beastie wrote: Of course in an open, evenly moderated situation, believers are going to be continually frustrated. It's not that critics are smarter or better debaters. It's just that critics don't have the handicap that believers do: trying to defend what is often simply indefensible. So the game has to be rigged.
That is, in my experience, true of all boards in which LDS believers discuss with former believers or non-believers.
The fact that the CoJCoLDS originated in a relatively recent period, from which lots of non-church evidence survives, as well as the audacious nature of some of the claims it makes (think Book of Abraham) makes their task just next to impossible in an open forum. I would make an exception for encounters with naïve evangelical Christians, whom they sometimes succeed in silencing by showing (in effect) that their critics' beliefs are as weird as their own (that's not quite how they put it).
Beastie's characterization is also true of this board.
The only way it could really succeed in making LDS believers comfortable en masse would be to enact strict controls on how far arguments can be pressed, and how critical one is allowed to be of a retreating opponent. That is just not going to happen, so there will always be only a small number of TBM posters active at any given time. The ones who stick around will be mostly the thick-skinned, the obsessive and those with the gift of ignoring arguments and evidence that don't suit them. I name no names. And of course there are also those who are really on their way out anyway.