Sam Harris wrote:That's just wonderful, what an enlightening hobby you have, B&L. You spend time trying to deconstruct innocent people's beliefs based on what church they go to, and then once you've done it, laughing all the while at their discomfort, you come here for praise.
I do not get the idea amongst some here that LDS who you do not know, and who have done nothing to you, deserve to be either physically or psychologically harmed. It's funny when they get beat up (KARMA!), it's funny when their houses are vandalized, it's funny when you seek them out to "give them the truth" by placing information contrary to what they've been taught before them in the most disturbing way possible.
And yet it has been bandied about on this board that I have no integrity.
So far as I understand the situation, 'Boaz and Lydia' is a former LDS who has come to the conclusion that his time in the CoJCoLDS was a highly negative experience all round, as well as being based on falsehood. On that basis he thinks it reasonable to discourage people from joining that organisation.
The CoJCOLDS, in an effort to persuade people to join it, maintains a website with an open invitation to 'chat' with someone described as 'a missionary', whose object may reasonably be supposed to be to persuade people that the teachings of the CoJCoLDS are true. That person is presumably there in a volunteer capacity, and can reasonably be presumed to anticipate that he or she may encounter strong unbelief.
'Boaz and Lydia' can, it seems to me, quite properly accept the invitation to 'chat', and in the course of that chat may reasonably make his best efforts to argue against the position that the missionary advocates.
You refer to his dialog with the missionary as "deconstruct[ing] innocent people's beliefs based on what church they go to". The word 'deconstructing' seems misused here (surely you just mean 'arguiing against'?), and 'innocent' is surely irrelevant too - you speak as if B&L had chosen to hit the missionary with a stick in an unprovoked attack, whereas he is in fact simply accepting the open invitation to chat, and then putting forward evidence that the missionary's position (Joseph Smith did not marry a teenage girl) is false. [You then move into irrelevant stuff about other people delighting in physical attacking LDS persons and property, though this is not what B&L is advocating here.] And as for the stuff about "based on what church they go to" - you would hardly have expected B&L to give the missionary a trenchant refutation of (say) the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, would you? He is talking to an LDS, so he discusses what the CoJCoLDS teaches.
You complain about B&L thinking "it's funny when you seek [LDS] out to "give them the truth" by placing information contrary to what they've been taught before them in the most disturbing way possible". Please recall that he is talking to a
missionary who has offered to discuss LDS belief with all comers in the hope of converting them. He is not shouting at people in the street, nor appearing on their doorsteps unannounced to offer his message. Why shoudn't he offer the best counterevidence he can?
And frankly I do find it ludicrous, and indeed laughable, that a missionary for the CoJCoLDS can be so ignorant about the history of Joseph Smith, the prophet of the church for which they are proselytizing, that he or she does not know Joseph Smith married a whole lot of women, some of them teenagers, some of them sisters who were his legal wards, If I recall correctly. Anyone that ignorant in such a role cannot complain if their ignorance is sometimes mocked. While I don't have the same motivations and tastes as B&L, I really don't see anything bad about what he has done here.
I think you on the other hand need to ask yourself why the CoJCoLDS is marketing itself using naïve and ill-prepared kids in this way.