Internet vs Chapel Mormons and Mormon Apologetics

[_GoodK]

I was listening to this video - one I've seen many times before - when I realized they were talking about Dr. Shades dichotomy and the crackpot racket known as LDS Apologetics.

If you find it online fast forward to minute 24 and kickback.

Otherwise, here is the portion that I find particularly interesting.


Minute 24:

Richard Dawkins: "There is a slipperiness too isn't there, about one way of speaking to sophisticated intellectuals and theologians and another way of speaking to congregations and above all, children... One of the things that I feel is that the sophisticated [intellectuals] will say one thing to each other and to intellectuals generally, but will say something totally different to the congregation. They will talk about miracles... "

Daniel Dennet: "They won't talk to a congregation. When sophisticated theologians try to talk to the preachers they won't have any of it. You've got to realize, sophisticated theology is like stamp collecting. It's a very specialized thing and only a few people do it. They take in their own laundry and they get all excited over some very Arcane details. And their own religions pay almost no attention to what they're saying... because what they say in their writings, at least from my experience, is eye-glazing, mind twisting, very subtle things that which have no particular bearing on life."

(FARMS, anyone?)

Richard Dawkins: "Academic Theologians will attack us for accusing people of taking the scriptures literally, and will say "Of course we don't believe the book of Genesis literally." And yet they do preach about what Adam and Eve did, as if they did exist. As if it is a sort of license to talk about things which they know and anyone with any sophistication knows is fiction, and yet they will treat their congregations, their sheep, as though they did exist. As though they were factual. And a huge number of those congregations think they do exist."


Sam Harris: "They never admit how they come to stop taking it literally. You have all these people criticizing us for our crass literalism, whereas the fundamentalists are the fundamentalists. Yet these moderates don't admit how they have come to be moderate. What does moderation consist of? It consists of having lost faith in all of these propositions, or half of them because of just the hammer blows of science, and secular politics. Religion has lost its mandate on a thousand questions and moderates tend to argue that this is somehow a triumph of faith. As if faith is somehow self enlightening whereas it has been enlightened from the outside. It has been intruded upon by science."


I think Dennet's statement deserves a second look.

"It's a very specialized thing and only a few people do it. They take in their own laundry and they get all excited over some very Arcane details.


And their own religions pay almost no attention to what they're saying... because what they say in their writings, at least from my experience, is eye-glazing, mind twisting, very subtle things that which have no particular bearing on life."

.

[_CaliforniaKid]

Speaking as a former evangelical who gradually liberalized and was still involved in ministry, I can say there's some truth to this. However, I didn't preach about Adam and Eve as if they were real after I stopped believing in a literal Adam and Eve; I just avoided the subject altogether. This wasn't dishonesty on my part; it was just the brute fact of working for an organization and wanting to be true to the principles of that organization while still sharing the good principles I had learned on which we could all agree. In an congregationally-governed evangelical church, where the ignorant mob rules, a minister actually has little freedom to share unorthodox principles. He is not "in charge" of the flock; he is an employee and a servant of that flock. The sheep can depose the shepherd if he shepherds them in a too-controversial direction.

A similar problem exists in churches with a top-down polity, except in those situations it is the conservative leaders at the top who will fire or excommunicate you rather than that initiative coming from the grassroots level. The only reason that mainline denominations like the Methodists, Episcopalians, and the RLDS managed to liberalize so much is that the modernists got into their hierarchies before people fully realized the threat that modernism posed to the essentials of the faith. Ever since the rise of reactionary fundamentalisms in the early twentieth century, denominations have become increasingly polarized and the fundies have been very vigilant about boundary-maintenance where they have the power to do so.

[_Trevor]

I would also add that whereas Mainline Protestant clergy have liberalized in the way that Dawkins et al. discuss here, most LDS apologists have not. It is actually the Sunstone/Dialogue crowd that treats LDS truth claims metaphorically. Apologists are often qualifying things in such a way that they can remain anchored in rock-solid reality somehow. LGT keeps the Book of Mormon in the realm of real, lived events. It is people like me who prefer to see it in mythological terms.

[_Daniel Peterson]

"Imagine someone holding forth on biology," writes the British Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton, a relatively sympathetic reader, "whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology."

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html

[_cksalmon]

In a congregationally-governed evangelical church, where the ignorant mob rules, a minister actually has little freedom to share unorthodox principles. He is not "in charge" of the flock; he is an employee and a servant of that flock. The sheep can depose the shepherd if he shepherds them in a too-controversial direction.

Looks like the embrace is quite complete, Chris. I can't say that I'm surprised you now equate biblical fidelity in an evangelical church to the rule of an "ignorant mob," and, really, I can't even say I'm overly offended.

I don't know exactly what church community you've migrated from, but I will state that my own experience radically contrasts with your own. My pastor is not an employee. He is "in charge" of his flock. And he would rightly be deposed were he to abandon biblical fidelity upon the altar of post-Enlightenment agnosticism.

One of your ignorant mobsters,

Chris

[_antishock8]

Equivocation.

[_GoodK]

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why the FARMS Review (of authors) is the way it is.

"Imagine someone holding forth on biology," writes the British Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton, a relatively sympathetic reader, "whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology."

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html

Forget the argument, the actual substance. Employ the ad hominem. You certainly have me convinced. I'm going to try and smash my face into the wall repeatedly now in hopes of forgetting everything I've ever heard Dawkins say.

[_Daniel Peterson]

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why the FARMS Review (of authors) is the way it is.

"Imagine someone holding forth on biology," writes the British Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton, a relatively sympathetic reader, "whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology."

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html

Forget the argument, the actual substance. Employ the ad hominem. Good work Professor. You certainly have me convinced. I'm going to try and smash my face into the wall repeatedly now in hopes of forgetting everything I've ever heard Dawkins say.

GoodK is absolutely right. As anybody who actually looks at the FARMS Review will quickly learn, it never deals with any arguments at all. It merely calls people names. No evidence is cited. No actual arguments are attempted. No logic is deployed. It never deals with substance. It's entirely ad hominem.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the way the FARMS Review is.

See it, in all its embarrrassing horror, at http://farms.BYU.edu/publications/review/

[_antishock8]

What a joke.

[_Daniel Peterson]

What a joke.

I agree.