a five+ year crusade of character assassination

[_harmony]

And this, my dear sock puppet, is why I'm consistently so fond of you. :-)

You'll get a bad wrap around here posting publicly such a thing.

My rep will stand it. ;-)

[_Kishkumen]

Brilliant.

"The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a stiflingly paternalistic bureaucracy whose chief product is the shotgun wedding of 19th-century magical tall-tales and a fantasy Ozzie and Harriet worldview. Its paid gerontocracy does not exist to serve, but to be served, while the members of that gerontocracy earn their widow's mite by churning out a never-ending stream of vapid Chicken Soup for the Soul type of pabulum mixed in with their personal neuroses and arbitrary value judgments that become Mormon cultural taboos. The Church asks for everything but gives nothing back.

'Give us 10% of your money, and numerous other ecclesiastical levies besides that. Give us vast swaths of your personal time, too, and rearrange your life around your fealty to the organization. In return, we will give you, alternatively, guilt trips based on superstition and platitudes based on largely fictitious and boring anecdotes.'

Obedience for its own sake is the Church's central message. The deep thoughts from the Church's purported living prophet are like a maudlin Hallmark card. There is nothing particularly profound, interesting, insightful, or rewarding about faithful membership in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."

The statement above cannot be taken as a negative or critical statement. No matter how you spin it, I am commenting on a false identity and a fake pseudonym (excuse the redundancy "fake pseudonym"). There is no such entity as "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." It is a pseudonym. There IS an entity that actually exists that is called "Corporation of the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." But I did not say anything about that entity in my above statement. I only mentioned the "false identity and fake pseudonym" of "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." So as long as the name isn't real, the criticism isn't real, either.

[_Kishkumen]

My sense of what Doctor Scratch does is that he mirrors what he sees LDS apologists doing to others. Do apologists make it personal? Most definitely so. No question. They have commented disparagingly on the personal lives and moral character of their targets in public with the idea that tit for tat is called for in the pursuit of the sacred cause of defending the Gospel.

I am at a loss as to what motivates a person who professes outrage at Doctor Scratch's persecution making an issue of the Doctor on other boards. I find the whole notion perplexing. Clearly the target must believe on some level that Scratch's outrages would not get sufficient attention were they not publicized elsewhere. Is Scratch's public smear campaign not well known enough? How much of an outrage or how damaging can it be if it is limited to this insignificant outpost of the internet?

One really has to wonder.

[_harmony]

My sense of what Doctor Scratch does is that he mirrors what he sees LDS apologists doing to others.

It wasn't effective in encouraging behavioral change when Wade did it either.

[_Kishkumen]

It wasn't effective in encouraging behavioral change when Wade did it either.

Wade is mentally challenged. Almost nothing he does could be called effective.

[_Doctor Scratch]

for what it's worth, I have never viewed my posts as being a "mirror" of what the Mopologists do. As to whether or not my postings have led to change in Mopologetics.... It's probably impossible to say one way or another, though there have clearly been substantial changes in the World of Mopologia since I began posting. For example, shortly after I launched "Mr. Scratch's Guide to FAIR," I received an odd note from FAIR Chair John Lynch, and soon after that, FAIR dumped the messageboard, after which it was reborn as the aptly named MAD board. Did my commentaries contribute to this in any way? I don't know. It's possible, I guess.

[_Kishkumen]

for what it's worth, I have never viewed my posts as being a "mirror" of what the Mopologists do.

I suppose not exactly, but there are some similarities.

[_sock puppet]

I don't think Dr Scratch's Mopologetic critique posts have been deliberately designed to use NAMIRS/FAIR tactics on them, but I do think that there are some similarities. NAMIRS/FAIR calls into questions the motives and methods of those who write Mormon critiques. Dr Scratch's threads/posts call into question the motives and methods--and impact and effect--of NAMIRS/FAIR themselves. There's an irony that the focuses are similar.

[_Kishkumen]

All I know is that my Mission to the Mopologists is over. I no longer really care about how LDS apologetics goes. I used to care very passionately, since, in a sense, apologetics had a huge impact on me. Now I have become convinced that the enterprise is completely marginal, and, as far as the LDS Church and Mormonism is concerned, a footnote. Do the apologists have a role? I am sure they do, but they have little to offer me and I don't really expect much of anything out of them.

As LDS authors go, I will always have a fondness for Hugh Nibley, and I enjoy some other writings by folks who engage in apologetics, even those of Daniel Peterson, but for the most part apologetics has little to offer me, and my desire to engage apologists decreases with each passing month.

Now my Mormon interests have taken a much more abstract turn. The late Anton La Vey used to play Tin Pan Alley tunes on his synthesizers, thinking that he could send the energies of this music, which he considered to be the most Satanic of all, out into the cosmos. I will content myself with my scholarship on Jaredites, my Jaredite artistic projects (Lumen Kishkumen), and chatting with friends here. The Reverend's ministry has turned a new leaf, the seeds of which were planted earlier this year.

That said, I feel badly for apologists who behave poorly on occasion and attract negative attention. Funny how those things tend to go together.

[_Drifting]

Isn't it entirely possible that DCP and Scratch are one and the same in real life identity?

We all know that DCP craves attention and noteriety. What has given him that attention and noteriety more than Dr Scratch over the past five years? In fact, Dr Scratch, instead of harming DCP's reputation has only served to enhance it in a kind of subtle back door kind of way. Giving DCP ammunition to say to his peers and GA contacts - "look how much they fear the work I'm doing, look at how hard i'm fighting the good fight" etc.

DCP didn't run away from Scratch - in fact he ALWAYS engaged him.
He only ran away when Buffalo and Stak shined the spotlight on some things he wished to avoid engaging in - factual and reasonable points.
No, Dr Scratch always got (and still gets) his attention.

Perhaps the frequent quoting of each other in their respective signatures is merely egotistical laughing up the online sleeve, feeding himself lines.

Perhaps the recent truce based on DCP not having time to post online was truer than we thought as he had to maintain more than one identity. And that he has recently found that his experiment to operate without his Scratch persona actively pursuing him - his noteriety dwindles to the point where he is a becomes a bit of a sad 'also ran'.

Didn't the Cafeteria crash and burn when the going got tough for DCP to hold court without dissenters? And who, in part was the catalyst for its downfall, when he posted content from the Cafeteria on this board....Scratch.

Hmmm...

There are things harder to believe than the hypothesis that Dr Scratch is merely a long term self publicity vehicle created and operated by DCP himself...