Maybe the .pdf lamentations are well placed. Imagine the home of a financially successful LDS. He pays his tithing. Goes to church, and the temple. Yada, yada, yada. He's heard from Brother So-and-so that down there at BYU there's an organization, FARMS, that was taking the mantle up to defend 'the Church' against the Tanners and other pesky FoMo's (not fear of missing out) and critics. The faithful tithepayer asks a few questions, and is given a phone number (later an e-mail address) to contact FARMS and get a subscription to the FARMS Review, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies--whatever. He gives his credit card, starts getting the quarterly installments. Placing each one on the shelf in the room where it will be sure to be seen by the home teachers, the neighbors and the bishop whenever they visit. It's not really cracked open, just placed on the shelf. After all, it looks pretty heady. Just by subscribing and placing each new issue in succession alongside the previous ones gives this tithepaying member assurance and of course, a warm feeling in the bosom that there no doubt within those unviewed pages the answers that stuff in the face of critics and FoMo's. Reading the Interpreter or Scripture Central online--reading! yikes--the tithepayer doesn't have time for that. No physical token to place on a shelf in the house to virtual signal that he believes that there are, within such pages, good refutations.drumdude wrote: ↑Tue Dec 31, 2024 4:32 amYou can’t make this stuff up!
https://publicsquaremag.org/media-educa ... ith-doubt/
Apologists just cannot stop whining about the CES letter. Its success must be attributable to anything but its own merits.
In 1993, Adobe Systems led the programming competition with its Portable Document Format (PDF). After guarding it as intellectual property for fifteen years, Adobe displayed shrewd business logic in 2008 by offering the PDF as an open format (PDF 1.7)—allowing software developers worldwide to develop and provide tools for the creation, modification, viewing, and printing of PDF files if they adhered to Adobe’s original PDF specifications.
Also, in 2008, Adobe offered its Reader 2.0 as a free download. This enabled web designers and authors to offer their publications as PDF downloads with an accompanying link to the free PDF viewer. Readers could easily download both the app and the book or article and view the original text as it was designed to be read.
Advanced distribution capability. Soon other free PDF viewers became available, and popular Internet search engines incorporated them into their browsers (2).
A new world began to emerge, empowering individual authors and content creators to distribute their views instantly, in increasingly persuasive ways, across a mammoth distribution channel: the World Wide Web.
The reality is that before the early 2010s, it would have been difficult to widely distribute any computerized books or extensive articles such as The CES Letter. Documents circulated as Microsoft Word or WordPerfect files would have been susceptible to formatting changes when the files were opened, as well as alteration from other readers.
Then junior is sent a .pdf of the CES Letter. He starts reading it. Ouch. So, he asks dad where can sonny boy get the answers to these perplexing observations. It dawns on dad that he has those old issues otherwise collecting dust on the shelf since 2012 or before, and points his son in their direction. Then weeks later on a boring afternoon, the son starts looking. Reads an article. It doesn't set well. "Is this the best that the Church's scholars can do?" Doubts linger and gnaw at him. He goes on with high school. At college his freshman year, he doesn't enroll in institute. He breaks the news to mom and dad he's not going on a mission, which they suspected a bit when they caught wind he was going to a number of frat house parties--where, god forbid, there are women who will have fun.
Oh, those were the days. When their were physical, paper copies being added to the shelf, before a rascally treatise in .pdf form was going viral through email forwards and downloads from online. Just like Archie and Edith in the intro to each episode of All in the Family,
Boy the way Glen Miller played,
Songs that made the hit parade,
Guys like us we had it made,
Those were the days,
And you know who you were then,
Girls were girls and men were men,
Mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again,
Didn't need no welfare states
Everybody pulled his weight,
Gee our old Lasalle ran great,
Those were the days
