Don't think it hasn't been a little slice of Heaven...
Posted: Sun Mar 22, 2009 8:53 pm
I know, I know. I've been threatening to leave this intellectual and ethical roach hotel for a couple of years now. But with DCP having apparently left this great literary accident scene, and with Nehor seeming to have bid farewell, I must, writhing in lugubrious regret and with pathos appropriate to the occasion, tender my own resignation. As this forum has become, and has been in process of becoming for some time, simply yet another RFM (really, a kind of cross, given its overwhelmingly secualrist/liberal atmosphere, between RFM and MoveOn.org). It has become far too hostile (and frankly, intellectually clownish) to be anything but a masochistic exercise in self flagellation for any serious apologist.
I'm actually doing quite well in my recovery program at present. I've got my posting here down to perhaps once every two or three weeks (its been difficult, I admit, to go cold turkey), and have been enjoying lively and thoughtful discussion and, yes, debate, over at the MAD boards.
My appetite has returned, I'm sleeping much better now, and that strange, unnerving sense that I'm being watched has stopped (Scratch's "informants" please take notice).
As this forum, without myself, Daniel, Nehor, bc, Wade, and Bob (and a few others now and then) is now, for all intents and purposes, bereft of any alternate viewpoints, dissent, or challenge to reigning orthodoxy, the board will be free to continue its inexorable degeneration into a kind of vulgar, pop psychological version of Signature Books, but with the overtones of Madalyn Murray O' Hair and the 9/11 conspiracists-as-applied-to-all-things-Mormon that have made this forum such an innnnnnteresting place over the last three years or so.
I love apologetics, as I love the Gospel, the Church, and the life of the mind, education, and the search for knowledge, truth, and wisdom.
These things are not, however, valued here as a general rule, and, even as I like engaging others who do not share my beliefs and convictions, there comes a point at which an atmosphere becomes thick, oppressive, and suffocating to the point at which no real point or purpose remains in the apologetic enterprise.
Therefore, you may have your licked cupcakes, your Big Love, your Mormon gulags, the court intrigues of FARMS scholars, Daniel Peterson's scheming to discredit the valiant and courageous Scratch, your fantasies of star chamber LDS scheming to oppose and defeat Proposition 8; your self serving fantacism regarding Joseph Smith's sex life, the Church's teachings about sex, sex, earrings, sex, tattoos, sex, dress standards, and sex; your lachrymose wailings over homosexual marriage, alleged racism, sexism and every "ism" presently represented within the PC lexicon that for most leftists passes for critical thought, and your pantheon of courageous, crusading dissidents, gadflies, hounding bigots, and intellectual poseurs that form the nucleus of the ex-Mormon culture club.
I also leave you with your vulgar, dyspeptic hostility, you profanity, your ugly, irrational, self indulgent liberal pseudomoralism, your all too often strained intellectual dishonesty, and, above all, your cupcakes.
I leave you alone with your bread and butter, but above all, I leave you with your bread and circuses.
I leave a number of you with the masks you wear here, and the scripts you have been given by interested others.
For those of you who are here because of personal losses and tragedies in life for which the Church has become the ram caught in the thicket, you have my condolences and understanding, but not my acquiescence or support.
For those here as an exercise in self justification and impotent rage directed at the source of the knowledge that you have sinned and and devastated your own life and/or the lives of others, you again have my empathy. I know how it feels to devastate one's own life and to watch the effects of one's own conduct corrupt the lives of others. I do know the nature of these realities.
But the Gospel is the answer to these mortal conditions, not the source of them. It is the coals that sear our very conscience, and that seared conscience itself is a gift of God. These, like all forms of pain, are warnings that we are ill or wounded. Railing and fuming against the pain itself, or against the physician who is the only source of healing and wholeness, avails, of course, nothing.
Do not seek consuming yet fragile self justificational catharsis here at Mormondiscussions.com, but healing, salvation, and peace as you come unto Christ, and serve the cause of Zion in his authorized and divinely appointed Church.
And, as the title of this post mentions, don't think it hasn't been a little slice of heaven.
Because it hasn't.
Adieu, as they used to say down in Zarahemla.
LHB (Droopy)
I'm actually doing quite well in my recovery program at present. I've got my posting here down to perhaps once every two or three weeks (its been difficult, I admit, to go cold turkey), and have been enjoying lively and thoughtful discussion and, yes, debate, over at the MAD boards.
My appetite has returned, I'm sleeping much better now, and that strange, unnerving sense that I'm being watched has stopped (Scratch's "informants" please take notice).
As this forum, without myself, Daniel, Nehor, bc, Wade, and Bob (and a few others now and then) is now, for all intents and purposes, bereft of any alternate viewpoints, dissent, or challenge to reigning orthodoxy, the board will be free to continue its inexorable degeneration into a kind of vulgar, pop psychological version of Signature Books, but with the overtones of Madalyn Murray O' Hair and the 9/11 conspiracists-as-applied-to-all-things-Mormon that have made this forum such an innnnnnteresting place over the last three years or so.
I love apologetics, as I love the Gospel, the Church, and the life of the mind, education, and the search for knowledge, truth, and wisdom.
These things are not, however, valued here as a general rule, and, even as I like engaging others who do not share my beliefs and convictions, there comes a point at which an atmosphere becomes thick, oppressive, and suffocating to the point at which no real point or purpose remains in the apologetic enterprise.
Therefore, you may have your licked cupcakes, your Big Love, your Mormon gulags, the court intrigues of FARMS scholars, Daniel Peterson's scheming to discredit the valiant and courageous Scratch, your fantasies of star chamber LDS scheming to oppose and defeat Proposition 8; your self serving fantacism regarding Joseph Smith's sex life, the Church's teachings about sex, sex, earrings, sex, tattoos, sex, dress standards, and sex; your lachrymose wailings over homosexual marriage, alleged racism, sexism and every "ism" presently represented within the PC lexicon that for most leftists passes for critical thought, and your pantheon of courageous, crusading dissidents, gadflies, hounding bigots, and intellectual poseurs that form the nucleus of the ex-Mormon culture club.
I also leave you with your vulgar, dyspeptic hostility, you profanity, your ugly, irrational, self indulgent liberal pseudomoralism, your all too often strained intellectual dishonesty, and, above all, your cupcakes.
I leave you alone with your bread and butter, but above all, I leave you with your bread and circuses.
I leave a number of you with the masks you wear here, and the scripts you have been given by interested others.
For those of you who are here because of personal losses and tragedies in life for which the Church has become the ram caught in the thicket, you have my condolences and understanding, but not my acquiescence or support.
For those here as an exercise in self justification and impotent rage directed at the source of the knowledge that you have sinned and and devastated your own life and/or the lives of others, you again have my empathy. I know how it feels to devastate one's own life and to watch the effects of one's own conduct corrupt the lives of others. I do know the nature of these realities.
But the Gospel is the answer to these mortal conditions, not the source of them. It is the coals that sear our very conscience, and that seared conscience itself is a gift of God. These, like all forms of pain, are warnings that we are ill or wounded. Railing and fuming against the pain itself, or against the physician who is the only source of healing and wholeness, avails, of course, nothing.
Do not seek consuming yet fragile self justificational catharsis here at Mormondiscussions.com, but healing, salvation, and peace as you come unto Christ, and serve the cause of Zion in his authorized and divinely appointed Church.
And, as the title of this post mentions, don't think it hasn't been a little slice of heaven.
Because it hasn't.
Adieu, as they used to say down in Zarahemla.
LHB (Droopy)
