that has not been definitively holed below the waterline? I wonder what DCP would say?