Pokatator wrote:It is the strangest conspiracy I have ever seen on any board, to have Exmo's and TBM's in agreement against poor Coggins7.
Don't you think you may be misusing the word 'conspiracy' here? You might call the consensus of testimony against Coggins a 'conspiracy' if you thought that everybody who has contradicted him on the point in question was doing so by prior secret agreement in order to deceive him - as if, for example, they were all saying 'No, Coggins, you're wrong, the US was on the same side as Germany in WWII", just to see if they could win a bet to the effect that they could make him change his mind.
But presumably, like all the rest of us on this board (LDS, exLDS or plain old never LDS), you agree that the evidence available to you is 100% against Coggins. Not a soul comes forward to support him from any side. It's more like he was saying 'Marilyn Monroe was a brunette' and other posters were saying things like 'No she wasn't, and I saw her in Hollywood loads of times in the 1960s' or ''My Mom always said she was the archetypal blonde during her teenage years' and so on and so on. That isn't a conspiracy, it's just a normal reaction of a bunch of people when someone says something they have good reasons of various kinds to suppose is false.
How does one explain this strange business? It all seems to have started when Runtu came briefly out of exile and this exchange took place:
Coggins7 wrote:
No, not really. P** L** Al* has not been spoken in the Temple for an age. There was a flat footed lie stated to the effect that B&L had gone through the Temple in, I believe, 1987, and "Chanted" (the words were spoken in unison, not "chanted") . Well, I went through in 1980, and no such words were present, nor were they when my parents went through in the forties.
Runtu:
I'm breaking my self-imposed exile to say this: either you're a lying sack of cr*p or you have the world's worst memory. I attended the temple literally hundreds of times before the "p** l** al*" (and no, that's not the spelling) was removed in April of 1990. If anyone's been caught in a flat-footed lie, it's you, Cogs, not Porter.
See
http://www.mormondiscussions.com/discus ... ht=#134079 (asterisks mine, to avoid telestialisation).
At this point Coggins immediately fell silent, and remained so for quite some time I think. But to judge from the very high frequency of his postings, which are often no more than sneering and content-free interjections of the kind that would get him booted from MAD, he really cannot keep away from this board: posting here apparently means a lot to him. So what to do, given that he must be able to see how the 100% consensus against him from all sides is a bit damaging to his credibility? His position on this point is like the thirteenth strike of the clock - as someone once said, it is not only disbelieved in itself, but also casts into doubt everything that preceded it (and indeed everything that follows it).
He could have taken the escape route offered by some posters, and say something equivalent to "I misspoke". But Coggins admit to a mistake, and one involving an error about a central part of LDS practice? Never - the claim for superior knowledge, integrity and insight is a vital part of his persona here. I suspect that it is what makes posting a rewarding experience for him.
So what choice did he make? Fortunately Coggins keeps repeating a neat characterization of it:
"Keep up the pose".
