How Long Until 'Sic et Non' is Cancelled?

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Doctor Scratch
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Re: How Long Until 'Sic et Non' is Cancelled?

Post by Doctor Scratch »

There is yet more evidence that "SeN" has effectively been "muzzled" by Patheos's Church-owned leadership, and that they are limiting what he can say on the topic of politics. Rather predictably, he and the other Mopologists are gloating in the wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling, and yet the response what quite limited and very circumspect:
One writer for National Review terms it “The Greatest Victory in the History of the Conservative Movement,” and I’m not strongly inclined to disagree. The overturning of Roe v. Wade has been a long time coming. But, at last, it has now come. Decisions regarding the regulation of abortion have been returned to the people and to their elected state representatives, where, under God and under the Constitution, they have always belonged. (There is further good coverage at National Review.)
Completely apart from the subdued nature of this comment, I see all sorts of problems with this observation. First of all, how is the "regulation" returned to "the people" when the pregnant women in question no longer get to have decision-making authority in states that are bringing the hammer down? The regulation is really just returned to state governments, where it will effectively be a case of "tyranny of the majority." This is yet more evidence that DCP is not a "serious" Libertarian. "The people"--according to polls--were against this ruling. DCP loves polls when they show health benefits of religion. It's funny how he has no use for polls when they don't suit his purposes.

Second, Kulkulkan correctly pointed out in another thread that the question of abortion raises all kinds of vexing questions for Mopologists vis-a-vis LDS theology. First of all, one of the points of mortality is allegedly to "come down and get a mortal body." So if a pregnancy is terminated before there is anything recognizable as a body, then how does this figure? Is it "immoral" because it interferes with this process? And what about the question of "free agency"? I suppose the Mopologists might respond that the agency of the fertilized egg is getting "taken away," but in that case, they are privileging the agency of one over the other. How do they justify that? And to return to Kulkulan's point: what about the so-called "age of accountability"? K. points out that children who die before the age of 8 get "a golden ticket to the Celestial Kingdom." Does this in any way figure into their thinking?

I think that, at the end of the day, the Mopologists don't actually care about any of this all that seriously. Instead, this is more about wielding power over women's decision-making abilities. There is an old, rancid thread amongst certain LDS men where they angrily resent anyone having "casual sex," because if they didn't get to do that, and are "stuck" humping one partner for life, then why should anyone else get to have that kind of fun?
Last edited by Doctor Scratch on Sun Jun 26, 2022 7:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"If, while hoping that everybody else will be honest and so forth, I can personally prosper through unethical and immoral acts without being detected and without risk, why should I not?." --Daniel Peterson, 6/4/14
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Re: How Long Until 'Sic et Non' is Cancelled?

Post by drumdude »

SeN Comment Section wrote:The Last Danite • 17 hours ago
Human life is created at the moment of conception. To end this life is to terminate it.
The Last Danite is a TBM trump supporter who posts regularly on SeN's blog.

Here were have another wonderful example of Mormons not knowing their own theology. They just take random talking points from evangelical Christians and spew them out with zero thought.

They've really had a brain drain in the Mormon church, there's no one left with any functioning grey matter. Just mindless drones that follow the prophet.
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Re: How Long Until 'Sic et Non' is Cancelled?

Post by Gadianton »

Doctor Scratch wrote: So if a pregnancy is terminated before there is anything recognizable as a body, then how does this figure? Is it "immoral" because it interferes with this process?
I think for DCP, it's got to be a matter of when the spirit enters the body. We already know what he thinks of any organic matter sans a spirit. We know from his many attacks on Gemli, that he believes a materialist world is one of meaningless "meat units". In such a world, not only would abortion be okay, but randomly killing people for fun would also be okay also. He's said this point blank about a thousand times. So he's kind of in a fork. If he recognizes personhood within organic matter sans a spirit, then he's admitting materialism is fundamentally justified.

That's a bullet he might not be able to bite, even if he wants to. There's no theological precedent in Mormonism to justify it. President Kimball used to marvel at the energy of children, attributing it to the adult sized spirit stuffed into a tiny body. How far can you push the stuffing logic? And is he really going to say in IVF when they start with four or 5 embryos that 4 are spirits from the pre-existed that came down to inhabit test tubes and then die? And then, the Book of Mormon seems to teach that the spirit occupies the body around the time of birth:
pre-mortal Jesus wrote:For behold, the time is at hand, and on this night shall the sign be given, and on the morrow come I into the world, to show unto the world that I will fulfill all that which I have caused to be spoken by the mouth of my holy prophets” (3 Nephi 1:13).
Incredibly, this scripture affirms abortion up until the last day of pregnancy. Now, it's possible that Jesus occupied the embryo at conception and also spoke to prophets telepathically from the womb. That's some serious speculation, and would make Jesus like Alia Atreides, Paul's sister in Dune, who spoke to people presciently from the womb. But then when does the veil fall? Did Jesus know everything as a child? There are a lot of problems here for DCP to work out before he starts throwing people in jail for decisions they make for themselves.
Doctor Scratch wrote: I think that, at the end of the day, the Mopologists don't actually care about any of this all that seriously. Instead, this is more about welding power over women's decision-making abilities. There is an old, rancid thread amongst certain LDS men where they angrily resents anyone having "casual sex," because if they didn't get to do that, and are "stuck" humping one partner for life, then why should anyone else get to have that kind of fun?
This is absolutely true.

I wonder how DCP will like it if one day, states are allowed to decide for themselves which religions should be tolerated.
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Re: How Long Until 'Sic et Non' is Cancelled?

Post by Marcus »

huckelberry wrote:
Sun Jun 26, 2022 4:42 pm
Everybody Wang Chung wrote:
Sun Jun 26, 2022 4:02 am
I hope SeN never gets canceled. It’s a monument to the stupidity of Mopologetics for all to see.

It’s sad that DCP is back home now. I know how much he enjoyed being lost in the death camps of Europe for the last few weeks.

[img] https://i.imgflip.com/6kwd83.jpg /img]
Daniel C. Peterson recently pictured here while touring Auschwitz.
I do not understand your need to continually insult Mr Peterson. I do understand he can be annoying. I understand disapproving of his tactics. There are times I am a bit surprised when your normal insults are surpassed to reach places ridiculous.
i understand your sentiment, huckelberry. but there is so much history, and even when there's not, Peterson has behaved badly. in my case, some years back, a very unsavory character told him who he thought i was, in real life. (the supposed 'snitch' was smokey, the guy who posted really horrible anti-semitic stuff and holocaust denials here for a while. seriously, an immoral, evil person.)

with no hesitation, Peterson posted smokey's erroneous information, which was the name of a professor on the East Coast, the city they worked in and the name of their university, even their area of expertise. he was wrong, it wasn't me, but i was in shock that he was so willing to dox someone online. i feel horrible at the abuse i'm sure that professor endured for a while. i have no doubt there were, at the very least, nasty emails from midgley.

( :roll: i collected and saved a few of midgley's diatribes myself, from way back in the day, that midgley sent to a teenaged niece of mine who was spending the summer with us and who had commented on a Mormon site using one of my old log ins. midgley violated the site's policy and accessed my old email address, and began using it to harass my niece. it took a threat of reporting him to the authorities for harassing a minor online before he would stop. that account was permanently closed, as a result, but i kept the emails. that was my very first exposure to mopologetics. midgley is a bullying ass.)

Anyway, Peterson found it acceptable to dox this professor on his blog, apparently because i took issue with his plagiarized work. he implied there was something morally wrong with me, because as a fellow professor, i publicly objected to his plagiarism. he has never once admitted any culpability regarding his massive and meticulously documented body of plagiarized work.

So, while i agree Everybody Wang Chung may carry things too far, i really have a hard time objecting, given the unwarranted attack on who Peterson thought was me, as well as the myriad of stories like mine i have read online. these mopologist guys have a very skewed sense of ethics and morality.
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Re: How Long Until 'Sic et Non' is Cancelled?

Post by Everybody Wang Chung »

“Marcus” wrote:( :roll: i collected and saved a few of midgley's diatribes myself, from way back in the day, that midgley sent to a teenaged niece of mine who was spending the summer with us and who had commented on a Mormon site using one of my old log ins. midgley violated the site's policy and accessed my old email address, and began using it to harass my niece. it took a threat of reporting him to the authorities for harassing a minor online before he would stop. that account was permanently closed, as a result, but i kept the emails. that was my very first exposure to mopologetics. midgley is a bullying ass.)
Marcus,

WTH?! This certainly deserves its own thread. Please post it.

I’m sorry. That’s horrible behavior from Midgley and DCP. I wish I could say I’m surprised.
"I'm on paid sabbatical from BYU in exchange for my promise to use this time to finish two books."

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Re: How Long Until 'Sic et Non' is Cancelled?

Post by drumdude »

There's a lot that doesn't get posted here. There's just too much of it to keep track, it would be a full time job. Peterson liked a comment by his friend Midgely wherein Midge tells us which death camp is his favorite and why. Why does DCP keep the comment up, and even put a like on it? DCP knows it will get a rise out of the forum.

It's childish, but DCP gets off on acting like an edgy teenager online. None of us have the time nor the desire to keep a scorecard of every stupid racist/homophobic/awful thing DCP has posted online. I assume most of you know the history already.
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Re: How Long Until 'Sic et Non' is Cancelled?

Post by Doctor Scratch »

Well, what do you know? Just when we accuse him of being "muzzled," he posts a candidly political entry! How about that? Well, it could be interpreted as a "pro-Trump" post, so perhaps he's in the clear?

In any case, the hypocrisy is thick over there. He's waxing serenely about how important the the Supreme Court is, and how it needs to be independent from popular opinion, and how the US system of federalism is important, etc. Where was all of this when the ruling came down for Obergefell? On *that* occasion, he was whining incessantly about how wrong-headed the decision was and how his "religious freedom" was getting "taken away." When posters probed a little more deeply, though, it turned out that, no: he wasn't being denied his right to attend sacrament meeting or the temple, or to read his scriptures, or to pray, receive blessings, and so on. No, instead he was concerned that his right to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people was being "taken away."
"If, while hoping that everybody else will be honest and so forth, I can personally prosper through unethical and immoral acts without being detected and without risk, why should I not?." --Daniel Peterson, 6/4/14
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Re: How Long Until 'Sic et Non' is Cancelled?

Post by drumdude »

DCP wrote:Now that the matter of abortion has been returned to the people and their elected representatives, where, under God, it should have been all along, religious people are free to bring their religiously-informed values to the debate just as non-religious people are entirely free to bring their own values, however derived, to it. This is called democratic, representative government, and it’s what is supposed to occur under the aegis of the Constitution of the United States.

Why do I get the feeling if DCP had been born earlier he would be defending the system of free states and slave states...

"My religious values say I need to impose my system of morality on you and strip you of your right to bodily autonomy." :lol:
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Re: How Long Until 'Sic et Non' is Cancelled?

Post by DrStakhanovite »

I’ll give you my hot take: DCP will publicly “blog” in some kind of format, on some kind of platform, until his health precludes it.

I think a departure from Patheos is inevitable, but only because the platform itself isn’t aging well since its launch and the kind of content they can host is overshadowed by other forms of media. Frankly, the site is a mess with an absolutely garish aesthetic and some of the software just plain sucks. My guess is DCP will stay put until he is rousted because the hassle of trying to transfer the archives from one platform to another can be daunting, even though he repeats himself so much that he’d probably only need to retain about a fifth of his material with everything else being some kind of recycled content that can be done away with.

Mormon Apologetics, as it is conceived and practiced by the old FARMS crew, really isn’t an intellectual endeavor at all. These guys don’t live for ideas in the traditional sense of scholarship, where one devotes their life to a discipline and seeks to develop themselves and their craft simply as an end unto itself. By contrast, Mopologetics seeks to live off ideas instead of for ideas, almost identical in the way a marketing firm or a motivational speaker does. It isn’t surprising that DCP had a reputation as a guy who could gas up donors and get them to commit or that he conducts those cheesy “Holy Land '' tours; these kinds of practices are part and parcel to what Mopologetics actually is. To the Mopologists, the “Gospel” of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is simply a brand to promote and defend.

Consequently, I don’t think we are seeing a “decline” per say in DCP’s quality of writing or thought. I think he has fundamentally remained consistent since the 1990s, but now with retirement we are getting a fuller picture of just how poor the state of his thinking really is. He doesn’t write like a mature scholar who ought to be at the height of his powers, you can hardly tell through the substance of what he actually says that he was even affiliated with Higher Education, that he actually enjoys reading, or that he makes a daily practice of writing. It is only through the same 6 or 7 stories and repetitious offhand remarks about “manuscripts” and “notes” that we are reminded that he is supposed to be a man of letters.

I don’t think there is any question about the fact that DCP finds himself in a lull as far as material goes, but I think that is probably due to the fact he is probably trying to enjoy his vacation and take a break from the usual apologetic topics. He might even be burned out.

He’ll get back to form though, he has expressed a kind of pastoral calling to apologetics and I think that is genuine. If nothing else, he loves to editorialize and can’t stop himself from saying something regrettable.

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Re: How Long Until 'Sic et Non' is Cancelled?

Post by Dr. Shades »

Marcus wrote:
Sun Jun 26, 2022 9:47 pm
( :roll: i collected and saved a few of midgley's diatribes myself, from way back in the day, that midgley sent to a teenaged niece of mine who was spending the summer with us and who had commented on a Mormon site using one of my old log ins. midgley violated the site's policy and accessed my old email address, and began using it to harass my niece. it took a threat of reporting him to the authorities for harassing a minor online before he would stop. that account was permanently closed, as a result, but i kept the emails. that was my very first exposure to mopologetics. midgley is a bullying ass.)
MARCUS: I echo Everybody Wang Chung. With all possible respect, I'd say you owe it to posterity to post all of Midgley's posts to your niece here in a separate thread. Please share.
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--I Have Questions, 01-25-2024
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