Aren’t the core problems of Mormonism very similar to the core problems of other religions? If we take Christianity, for example, I would say that it has a plethora of problems that most people don’t bother to ask about, let alone address, simply because they are “givens” for most people. Mainstream Christianity is so wrapped into the culture, so much a part of the global culture, that questions against it have to pull a helluva lot harder to make a dent. Christianity is not in danger globally. Mormonism is on its heels everywhere. And I don’t think that is because Mormonism is somehow more wrong than Christianity. I think it is because Mormonism is a tiny minority religion that attracts an inordinate amount of attention.Physics Guy wrote: ↑Sat Dec 09, 2023 11:23 amI don't see why it's a bad thing about the CES letter, that it collects a lot of old problems with Mormonism. I never got the impression that Runnells was claiming to have any brilliant new insights. On the contrary, I thought his claim was to be raising obvious questions. If people liked his new collection of old issues, that's not his or his document's fault.
The weird thing is how Mormonism still has a good half-dozen or so major issues, that have been around for a century or so, and that are supposed to have been "addressed" many times. Nonetheless the same issues have not gone away, or even changed very much. It's weird to have that big a stalemate going on for that long. The long stalemate of addressed-but-persistent issues has become an issue itself.
The typical Mormon explanation for this meta-issue is that biased anti-Mormons just refuse to listen to the clear and sufficient apologetic rebuttals of their critiques. If the rebuttals were both sufficient and clear, though, we would expect the church to have publicised these great rebuttals so well that critics would have had to drop the old issues and look for new ones.
I think that what Mormons must really believe about their apologetic defences on the perennial issues is that the defences are sufficient, but not really that clear. They're not quick, snappy comebacks that shoot the issue through the heart in a way that is obvious to any neutral and intelligent observer. Instead they're long, pedantic treatments full of reframings and refocusings. I reckon that faithful conservative Mormons truly believe that these long answers are convincing, but they must recognize that the long answers are long.
In particular there is no way to condense the long answers into short summaries that still seem convincing. In any short form, the apologetic defences come across as flimsy and doubtful. So there is no good way to publicise these sufficient answers to the general public, or even within the Mormon church. The supposedly good answers remain buried in long, scholarly treatments that virtually no-one has read.
Apologists and their supporters can therefore complain indignantly that their ignorant critics have been too lazy or dull to follow their well established answers. My own view, I'm afraid, is that this is an important part of the long-answer strategy.
The long answers that always look sketchy when summarised are like out-of-focus photos of Bigfoot at dusk. All that length and sophistication is really just concealing bad arguments. It takes ten pages to make the conclusion seem plausible. In all that verbiage, though, there is room for apologists to hide from their opponents. If they attack any one point, the apologists can retreat into the others and claim that the critics have misunderstood the whole line of argument. It's a guerrilla campaign that avoids decisive engagements on purpose—because they would only be lost, every time.
In fact there are no good Mormon answers on those old chestnut issues. There is nothing that could stand cross-examination. There are only long snow-job evasions. These can't be publicised effectively, because they lose all impact when shortened. So the issues persist, along with the Mormon impression that they have all been "addressed".
Mormonism also suffers the liability of having arisen in an extremely literate setting. What I mean by that is that there are so many documents to scrutinize. And, while I love that as a historian, as a characteristic of the religion it is really kind of a liability. I don’t know whether Jesus got a leg operation when he was a child because I barely know anything about Jesus at all. Much of what I know was probably made up, and it was made up by people who were very motivated to make him out to be wonderful and enjoyed the luxury of no documents to fact check their claims. Same for Buddha. Same, honestly, for Pythagoras and Socrates. Important figures for the spirituality of Eastern and Western civilization whom we know precious little about, and yet most people don’t go around questioning their character because there is nothing to really interrogate, as in no material to examine. Aristophanes roasted Socrates in comedy, but that is not really the same thing.
