FAIRMormon Conference: Mopologists Unhinged

[_Stem]

Transcribed from the end of his speech:

We can see in the Church sometimes the results of local leaders or other individuals who are either incompetent or lack integrity. The results can be a disillusionment resulting from failure of specific institutions to meet high expectations. When people trust and that trust is exploited they become more cynical. Common to most definitions of cynicism is the belief that others lack integrity and cannot be trusted. The observation of self-interested behavior on the part of leaders leads to a sense of betrayal and is it also caused when someone perceives that the organization has failed to meet it's obligation. Such as the violation of organizational procedures which leads to reactions such as anger, outrage, distrust, and resentment. It can also be caused when an individual holds unrealistically high expectations which are subsequently unmet. Those who have lost trust often accuse the church of failing to communicate important information. honest and frequent communications generates perceptions of fairness and trust. Failure to communicate important information in contrast particularly in times of organizational unrest violates the contract, resulting in unmet expectations, fear, distrust, and ultimately cynicism.

Moreover attempts by management to deny well-crafter rumors serve only to exacerbate individual's contempt and in time distrust towards management. Although individuals may feel that the Church has been hiding something in most cases it's not a matter of the Church failing to communicate but the individuals failing to pay attention. This is general not specific. More prominent in members of the Church in loss of trust is taking offense. Individuals consider the nature of their treatment as criterion for fairness. Honesty, ethicality, politeness and respect in interpersonal dealings are prominent factors in perceptions of justice. When these standards are not honored, perceptions of interactional justice will result thus leading to negative attitudes such as dislike and distrust towards purveyors of the discourteous treatment.

members of the Church and especially local leaders who are dishonest or who fail to lead the teachings of the Church demonstrate a lack of integrity in their behavior and invite cynicism. The Lord has warned that those who wish to exercise power and influence must be without hypocrisy and without guile. Some in the Church have tried to use various gimmicks or techniques to combat the effects of either their own or others breaches of integrity. These may not be particularly effective as "the goal of these management techniques continues to be control and manipulation". members of the Church have been warned that the attempts to exercise control or dominion or compulsion over the children of the souls of man in any degree of unrighteousness are counterproductive.

Those who have demonstrated a lack of integrity often contribute to others who have integrity but lack of commitment. They attribute this lack of commitment to obstinancy or some irrational resistance to change even though no compelling case to change has been presented to them. Presenting a compelling case is what the scriptures call persuasion. Now I understand being offended by failures of integrity and competence. A number of church members I have run across over the years have through lack of integrity or competence done a lot of things to offend me. But I do not have to shut myself out of heaven just because they want to go to hell. Although I find their actions extremely offensive I refuse to allow their offensive behavior to interfere with my keeping my covenants. Covenants afterall are not something that gets in the way of what we are trying to do. They are what we are trying to do.

If the records of the covenants given to Abraham are not historically authentic or the records of the keeping of the covenants or God's fulfillment of the covenants what basis do we have that God will fulfill is promises to us? If those who deny the historical authenticity of the scriptures really believe that, why on earth would they expect God to keep His promises to them? This issue as Pres Oaks has pointed out is fundamental. if we consistently bracket, reject or refuse to deal with the historical authenticity in order to appeal to those in the great and spacious building we legitimately invite the cynicism that will surely greet such efforts. In doing so we sale our birthright, scriptures that are historically authentic, for a mess of plaudits. Elder Packer addressed this directly, "Do not yield your faith in payment for an advanced degree or for the recognition and acclaim of the world. For what profited a man if he gains his degree and lose his soul?"

Above all we should defend historical authenticity because the events in scripture actually took place. These are records of real people. Who really spoke with God. And really saw God. And really made covenants with God. And really kept covenants with God. and really receives the promises of God. We should defend the historical authenticity of the Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham because it is defending the truth. Why would we want to bracket the truth.

Aren't we all convinced yet?

[_Philo Sofee]

Some local leaders and adults are wrong, and we haven't been paying attention, but implicit in his UNSPOKEN speech is that the General Authorities are never wrong, they are good communicators, we are just not good listeners. It is never the GA's fault, oh no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no,no! It always rests upon us as the problem. This after so many years and ad infinitum repeating just bores the hell out of me. YAWN. Same ole song and dance. The Brethren are only human, and NEVER claim infallibility. But no one holds them accountable for when they are wrong, they just blame the little guys, the locals, the congregations etc. Stuff yer piehole already, been there heard that, and that is decidedly NOT WHERE THE FRICKIN PROBLEM LIES DOUGH HEADS! (damn....., Shulem is influencing me.... )

Gee is a frickin paid moron. He talks like it, acts like it, and walks like it. Color me unconvincingly unimpressed. I don't buy his explanation for a moment, not even one moment.

[_Shulem]

Gee is a frickin paid moron. He talks like it, acts like it, and walks like it. Color me unconvincingly unimpressed. I don't buy his explanation for a moment, not even one moment.

Did you ask him what the king's name is?

[_Philo Sofee]

Gee is a frickin paid moron. He talks like it, acts like it, and walks like it. Color me unconvincingly unimpressed. I don't buy his explanation for a moment, not even one moment.

Did you ask him what the king's name is?

Yes, he said Tut.....

[_lostindc]

Because Midgley cannot possibly actually believe what he says when he defends Joseph Smith and Mormonism, he is far and away too smart for that, so he needs reassurance in group think, and that ends up making you cranky when others disagree, even when done so agreeably. The need people to think alike and believe alike or else their paranoia overwhelms them. They are taught to follow not think. Midgley was intelligent enough and well read enough to think, and see through it, but now shrinks back in fear of confronting truth, so he lashes out at others who are not so cowardly. It's perfectly obvious actually. But, there is no way I could have seen it being an insider apologist, and neither can he. He is asleep and needs to awaken, and only life experiences can do that. So I now grasp that I really don't have to take much of what he says all that seriously, because deep down, his actions betray his own sense of fear that he is wrong.

for what it's worth, you were never angry or intolerant when you were in full apologist mode. I've said it before, but people don't change their personalities and values when they leave the church, despite what Joseph Smith taught about us terrible apostates. I once told Kevin Graham in person that he was kind of an asshole online before he left the church, and he was still kind of an asshole online now. He laughed.

But I do think you're right that the angriest apologists (for any ideology or organization) tend to be those who are genuinely afraid they are mistaken.

Agreed, with everything, but especially the analysis of Philo.

Philo, I remember your work. I was an active Mormon back in the day and I liked encountering your posts, etc. because you're a likable person.

Both sides can get down and dirty for sure, but you kind of expect more from "academics" paid to publish on the subject of tough Mormon issues, e.g. DCP and the Interpreter.

[_Gadianton]

Now, the apostle who weighed in on the issue back in 1993, Dallin H. Oaks, now a member of the First Presidency, termed "[t]he historicity—historical authenticity—of the Book of Mormon" to be a fundamental issue related to "faith in the Lord Jesus Christ."

Well, of course. Faith in Christ is not even possible without first getting a pass from the gate keepers of the Limited Geography Theory. Migdley, Sorenson, DCP, and Gee and maybe old Hamb, literally stand as the sole intermediaries between anyone and that person's ability to have faith in Christ. It must be quite a feeling to have that kind of power eh?

The quote relayed by Stem that begins with "We can see in the Church sometimes the results of local leaders or other individuals who are either..." is interesting in a way. Did he really prepare that? It's like, he was standing up their brainstorming and connecting this idea to that idea, without making a coherent point.

As for the "outburst", lol. You only live once, eh?

[_Johannes]

I've said it before and I'll say it again, there are men like Louis Midgley in every church, and the trick is to find something for them to do to keep them out of trouble. I think that Midgley and Gee would benefit from a good few years as counsellors in their ward primary presidency. It would alter their perspective on things.

To be fair, the Documentary Hypothesis is not really a consensus position among Old Testament scholars any more, at least not in the form in which it was originally put forward in the 19th century. It presupposes four actual, distinct documents (J, E, D and P) from which redactors constructed the Pentateuch, like academics working in a university library. While the Pentateuch probably was assembled from earlier materials, and you can find "J-type", "E-type" and so on material in it, it probably developed in a less schematic way than the theory suggests. For example, it is widely believed that E never existed as a separate text from J. Gee should know this if he is purporting to instructing people publicly about scripture.

[_Tom]

Gee's comments on Ritner towards the end were both stunning and disappointing. (This comes roughly at the 53:00 mark.) It looks to me like he was handed (by Scott Gordon, looking somewhat like the actor Noah Emmerich) a list of questions that were written / submitted beforehand--evidently, candid question-asking simply will not do for this Mopologist--and he reads aloud a question asking if he intends to respond to some of the recent Ritner criticism. First, Gee compares Ritner's work to a "non-Catholic" criticizing a Papal Bull. "Why does he care?" Gee asks. He goes on to say that he's not going to respond because Ritner's review was "in poor taste" and "rather weak." His final answer to the question posed to him--i.e., the question of whether he will pen a response or not--is, no, he will not be, because: "As far as I can tell, who cares?" Well, at minimum, the person who asked the question "cares."

This brings to mind an audience member question that Dr. Gee responded to at the end of his 2012 FairMormon conference address (beginning at 36:10): "Do I [Gee], or one of my associates at BYU FARMS, plan on a response review of Robert Ritner's new book attacking the Book of Abraham?" Gee replied: "Yes, if I can get it done." (Several of Gee's other responses to questions asked at that particular conference were a bit curt and flippant.)

[_Tom]

To be fair, the Documentary Hypothesis is not really a consensus position among Old Testament scholars any more, at least not in the form in which it was originally put forward in the 19th century. It presupposes four actual, distinct documents (J, E, D and P) from which redactors constructed the Pentateuch, like academics working in a university library. While the Pentateuch probably was assembled from earlier materials, and you can find "J-type", "E-type" and so on material in it, it probably developed in a less schematic way than the theory suggests. For example, it is widely believed that E never existed as a separate text from J. Gee should know this if he is purporting to instructing people publicly about scripture.

Gee's new book on the Book of Abraham contains a few pages devoted to the Book of Abraham and source criticism (the passage in question lacks any footnotes):

Because of similarities between the Book of Abraham's account of the creation and the biblical record, some have assumed that the Book of Abraham is based on Genesis as opposed to assuming that Moses's account might have been based on Abraham's.

In the late nineteenth century, a theory called source criticism developed, arguing that the Pentateuch (the five books attributed to Moses...) was composed by a number of different authors in separate books and then shuffled together in such a way that the separate accounts told the story. This combining of accounts supposedly took place sometime after the Babylonian exile. Source critics claim that their modern separation of the biblical text into narrative strands somehow matches hypothetical ancient sources. This theory has gained wide acceptance in certain quarters even though no manuscript evidence supports it. Since no manuscripts actually attest these hypothetical sources, source critics have no way of testing whether their theories actually work or whether they are simply baseless speculation. Even those who accept that Moses wrote the book of Genesis must either posit that Moses received all of the information about his ancestors directly from God or that he had some access to written or oral sources for that information. So the question is not whether whoever wrote the Pentateuch had or used sources, but whether or not source criticism can correctly identify those sources. Various source critics using the same methods come up with different sources for the same text, and none of these can be verified by actual ancient manuscripts. Actual tests of source criticism--where scholars have used source criticism to predict sources for a text and then the actual sources have been discovered--have usually failed. Therefore, source criticism is less a scientific theory than a scholarly dogma.

The acceptance of source criticism as it is normally understood conflicts with the acceptance of the historicity of the Book of Abraham. Most source critics, for example, attribute Genesis 1 and 2 to separate sources and claim that they were combined after the destruction of Jerusalem in the sixth century BC. If the Book of Abraham is historical, then the basic narrative in Abraham 4 and 5, which parallels Genesis 1 and 2, existed long before source critics say it was created. If one accepts the historicity of the Book of Abraham, then one cannot accept the validity of source criticism. Likewise, if one accepts the validity of source criticism, then one cannot accept the historicity of the Book of Abraham. The two are incompatible.

The method of source criticism was developed at a time before sources from the ancient Near East were generally known and accessible. The textual presentation of what might appear as two different creation narratives is actually standard in early Mesopotamian accounts of primeval times.

Gee, An Introduction to the Book of Abraham, 136-38.

A sample of Dr. Gee's earlier criticisms of source criticism can be read here (see the section of the essay that begins "Thus, it would seem that source criticism"; it is possible that Gee may have been involved in the "experiment" described in the section of the essay titled "Creative Misreading").

[_Johannes]

Thanks, Tom. Let's have a closer look at this.

In the late nineteenth century, a theory called source criticism developed, arguing that the Pentateuch (the five books attributed to Moses...) was composed by a number of different authors in separate books and then shuffled together in such a way that the separate accounts told the story. This combining of accounts supposedly took place sometime after the Babylonian exile.

Yes, this is a summary of the Documentary Hypothesis in its classic form: there were four "separate books" that were redacted together. It is this mechanical model of composition that more recent scholars have challenged. It's a bit of a straw man these days.

There is, incidentally, no "theory called source criticism". It's more of a methodology, or an approach to ancient texts, than a specific "theory". It's certainly vastly wider than the Documentary Hypothesis. YOu can reject the Doc Hyp in its 19th century form and still maintain that source criticism is a fruitful methodology to apply to the Pentateuch.

Source critics claim that their modern separation of the biblical text into narrative strands somehow matches hypothetical ancient sources. This theory has gained wide acceptance in certain quarters even though no manuscript evidence supports it. Since no manuscripts actually attest these hypothetical sources, source critics have no way of testing whether their theories actually work or whether they are simply baseless speculation.

The false premise here is that source criticism can be validated only by manuscript evidence or else it amounts to mere "baseless speculation". This is basically an anti-scholarly or anti-intellectual position, and at this point I start to get quite angry with Gee, because he is supposed to be a professor and he would not come out with this stuff if his religious commitments didn't hinge on it.

Various source critics using the same methods come up with different sources for the same text, and none of these can be verified by actual ancient manuscripts. Actual tests of source criticism--where scholars have used source criticism to predict sources for a text and then the actual sources have been discovered--have usually failed. Therefore, source criticism is less a scientific theory than a scholarly dogma.

He's making the business of source criticism sound much more uncertain that it actually is. A lot of mistakes have been made in this area, and (as I keep saying) scholars today have moved past the original 19th century models of Pentateuchal criticism. But it's not that uncertain. No-one who isn't a fundamentalist argues today that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 don't have different sources (1 is P and 2 is J). We don't need to dig up an ancient manuscript to be confident of that.