In her last sentence, she crossed the ultimate line of offending our big, all-knowing precious guru DCP.
QUOTE(Daniel Peterson @ Jan 4 2008, 12:16 PM)
Sometimes. But not intrinsically. (The National Anti-Mormon League certainly didn't intend, by choosing that title, to stigmatize itself. Robert McKay, formerly of Utah Missions, Inc., surely doesn't think himself a bad person for opposing Mormonism.) By contrast, the term cult, as it is used by sectarian polemicists, conveys virtually nothing but its "strong negative charge."
The fact that a term distinguishes one group from another is not only not enough, by itself, to make it illegitimate, it is essential to the nature of language that it so distinguish. The adjective happy distinguishes the noun it modifies from nouns modified by the adjective unhappy. Non-Mormons are not Mormons. Baseball players, to the extent that they're baseball players, are not football players. Grasses are not trees. Reptiles are not mammals. Blue isn't red. Chinese isn't Spanish.
The fundamental problem with polemical use of the term cult is that it is pejorative and not only distinguishes between groups but (very strongly) stigmatizes one of the groups by verbal legerdemain rather than by analysis and without any clear definition. Linguistically, it thus becomes closer to a grunt or an expletive than a content-term.
Can the word anti-Mormon be used pejoratively? Yes. Of course. Many words can. But cult, in the sense in which it is used by sectarian critics of Mormonism, seems to have no sense but a pejorative one.
And, of course, my position is that no coherent definition of cult, in the relevant sense, is on offer.
Precisely.
Whereas, by contrast, the clear meaning of anti-Mormon, which can be very simply deduced from the clear meaning of the adjective and adjectival noun Mormon and the clear meaning of the prefix anti, is neither arbitrary nor ad hoc nor difficult to understand.
That people can disagree about when to apply the term anti-Mormon is no more lethal to the utility of the term than is the fact that people can and do disagree just as easily about when to apply terms like good, beautiful, tall, convincing, orthodox, useful, delicious, fair, plausible, long, entertaining, bright, ridiculous, important, rich, difficult, and worthwhile.
Exactly. And intrinsically so.
And your little excursion plainly didn't accomplish much, either.
Never mind. I'm busy.GoodK
I think it has. You just fail (intentionally, I'm sure) to make the connection. I'm busy as well. I just expected more of the Professor Dumbeldore of the forum.
You just don't get it. Come back in three days. ~Mods
[/b]