The Vision of the Anointed Never Faileth at FAIR
Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2012 1:38 am
The recent Church Newsroom statement regarding the Church's position on race, generally speaking, and the priesthood ban specifically, has apparently been perceived by a core of MDD board moderators as a throwing down of the gauntlet and a license to take off the politically correct gloves and rhetorically run other TBM/conservative/libertarian posters out of the church.
This is deeply disturbing to me, as a life long member. For, in all essentials, taking an uncompromising position in no fundamental way different from the views and ideals of the Martin Luther King and the other early civil rights activists, and for defending the Church's official position and its clear implications regarding the priesthood ban, I have been thrown off the board.
Other LDS, putatively my "brothers and sisters" in the Church, and leading members of the apologetic community, have branded me and other conservative TBMs as racists, white supremacists, and bigots for supporting a theory of a colorblind society, the abandonment of race as a meaningful category of our relations with each other, and for the idea that black people do not need to be taken care of by pious, white liberals, but, if they live according to correct principles, will do quite well all on there own if they live according to principles that tend toward success, excellence, and personal advancement in matters both temporal and spiritual.
Yes, blacks do not need the welfare state plantation. Blacks do not need to be dependent, child-like mascots of the white, leftist intelligentsia, whether secular or LDS. They do not need apologies for imagined wrongs (like the ancient Lamanites), but an environment of open, dynamic, equal opportunity and human potential. For stating these principles and other arguments of similar kind, I have been branded a "racist" and a "white supremacist" by the righteous at the MDD board.
After thinking long and hard about this, I have decided not to return to MDD. Some of the bannings there were deserved, as, now and then over the years, I engaged in some improper personal attacks of my own. Over the last couple of years, however, the banning has taken on a decidedly focused character, that focus being upon speech and, in particular, arguments that attempt to link gospel teachings to present day cultural and political issues and dynamics that apparently deeply offend some number of mods at that board.
To cut to the chase, I haven't been banned for running afoul of board rules, but for running afoul of the "correct" interpretations of scripture and church teachings relative to certain present day social, cultural, and political bodies of thought presently dominant in academia. Please, I'm not crying sour grapes. I know this to be the case because other posters, who have actually launched multiple personal attacks on my character (equal to anything I receive here) have been allowed to stay in the thread from which I was banned.
Breaking board rules and flaming are clearly not the issue anymore, but who does it and from what perspective. I consider this a corruption of both the spirit and intent of apologetics as a movement and a massaging of board rules to favor certain beliefs over others when the intersection of the gospel, politics, and contemporary cultural conditions are at issue.
Juliann, who I once respected, has clearly gone into full blown political cleansing mode, and transferred the need to ideologically cleanse and purify from secular social and political issues into the Church. In the present case, the mod who banned me left no reason, no rationale, and no name. Her attack on Le Sellers as a mocker of black "victims" of some church action places her in the position of a self anointed inquisitor of "incorrect" interpretations of church teachings for which other's characters can be called into question without a second thought.
Its one thing to steady the ark, but how many bodies can one cram into the Holy of Holies at one time to support that project? The venom I've seen directed at me and other TBM posters by other, supposedly TBM's has been very instructive. This issue has brought the righteously neo-orthodox (such as Jeremy Orby Smith) well out of the closet and into the arena. The gloves are now apparently off. Comment on the intersection of the gospel and contemporary social/political issues is, despite what the mods have said in the past, allowed at the MDD board. It is tolerated, however, only from one philosophical/ideological perspective (much in the same manner only certain views are tolerated at the elite academic institutions from which these mods received there advanced degrees, degrees which allow them, it appears, to Trump and modify the official teachings of the church as they see fit).
FAIR is, unfortunately, and given all the good work it has done in the apologetic area, attempting to serve God and mammon at the same time and have their cake too.
A reaction, I think, may not be far in the future.
This is deeply disturbing to me, as a life long member. For, in all essentials, taking an uncompromising position in no fundamental way different from the views and ideals of the Martin Luther King and the other early civil rights activists, and for defending the Church's official position and its clear implications regarding the priesthood ban, I have been thrown off the board.
Other LDS, putatively my "brothers and sisters" in the Church, and leading members of the apologetic community, have branded me and other conservative TBMs as racists, white supremacists, and bigots for supporting a theory of a colorblind society, the abandonment of race as a meaningful category of our relations with each other, and for the idea that black people do not need to be taken care of by pious, white liberals, but, if they live according to correct principles, will do quite well all on there own if they live according to principles that tend toward success, excellence, and personal advancement in matters both temporal and spiritual.
Yes, blacks do not need the welfare state plantation. Blacks do not need to be dependent, child-like mascots of the white, leftist intelligentsia, whether secular or LDS. They do not need apologies for imagined wrongs (like the ancient Lamanites), but an environment of open, dynamic, equal opportunity and human potential. For stating these principles and other arguments of similar kind, I have been branded a "racist" and a "white supremacist" by the righteous at the MDD board.
After thinking long and hard about this, I have decided not to return to MDD. Some of the bannings there were deserved, as, now and then over the years, I engaged in some improper personal attacks of my own. Over the last couple of years, however, the banning has taken on a decidedly focused character, that focus being upon speech and, in particular, arguments that attempt to link gospel teachings to present day cultural and political issues and dynamics that apparently deeply offend some number of mods at that board.
To cut to the chase, I haven't been banned for running afoul of board rules, but for running afoul of the "correct" interpretations of scripture and church teachings relative to certain present day social, cultural, and political bodies of thought presently dominant in academia. Please, I'm not crying sour grapes. I know this to be the case because other posters, who have actually launched multiple personal attacks on my character (equal to anything I receive here) have been allowed to stay in the thread from which I was banned.
Breaking board rules and flaming are clearly not the issue anymore, but who does it and from what perspective. I consider this a corruption of both the spirit and intent of apologetics as a movement and a massaging of board rules to favor certain beliefs over others when the intersection of the gospel, politics, and contemporary cultural conditions are at issue.
Juliann, who I once respected, has clearly gone into full blown political cleansing mode, and transferred the need to ideologically cleanse and purify from secular social and political issues into the Church. In the present case, the mod who banned me left no reason, no rationale, and no name. Her attack on Le Sellers as a mocker of black "victims" of some church action places her in the position of a self anointed inquisitor of "incorrect" interpretations of church teachings for which other's characters can be called into question without a second thought.
Its one thing to steady the ark, but how many bodies can one cram into the Holy of Holies at one time to support that project? The venom I've seen directed at me and other TBM posters by other, supposedly TBM's has been very instructive. This issue has brought the righteously neo-orthodox (such as Jeremy Orby Smith) well out of the closet and into the arena. The gloves are now apparently off. Comment on the intersection of the gospel and contemporary social/political issues is, despite what the mods have said in the past, allowed at the MDD board. It is tolerated, however, only from one philosophical/ideological perspective (much in the same manner only certain views are tolerated at the elite academic institutions from which these mods received there advanced degrees, degrees which allow them, it appears, to Trump and modify the official teachings of the church as they see fit).
FAIR is, unfortunately, and given all the good work it has done in the apologetic area, attempting to serve God and mammon at the same time and have their cake too.
A reaction, I think, may not be far in the future.
Too bad MAD -- you racist pigs! MAD is the Nazi-board. Ban me! man me!