honor wrote:My observation of your posting history is that you view yourself as a moderate based on a handful of criteria that basically amount to this: You don't argue that the facts are decided with truth being known or rejected, while believing the probabilities are in favor of the Church being what it claims to be. You base it on your view there is every reason to live life with the belief there is a divine creator God, and that Mormonism ended up making sense to you after your time reflecting on it after struggling with a period away from Church orthopraxy. The counterbalance you see in your own position comes from this experience, allowing that LDS history is messy and a rational person could be convinced it isn't what it claims to be. So, you view your position as fair minded while it looks no different to an outsider from how a TBM would act or respond.
Based on that, a moderate Mormon is someone who behaves like the Church is true much like a TBM while offering the non-believer the olive branch that they are being rational in their lack of belief rather than just rebellious.
A fine analysis, Honor. I think what you are saying is, behold, MG, the groveling believer with little compassion for anyone, had a faith crisis. He had no problem with anything within TBM ideology -- he wasn't worried about denying the priesthood to blacks, for example -- but rather, he was worried about the evidence for the Book of Mormon (or an issue like that). He was worried about the facts surrounding the supporting structures to his narrow and selfish ideology, he was not worried about his ideology being narrow and selfish.
The term "moderate" is a political and ideological term, and not one without imprecision. Jesus was an extremist by the standards of his government, but we would consider him a "moderate" in terms of theology, in the way we think about theology in our world. For Jesus, a sinner wasn't an outcast. For Paul, racial boundaries did not exclude salvation. "Evidence" certainly has it's place, and Jesus and Paul were skeptics. Skepticism, for either, served the purpose of getting the hardliners to question their beliefs. "Let he who is without sin" (Jesus). "We can only trust in love...because we look through a glass darkly" (Paul)
But MG has little interest in any of this. He doesn't care if the sinner feels welcome, his "moderate" impulses, instead, inform him the sinner may be lying. Perhaps the blind man could really see and it's all just a scam? The adulteress likely brought it on to herself. If MG ever worried about polygamy, I'd wager he couldn't have cared less about the alleged young women Joseph Smith sought after, or the wives of his friends, or even his friends for that matter, but rather, he was worried about theological discrepancies, or inconsistencies that weigh in favor of the practice being made up rather than being revelation, or that would discredit the Church's fanatical modern views on sexuality and gender roles.
In what way is MG striving to be a moderate? What exactly does a "moderate" mean in MG's hardliner, narrow, and self-centered worldview? MG has saved the baby,
skepticism, from the dirty bathwater of
love and compassion, and uses it to the ends of one of the oldest tricks in the book. He's an "epistemic" moderate, a man who questions all ability to rationally know the truth about the world, in order to justify belief in a hardline theology (or rather, anything that he wants to believe at the time).
He's not the first person, of course, to try such a thing, and many apologist run this play. I mean, how original is it to doubt the possibility of knowledge when the evidence puts the smoking gun in your hands? Anyone who has ever tried to justify something terrible they've done has likely considered the possibility that the truth of their crime is unknowable. Let's agree to disagree.
As one ZLMB poster put it, who was pretty much was obsessed with exactly what MG is obsessed with, although smarter than MG and better able to articulate a position -- Mormons are epistemically "liberal" and politically "conservative". That amounted to Mormons being skeptics of science, evidence, and truth, yet very conservative in their theology. It was eye-popping to comprehend how a person can't see how problematic such a position is. And this is exactly what MG is going for, in case his audience hasn't quite figured out what an MG moderate is yet. from there, a fundamentalist or black-and-white thinker, is anyone who in advance can't see that Mormonism can't be questioned, because we look through a glass darkly, while a moderate is a person who has embraced skepticism and therefore, learned not to question, since there are no answers, and continues to believe no matter what.
Unfortunately, a really big issue with the new MI, with Givens, Bushman, Patrick Mason and the rest, is that while they might personally see a two-dimensional service of skepticism -- on the one hand, it justifies belief, but on the other, it extends mercy to the unbeliever and extends the boundaries of the tent (as Honor put it so well), I'm worried that the vast majority of those who become influenced from their work will be MG types who save the baby from the bathwater, towards a one-dimensional pursuit of their personal theological comfort zone. The new Church essays really are geared exactly towards this one dimensional end, having taken in greatly the input of Bushman and others.
For some, looking through a glass darkly means taking extra caution and watching their step, and for others, it means drawing their blade, because nobody will know who done it.
