DiscussMormonism.com

Craig Paxton wrote:Probably one of the best, most convincing, laid out arguments of traping a living general authority with his own words I've ever heard argued. Elder Ballard should be embarrassed of himself. Consigliere is masterful in crafting his exposé of Ballard, trapping him with his own words and building supportive evidence from other GA's that leaves Ballard with no where to hide. He literally backs Ballard into the perverbial corner and then drops the anvil of Ballard own making on him. Kaboom.

Edit to add: Ballard claims that the church has never hid anything from its membership, that church leaders are honest, that those who have questions and doubts just need to trust their church leaders. Consigliere then list 12-13 examples where the church has in fact hid, lied, whitewashed or used ellipses to alter, hide its history.

I can't recommend this podcast enough...this is a classic podcast episode, one for the ages

The link, the link!

http://www.mormondiscussionpodcast.org/2017/11/radio-free-mormon-021-elder-ballard-blows-church/

DrW wrote:

cwald wrote:Yes. I agree. I would hope somebody would transcribe this podcast and put it up on the internet in written form. It is really well done and something I would like to have on the shelf as a resource.

This ^.

Is there some good voice recognition software that can create a text file from an MP3? I am sure it would take a lot of cleaning up after that, but it would be a good start.

I suspect that Consigliere was working from some kind of script. I doubt from the way he was speaking that he simply spoke extempore throughout.

Consigliere? If I am right, could a cleaned-up version of your script be published online, please?

Just got back from Thanksgiving vacay and saw this thread.

Thanks for all the kind comments, everybody!

My notes are really pretty crummy.

To let you see what I am working from, I will take my actual notes and copy them below.

Here goes nothing!

__________________________________

ELDER BALLARD
Elder Ballard CES Address, February 29, 2016

Gone are the days when a student asked an honest question and a teacher responded, ‘Don’t worry about it!’ Gone are the days when a student raised a sincere concern and a teacher bore his or her testimony as a response intended to avoid the issue. Gone are the days when students were protected from people who attacked the Church.

Elder Ballard October 2017 General Conference

Be aware of organizations, groups, or individuals claiming secret answers to doctrinal questions that they say today’s apostles and prophets do not have or understand.

Young Single Adult Face-to-Face Promotional Video (early November, 2017)
Elder Ballard says that, to be honest, the apostles do not have answers to all the questions being asked by young single adults. Those are the questions they avoid.


Elder Ballard 11-14-17 BYU Devotional Address

“I am a general authority but that doesn’t make me an authority in general,” he then quipped. “I worry that members expect too much from their leaders and teachers, expecting them to be experts [in areas and topics] well beyond their expertise. If you have a question that requires an expert, please take the time to find an expert to help you.”

THEIR REVELATION TRUMPS OUR REVELATION
Elder Eyring hinted at this by talking about “confirming revelation.”
We can receive any revelation God wants to give us . . . so long as it isn’t any different than what our leaders teach.

What about Adam-God?
Which leader?
What about Nephi? He received a revelation from God to kill Laban. The reason he didn’t act on it immediately is because it DID contradict scripture! Even Elder Oaks Book of Mormon does not support him in this!

I get that we can’t receive revelation for the Church. That makes sense. But why can’t we receive our own revelation, even if it is not the same as what is taught by Church leaders?


Hiding things

1. First Vision Accounts—JFS—Why not point them to the essays instead of this obscure article in the Improvement Era from 47 years ago? (In context, they lost control of the information, so they had to write the article in order to try to control the narrative!)
2. Joseph Smith lying about polygamy (carefully worded denials)
3. Post Manifesto Polygamy (Wilford Woodruff himself married a plural wife seven years after he issued the Manifesto; that is why D. Michael Quinn was excommunicated—for talking about this)
4. Adam-God!
5. Mark Hofmann (Elder Oaks was in the thick of this, along with Gordon B. Hinckley—the two apostles who were involved) Gordon B. Hinckley was a counselor in the First Presidency in January of 1983 when Mark Hofmann came into his office and sold him a letter written in Joseph Smith’s own handwriting about using folk magic in treasure digging. $15,000. No transparency. No news release. No article in the Ensign. Hidden away for two years until Los Angeles Times ran a story on it. (Again, it is no virtue to come clean only after you have been found out.) ***
6. August 22, 1981—The Mantle is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect
7. August 16, 1985 Elder Oaks

"I have chosen to speak on how Church history should be read, especially the so-called 'history'.... The fact that something is true is not always a justification for communicating it.... Balance is telling both sides. This is not the mission of official Church literature or avowedly antiMormon literature. Neither has any responsibility to present both sides." - Dallin Oaks
pages 2, 11, 18 http://mormonexpositor.com/refmaterial/ ... ks-CES.pdf

From 1985)
8. October General Conference, 1984—Ronald Poelman talk. Read quote.
9. No Improvement Era article on church website. No GC talks before 1970. No Journal of Discourses. No Lectures on Faith! It doesn’t sound like they are hiding anything, does it?
10. 1993—Stage Managing a Grizzly Bear—Elder Oaks caught lying to the press about Elder Packer’s involvement in the excommunication of Paul Toscano.
11. It is clear as crystal that they have organized this entire presentation; they say they got over 4,000 questions; they had help organizing them; they come prepared with documents to cite from (Elder Ballard has a folder); AND YET at several points they try to present as if this is spontaneous and off-the-cuffj; having questions asked from congregations in different countries; and even at one point saying that somebody just texted in this question. (Yeah, right!) Does this count as deception? Does this count as hiding things?
12. Elder Ballard already said in the promo from the first part of November that they don’t have answers to all the questions and those are the questions they will avoid. Does this sound like they are hiding things? They are avoiding certain questions.
13. 13. Elder Snow quote from November 8, 2013.


Elder Ballard chides his audience that if they would research, they would find that things had already been written about the First Vision.
Well, if they did research on the two gentlemen addressing the; they would find out they cannot be trusted to tell them the truth!


*** Jan 11,1983 - second counselor Gordon B. Hinckley pays document dealer Mark Hofmann $15,000 for alleged Joseph Smith letter about his treasure digging activities. He has Hofmann agree not to mention the transaction to anyone else and then he sequesters document in First Presidency's vault. First Presidency does not acknowledge its existence unitl Los Angeles Times is about to release story about document, which Hofmann later admits he forged.

The second story is shorter and less supplied with human detail-because none of the participants, thus far, have agreed to discuss it. Roughly six months after the media bonanza featuring the Lucy Smith letter, Hofmann walked into the church's headquarters with another letter. This letter was not faith-promoting. Hofmann bypassed the church archives and went directly to the office of Gordon B. Hinckley, a member of the First Presidency. It should be understood that only a handful of people in Salt Lake City could walk into Hinckley's office on demand. The First Presidency constitutes the highest office in the church; within the office are three men, a troika of elders who make virtually all major decisions.
The letter appeared to be written entirely in the hand of Joseph Smith. That alone made the letter valuable, but it was the content that demanded the attention of a man like Hinckley. It dealt with a side of Joseph Smith the church would like to forget, one that is usually referred to by the ugly name of "money digging."
In the years immediately preceding the founding of the church, Smith almost certainly had engaged in treasure hunting, a common practice in 19th-Century America. Often, the search for treasure was accompanied by arcane magical rites that, by modern standards, seem to have little to do with dignified religion. This letter referred to "clever spirits" that might guard treasure sites, and recommended techniques for foiling them. Altogether an embarrassment.
It is not known what was said by Hofmann or Hinckley. It is known that Hinckley wrote a check on a church account for $15,000. Hofmann took the check and Hinckley took the letter.
There were no press conferences, no articles in the church magazine. Two years later a reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune, acting on a rumor, called the church press office and inquired about its existence. The press officer denied knowledge of the letter.

Listened yesterday morning. One of your best.

What's the source (or sources) for the Joseph Fielding Smith story? My understanding is that there's little to no questions that the account had been removed from the journal and later taped back in, but how it was Smith, when he did it, that he stored it in a safe, and that he had it taped back in once it's existence had leaked?

Thank you for the notes, consig.

I listened to the podcast as well.

my wife was even summoned in for a rewind of some of the more juicy parts.

I think the bombast that comes with age and top management can be a mitigating defense for Elder Ballard's slip. If we can forgive the American Tobacco Association, then we can certainly forgive Elder Ballard on this point.

Apologists can either deny he said that or else insist that he was referring to a one hour time period after this presentation.

toon wrote:Listened yesterday morning. One of your best.

What's the source (or sources) for the Joseph Fielding Smith story? My understanding is that there's little to no questions that the account had been removed from the journal and later taped back in, but how it was Smith, when he did it, that he stored it in a safe, and that he had it taped back in once it's existence had leaked?

There is a Dialogue article from 2014 that documents the details:

LINK

An exerpt:

Even though Levi Edgar Young told LaMar Petersen that he had read the “strange account” of the First Vision, he had been instructed “not to copy or tell what they contained,” and accordingly did not divulge the contents to anyone. However, while not providing any detailed information about this “strange account” of the First Vision, Young did disclose that it described a vision of only Jesus, without any mention of God. Petersen kept this information confidential until Young’s death in December 1963.

In early 1964, Petersen told Jerald and Sandra Tanner about this “strange account” of the First Vision. They wrote to Joseph Fielding Smith, asking for an opportunity to see this early account. Joseph Fielding Smith did not know exactly what Levi Edgar Young had told LaMar Petersen, and he refused to let the Tanners see the 1832 history. However, about this same time Joseph Fielding Smith relinquished the three leaves of the excised 1832 history from his private custody within his office safe and transferred it back to the regular Church Historian’s collection. Then he authorized Earl E. Olson, his Assistant Church Historian, to show the newly available leaves to Paul R. Cheesman, a BYU graduate student working on his thesis. Cheesman explained that Olson demonstrated how the pages “matched with [the] edge of the journal to prove location” in the Joseph Smith letterbook.

As the result of this assistance, Cheesman prepared a typescript in his 1965 BYU master’s thesis on Joseph Smith’s visions. Later that same year Jerald Tanner and Sandra Tanner were the frst to publish the text of the 1832 account, using Cheesman’s imperfect transcript. Four years later Dean C. Jessee published his important article in Brigham Young University Studies, with an accurate transcript of the text.

toon wrote:Listened yesterday morning. One of your best.

What's the source (or sources) for the Joseph Fielding Smith story? My understanding is that there's little to no questions that the account had been removed from the journal and later taped back in, but how it was Smith, when he did it, that he stored it in a safe, and that he had it taped back in once it's existence had leaked?

I also covered this in detail in the third episode of RFM.

For your consideration.

http://www.mormondiscussionpodcast.org/ ... h-history/

And yes, the Dialogue article referred to by oliblish was my primary source.