Stormy Waters wrote:So if the church is open and honest about it's history and the difficult issues as you suggest, why is he being subjected to church discipline? What's his crime?
First of all, I don't believe excommunicating him is a good idea at all, because it's only going to bring more negative attention to the Church, as happened with the September Six. As for the problem with openness in regard to history,
Nevo did a post on MDDB which reflects my sentiments. For those who can't read MDDB:
Does the Church actively "hide" its history? Not really. Very little is actually hidden from public view. But the correlated version of history that the Church teaches its members necessarily omits anything that might tend to undermine faith. As a result, most members know little or nothing about Joseph Smith's money-digging activities, his 1826 trial, his secret marriages to already-married women and teenage housemaids, the Kinderhook Plates, etc. This is understandable on the Church's part, perhaps even justified, but it does set people up for disillusionment.
I am heartened to see the Church moving toward greater openness and transparency. There will always be a number of members who will remain uninformed about and largely uninterested in LDS history, but fewer and fewer members will find themselves broadsided by disclosures of the sort found in Grant Palmer's An Insider's View of Mormon Origins or Fawn Brodie's No Man Knows My History.
I think an important issue here is - whether one receives information, or "learns the truth about the past" from Mormon, non-Mormon, or anti-Mormon sources, will they continue to believe, as in "TBM belief"? Frankly, I can't see the Church coming out and willingly exposing itself to criticism. That is not only a fact of human nature, but organisational nature. If you kept a private journal and wrote many personal things therein that could expose you to public ridicule, or to ridicule because you didn't explain every single motivation for your actions, would you be happy to see that serialised in
The New York Times?
Also, what we are talking about here, too, is the "selection process". The Church does it, and sites like Mormon Think do it. It has been said that it's not necessarily a historian's writings,
per se, which reveal his/her bias, but the material they
select to weave their story, or his-story. Likewise, we reveal our own biases by what we choose to read, or not read. Though we hear many LDS saying they won't touch "anti-materials", there are many cases where exmos, having exited the Church, refuse to furthermore read too deeply (or at all) into "apologetic sources". Both feel threatened, one by the fear of losing faith, and the other by the fear that "it might be true after all", or just contempt that others cannot see what is "so obvious" to them, that "it's all a fraud".
