Kishkumen wrote:OK, many of the photographs are pretty. A few of them are lame. And the comments are amazing. I am, of course, gratified by those that stick up for Mr. Shumway. Also, I don't see that the captions are all that bad. They don't strike me as particularly inaccurate. At my house we did not watch TV until Wild Kingdom and Disney came on in the evening.
As one guy comments, very accurately I might add, area and local leaders often have come out with these micromanaging pronouncements about what people should be doing. For example, early in the 2000s, my in-laws' stake had a directive about women wearing pantyhose. They were told that they needed to wear pantyhose to church meetings. One of my BYU profs, who was serving as bishop, was told by his leaders that he must ask marrieds whether they engaged in oral sex. That was in the nineties!
So, how strange are these captions after all? They are actually quite mild compared to what they might have been.
What I find amusing is when mopologists try to ditch an individual's Mormon experience by chalking up certain aspects to that individual's "rogue" local LDS leaders. The weekly, and in some cases day-to-day, experience of Mormonism depends on what one's local LDS leaders do and say. The COB makes it possible, even if it does not endorse explicitly every thing that every SP and bishop and Relief Society president does and says. The COB builds the meeting houses, through the down-chain selects those in a stake or ward to be its leaders (through God's inspiration, right?), provides 'training', provides correlated lesson materials (that, as Darth J's posts repeatedly demonstrate, put mopologists at odds with the COB), and guidelines (CHI) for how the local leaders are to handle things.
In sum, the Church is not just the COB. It is not just NAMIRS--sorry to deflate your ego, DCP, on this fine Sunday morning. It is the collection of it all, right down to the Sunday School teacher for the 9 year olds in Seattle that abused one of those young girls, and how the upchain reacted to it. It is how it litigates in the courts (including paying out rather than disclosing its secret finances). It includes how the Church handles its PR, such as apostle Oaks first denying that the FP/12 was dealing with Hoffman, causing Oaks to eat crow the next day admitting they had been. Part and parcel of Mormonism is its real estate developments, both in the lavish, extravagant spending on City Creek Mall in downtown SLC and in causing poor people to be evicted from the low-end motel homes in blighted Ogden in the middle of winter, just a week or two before Christmas because the area surrounding the Ogden Temple needs sprucing up.
Mopologetics is the practice of denuding that which once made Mormonism a rich religious and social culture, a peculiar people. It is also the act of paring down to the unfalsifiable--something mainstream Christianity had honed for centuries, resulting in the unfalsifiable religious product that the LDS Church now hankers for. It is an intellectually dishonest exercise that when all is said and done, leaves Mormonism as nothing but an allegiance to the COB. The pace at which this has been achieved in the last 27 years is remarkable.
But keep in mind DCP and your mopologetic minions, if there was anything once worth having faith in (believing in the absence of evidence), you are chopping it down like the fanciful story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. Only you all are lying to yourselves about what you're accomplishing there at NAMIRS.
