Just because Bradford sees the necessity of studying other viewpoints does not mean that he sees everything as relative.
So do I. So does Daniel. So do most, if not all LDS scholars. You'd be interested, among my massive personal library, in the many books on religions, living and dead, other than my own. That, again, is not the point. Bradford did not have to destroy NMI/FARMS as originally conceived to follow his vision. Another wing or division of NMI would have worked just fine - unless one conceives of the original FARMS project as fundamenally illegitimate and therefore, in a sense "doesn't want to be seen with it."
He probably believes the Gospel of Jesus Christ (LDS) is the Truth, but as an academic he understands the necessity and importance of being able to engage other viewpoints from a position of understanding.
This is irrelevant. FARMS has been doing precisely that since its inception. I've spent a significant portion of my adult life studying (among other things) other religions "from a perspective of understanding" and personal interest. I also have a bias and underlying privileged perspective - the restored gospel - and this has never interfered, in the slightest, in my interest in and study of other religions.
If you begin with the assumption that your way is the right way, and your education is dominated by partisan views without any thorough exposure to different methodologies and viewpoints, then your work will be of limited value as a result.
Nonsense. This is an assumption and preconception on your part, and nothing more. There is no necessary reason to believe that a bias or belief that something is right precludes scholarly study of other systems of belief one understands to be wrong or otherwise lacking in some manner.
Scholarship is nothing more than the disciplined and methodical study of something and its
accurate description to others. So long as one is able to honestly and as accurately as possible, describe and explain a system of belief (say Taoism) in an intellectually substantive and scholarly way, bias is not an issue. One can also compare and contrast Taoism with the gospel (the bias) in an intellectually substantive and scholarly way, looking for areas of agreement as well as divergence. This is also a legitimate scholarly pursuit.
The problem only arises when one's bias causes one to misrepresent or characterize another religion for polemical purposes (one reason the Nag Hammadi manuscripts are so important), but that is a matter of intellectual honesty, personal integrity, and/or psychological temperament, not the existence of bias per se.
We can take, for example, Hamblin on the issue of Freemasonry and the endowment. Anyone with real training in Anthropology, Ritual Studies, Religious Studies, and the like, will not be at all threatened by the implications of Joseph Smith drawing on symbolic systems in his environment as he set about restoring the endowment ceremony. Christianity was revealed via the same means in its time.
And now here comes a paragraph of polemical frothing on subjects upon which it is not at all clear to me that you know what your talking about, but which your authoritative tone would like to make appear so.
While anyone trained in the above heavily theoretic and conjectural disciplines (which doesn't make them bad or unworthwhile, just, as with most of the humanities and social sciences, theory rich and data poor) may look at the origin of the Temple endowment that way, not being trained in the gospel of Jesus Christ and in the Temple endowment itself renders these purely secular perspectives moot since - precisely - those who approach the gospel in such a narrow, naturalistic manner are not competent to judge the material with which they are working.
Hamblin approaches the Temple as
both a scholar and one who has partaken of its ordinances and received a witness to their truth through the Holy Spirit. Bill Hamblin knows things about the origin of the Temple that a secular anthropologist can only infer and guess at based upon the surface phenomena within his intellectual frame of reference.
And that's where it ends.
But Hamblin flips out and sticks his fingers in his ears whenever he is shown to be a complete ignoramus on the subject of Freemasonry and its relationship with Early Mormonism. That's what you get for lacking the proper training to hold forth constructively on a subject, and it is a damn shame, since people like you take what he says seriously. Kerry Shirts, however, knows that Hamblin is full of crap on this point.
That's the first time I've ever seen Shirts defended in this forum. Ever. Is he your mascot now? I like some of what Shirts has written over the years. I'm dubious about other things he has said. But this isn't about Shirts vs. Hamblin. We know, because of a number of Masons who are also Mormons who have written about this subject, that the Masonic rituals contain both similarities and substantial differences.
Ancient Egyptian ritual drama regarding the journey through mortality and the passage of the spirit into the afterworld are much closer, if you wish real parallels, as are the mysteries of Cyril. The problem is that both the Masonic (an apostate form, from an LDS perspective) and the Temple endowment (the true, revealed pattern) rituals have ancient origins, but a secular anthropologist - especially given the theoretical biases (privileged intellectual template) of that discipline, is only going to be capable of discerning a linear, cause and effect derivative relationship going no further than the 19th century. A fatal error, but only to be expected from a purely naturalist, secular perspective.
