why me wrote:What church educates its members to cope with the anti-religious information on the Internet or about negative interpretations of their own church? I see no great historical interpretations of a church that comes from that church. What I do see are various interpretations of history from many sources but not written officially by a particular church.
So, the bigger question is: why do lds give up all their spiritual experiences they had in the lds church because of a website or a critical book written by a mere mortal? Now that is the bigger question.
No, why me, that is not the bigger question. That is the same tired question that the Church keeps asking itself to no avail. You see, having eschewed the fancy pants learnin' of the "doctors" long ago, Mormonism, unlike the Church you actually attend, abandoned the intellectual underpinnings that provide some kind of satisfactory grounding to its discourse. For all his brilliance, Joseph Smith was a rube in this area, and he accepted the usual anti-Catholic propaganda of his day. He founded his faith on a different tradition, and, unfortunately for him and his Church, his tradition ended up being as maligned and hated by mainstream Protestantism as Catholicism was.
So, the great irony is that leaders of his own Church ignorantly attacked the traditions that underlay the faith he built, with the result that Mormonism was intellectually orphaned. So, yes, the Spirit is there in spades. No doubt, but it has no context to make it look like anything other than weird. And, the apologists, especially guys like Lou "Woody" Midgley and "Wild Bill" Hamblin, attack vehemently any honest discussion of the traditions that did inform Joseph Smith, a man swimming in frontier Hermeticism, magic, and Freemasonry.
Oh, I get why they do. Because they know where they live. They live in a land awash in Protestant bigotry, ignorance, and fear regarding the above things. (This is not a knock on Protestantism per se, but a recognition of some of the particular factors that motivate Mopologists to fight against works like Brooke's
Refiner's Fire and Quinn's
EMMWV.) Everyone understands on some level (subconscious fear being one of them), and I can tell you Nibley sure as hell did, that Mormonism was in debt to the Hermetic tradition. The only disagreement would be over how that relationship works. Unfortunately, modern ignoramus Protestants have successfully branded all of this kind of thing as "Satanic," so no one who seeks respectability will touch it with a ten foot pole.
Kerry Shirts and Joe Steve Swick III are notable exceptions, but they are marginalized thereby. Indeed, though I love these guys, they will probably not make a direct contribution to repairing this situation.
In any case, without any grounding in its own intellectual tradition, it is all too easy for Mormons to be convinced, given the pull of Protestant bigotry, that Mormonism is simply weird, nonsensical, and perhaps even demon inspired. What Mormonism needs to counter that is a discourse that draws back the veil of mystery from sheer ignorance covering over its intellectual foundations, so that it once again makes some sense. I don't see that happening soon enough, but I have hope.
"Petition wasn’t meant to start a witch hunt as I’ve said 6000 times." ~ Hanna Seariac, LDS apologist
