DiscussMormonism.com

Confirmation bias. It affects every human being. If someone wants the church to be true, it doesn't matter how strong the evidence against it is. There can be 100 pieces of indisputalbe evidence showing the church is a fraud, but that can all be ignored in favor of any evidence that shows it just might, maybe, with the right mental gymnastics be true. The TBM will never overcome this until something happens that causes them to no longer have a personal investment in the church being true. The thing that causes that shift is different for everyone.

Seriously...they are busy little bees...and just too busy to look. I equate this with lazy.

Behold the power of inoculation and indoctrination.

When we think we know an answer we usually know it consciously, but our knowledge of which questions are supposed to be asked is often implicit. So are our expectations of what kinds of answers will count as answers. These implicit expectations of what should be asked and what should count as an answer may well be absurd but it's much harder to see this about them than it is to see that an answer is absurd if it doesn't meet these expectations.

For example, within Mormonism all the details about the "coming forth" of the Book are important. So Mormons may consciously recognize a particular Mormon answer to the question of the Book of Mormon's origin, and they may in principle be prepared to reconsider that Mormon answer. What they can't reconsider so easily, though, is the belief that the question of how the Book of Mormon came forth has to have a detailed answer.

Non-Mormons think that Smith faked the Book somehow, but can't supply a theory that goes head-to-head against the official Mormon account with a compelling alternative explanation of every detail. I think that for Mormons hearing this must be like hearing that two plus two is not equal to four because it equals vanilla. It doesn't just sound wrong. It sounds like nonsense.

Should we look in the mirror to find something beautiful when we are afraid we will see a mass of warts? Afterward, we could find an apologist to tell us the warts were all an illusion (they are skilled in deception), or we could accept ourselves warts and all.