Kishkumen wrote:My take on this is that you are nitpicking. I am not surprised that you are, since you have a habit of very closely scrutinizing. I think the question is not how thorough and painstakingly accurate the captions of the photos are (they are captions, so get a grip!), but rather whether they seem calculated to misrepresent or harm the LDS Church.
It doesn't matter whether they are "calculated" to misrepresent or harm the LDS church. The only thing that matters is if they
do misrepresent the LDS church.
You seem willing to give Shumway a free pass just so long as his intentions are good. My
modus operandi is to look at the net effect, not the intent.
I think you would be hard pressed to come to such a conclusion, unless you are accustomed to overreacting to representations of the LDS Church that do not fit the positive-PR mold.
You're right. He probably didn't think through what he wrote. But that doesn't give him a free pass for being misleading.
Again, Shades, you are demanding that captions under photos be written in such a thorough and painstaking fashion so as to prevent any possibility of misunderstanding the stances of a Church that cannot even be consistently and coherently accounted for by the apologists themselves.
No, I'm only suggesting that blatant inaccuracies should be avoided. Just because the apologists can't consistently and coherently account for the stances of the church doesn't mean we can't agree on some fundamentals, like whether or not Mormons have horns, for example.
In essence, this is an implicit gag order on anyone who does not fawn on the LDS Church and/or have a well-crafted PR-style message.
I hope that's not what you think I'm doing.
Think about what you are saying, Shades. You have got it back asswards. He started with photos. He did not start with a list of items he wanted to praise or smear the Church with. The statements were written in such a way that they could tie the pictures to his experience of LDS culture. In that, they do not do such a bad job.
It doesn't matter where he started. The only thing that matters is whether or not his statements are accurate. If he had said that "In my family, _____ held true," there wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, he said that "In Mormonism, _____ holds true" . . . thus rightfully opening himself up to scrutiny.
If you want to, you can go find pictures of Moroni, the gold plates, and polygamists in order to put together your own photo essay that really is designed to make the Church look weird. It seems to me that this is almost the opposite of what Shumway was trying to do.
Right, but my captions would have to be accurate. If they weren't accurate, then I would need to be censured.
You are grossly inflating the significance of the inaccuracies because you are picky, and you wrongly assume that he was trying to ridicule or criticize Mormonism.
He seemed to go out of his way to make it appear more cultish than it actually is. Either that, or he's extremely sloppy.
What he was doing--expressing in photos and words his own tense relationship with his family and the religious culture he grew up with--is much more nuanced and really has little to do with making the LDS Church look bad.
I get that. But that doesn't give him a free pass when it comes to his captions being misleading.
There really is no good reason to be inaccurate--"Nuance" notwithstanding.
"Finally, for your rather strange idea that miracles are somehow linked to the amount of gay sexual gratification that is taking place would require that primitive Christianity was launched by gay sex, would it not?"
--Louis Midgley
