SeN takes a cheap shot at Jehovah's Witnesses

[_Gadianton]

Add Jehovah's Witnesses to the list of faith traditions ridiculed by the staff at Sic et Non.

In a new post, a senior staff writer for Sic et Non writes:

Some years ago, I was irritated by a gratuitous insult to my faith in Thomas Cahill’s otherwise interesting book How the Irish Saved Civilization. While discussing the ancient Iranian-born religion of Manichaeism, now long gone but once (for a few centuries) a serious rival to Christianity, Cahill suddenly, out of the blue, compared it to “Mormonism” and to the doctrine of Jehovah’s Witnesses. All three, he said, are shallow and superficial faiths, “full of assertions . . . but yield[ing] no intellectual system to nourish a great intellect.”

Lol! I'm certainly inclined to agree with Cahill on this point, and in fact, many "Mormon Scholars" (an oxymoron?) have made a similar observation, for those who read carefully, and don't melt down in anger immediately as this particular staff writer did.

How does the staff writer respond?

I thought this remarkably unfair. While Jehovah’s Witnesses have been noted over many decades for their disdain for higher education, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have, to put it mildly, not been so known.

Lol! How dare you compare us to those dirty rotten JW's!!

And so it is, another faith tradition is thrown under a bus by the ever divisive Sic et Non blog and discussion board.

The staff writer goes on to list a bunch of Mormon organizations that supposedly show Mormonism is an intellectual faith. I'll let the reader go to the blog to check that long list out, but I will note that listed with "Mormon Interpreter" are several five-man shops all headed by the same old tired ex-FARMS guys.

It really doesn't matter how many Mormons are in the sciences or humanities, Cahill's point was that the faith itself had no intellectual system, which is true, and has been admitted many times by the Brethren, who have castigated the "philosophies of men" as Glen Danielson correctly points out. In recent years, James Faulconer and Kathleen Flake headed up the Yale Conferences, where they made this very same point, that Mormonism has no systematic theology.

That Mormons can go elsewhere to nourish their "great intellects" and then find ways to connect this to their Mormonism says nothing of Mormonism's (Intellectually bankrupt) teachings themselves. BYU has an institute program that goes no deeper than High School seminary, because Mormon doctrine goes no deeper than High School seminary. Sure, you can speculate, you can become a "gospel hobbyist" like the SeN folks have, which Neal A. Maxwell warned against, but none of this says anything about Mormon doctrine itself.

This staff writer is an expert mis-reader if there ever was one. He simply can't defend Mormonism on its own terms, the only argument he can make is that so-and-so with a Phd believes in Mormonism. Really, who gives a damn?

Gemli endures this same kind of misdirection all the time. Any time Gemli tries to get the Mopologists to examine Mormon doctrine in the light of science, the staff there flip out and point to all the Mormons who are scientists. Not the same thing, and in light of Cahill's comment, it's not the same thing to value higher education, and to have an "intellectual system" internal to the faith tradition.

[_moksha]

Too bad the apologist did not point to the story of How Mormonism Saved Civilization with the vast genealogical library and catalogue of DNA samples in its Ancestry.com or at least until Ancestry.com was sold to a multinational corporation with offices in Manhattan and China for $4.7 billion.

[_Physics Guy]

I sort of have to agree with Cahill about the JW faith. I was never interested in joining the JWs, so I have to admit that I may have lacked empathy for their positions, but I was interested enough in them as a phenomenon for a while that I read some JW books, talked with individual Witnesses ranging from one angry old lady whom I met on the street up to an older guy in a suit who must have ranked fairly high because he was authorized to discuss doctrine all by himself without the otherwise inevitable wingman. And I attended one of their Bible studies once.

They seemed to be enthusiastically anti-intellectual. "We keep everything simple" was one of their main selling points. And their Bible study was just reading a passage and asking questions to which the right answer was to parrot back a line from the passage.

A lot of the people participating in their Bible study seemed to be recent immigrants who didn't speak English well, so maybe this study was one that had been especially simplified for their benefit, but as I recall I got invited to it because it was simply the normal JW study in my neighborhood. My impression was that the whole religion was deliberately seeking a target audience of people who were in one way or another cognitively handicapped. All their literature seemed to be lavishly illustrated in a style that reminded me of Bibles for children.

I'm all for serving the cognitively handicapped. They are not lesser people. God loves them the same as everyone, and God has no reason to be particularly keen on human intelligence, because no humans are all that intelligent, and if God really wanted highly intelligent creatures God could raise up geniuses to order from dust.

But what the JWs seemed to be doing looked less like serving the cognitively challenged than like preying upon them. It kind of gave me the heeby-jeebies.

I can't honestly put Mormonism in the same category as the JWs in this respect. I think maybe Peterson has a legitimate beef with Cahill for mentioning his faith and the JWs in the same breath. The point that Cahill was trying to make probably stands, though. Mormons can be deep thinkers but Mormonism as such doesn't seem intellectually deep. "We make everything simple" is a Mormon selling point, too, at least up to a point.

[_Gadianton]

"They seemed to be enthusiastically anti-intellectual. "We keep everything simple" was one of their main selling point."

And that is different from Mormonism, how?

"A lot of the people participating in their Bible study seemed to be recent immigrants who didn't speak English well,"

The growth of Mormonism among intellectual Europeans is staggering, right?

I've had a handful of run-ins with JWs, they reminded me a lot of ourselves as Mormons, except for they were far more serious when representing their faith -- like they were the FBI or something.

"My impression was that the whole religion was deliberately seeking a target audience of people who were in one way or another cognitively handicapped"

Maybe you never saw the discussion pamphlets for Mormonism that were handed out in the 80s and 90s. I don't know about now. Up until the 80s you might have made the point that Mormons are peripherally scholarly, as the Ensign at one time published some thoughtful stuff. But the Brethren pulled the rug out from under that in the 80s.

"God loves them the same as everyone, and God has no reason to be particularly keen on human intelligence"

I totally agree. The idea that intelligence and education wins favor from God is ridiculous out of common sense, but the Bible as I recall, if anything, is anti-Intellectual. The high will be downtrodden and the lowly will be raised. That Peterson considers himself and his friends "stars-on" Sneetches who should be invited to the party by other haughty academic Christians, that they may look down together upon the less educated believers is absurd. It's not as evil as Desnat, but it's still completely vapid. Lou Midgley and Kiwi57 who strut around, presenting themselves as great academics are certainly in the right place.

"But what the JWs seemed to be doing looked less like serving the cognitively challenged than like preying upon them. It kind of gave me the heeby-jeebies."

Sounds like "soccer baptisms". The folks on SeN know all about that.

As an aside, the run-ins I had with JWs didn't leave me feeling they were unintelligent, but they go "by the book", there aren't external "scholarly" sources. A friend of mine told me, at least at one time, there was a single JW Bible scholar who had the degrees and creds, and only he was authorized to write for the faith. Mormon leadership doesn't stamp out third-party Mormon scholars, but they've reaped the problems that go along with turning a blind-eye to it. Just ask Jeffery Holland why he came so unglued: Who wouldn't want more scholars, if they were yours to control?

I went to a Kingdom Hall once with a friend and his GF who as JW. They were nice and even joked around a little before the meeting, which surprised me based on my street encounters. That same friend served a mission in Germany. He said JWs did better than Mormons there because they appealed to a certain kind of hard-nosed German.

[_Gadianton]

Oh, I missed the broader point. You have to understand, Physics Guy, that the apologists have always represented themselves as against criticizing other faiths, in principle. As Kiwi used to say, you must only share your "positive" faith beliefs, and he felt that's what Mormons do. Aside from luring critics to them to draw first blood, so that they may unload their own arsenal, they have shown that they don't really believe this mantra. If they could be on the inside, with the praises of the academic world heaped upon them while they point their fingers at the unscholarly, they would. Their lecturing about respecting the faiths of others is opportunistic only, and not something that they really believe.

But what would you expect of an academic who goes through a drivethrough, and then goes online to make fun of the English spoken by the restaurant staff there?

[_Kishkumen]

Add Jehovah's Witnesses to the list of faith traditions ridiculed by the staff at Sic et Non.

In a new post, a senior staff writer for Sic et Non writes:

Some years ago, I was irritated by a gratuitous insult to my faith in Thomas Cahill’s otherwise interesting book How the Irish Saved Civilization. While discussing the ancient Iranian-born religion of Manichaeism, now long gone but once (for a few centuries) a serious rival to Christianity, Cahill suddenly, out of the blue, compared it to “Mormonism” and to the doctrine of Jehovah’s Witnesses. All three, he said, are shallow and superficial faiths, “full of assertions . . . but yield[ing] no intellectual system to nourish a great intellect.”

Lol! I'm certainly inclined to agree with Cahill on this point, and in fact, many "Mormon Scholars" (an oxymoron?) have made a similar observation, for those who read carefully, and don't melt down in anger immediately as this particular staff writer did.

How does the staff writer respond?

I thought this remarkably unfair. While Jehovah’s Witnesses have been noted over many decades for their disdain for higher education, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have, to put it mildly, not been so known.

Lol! How dare you compare us to those dirty rotten JW's!!

And so it is, another faith tradition is thrown under a bus by the ever divisive Sic et Non blog and discussion board.

The staff writer goes on to list a bunch of Mormon organizations that supposedly show Mormonism is an intellectual faith. I'll let the reader go to the blog to check that long list out, but I will note that listed with "Mormon Interpreter" are several five-man shops all headed by the same old tired ex-FARMS guys.

Too bad, really. I would not denigrate someone else's faith as shallow and superficial. Historically speaking, all of these religions spring from pretty much the same place, so this is just a matter of the snobbery of one group in the same overall tradition looking at others. Manichaeans saw themselves as Christians. Mormons see themselves as Christians. Jehovah's Witnesses see themselves as Christians. Essentially, Cahill is saying that these other versions did not produce Aquinas, so they are crap. I suppose, but the success of one imperial version of Christianity to produce an Aquinas does not make Christianity itself any more or less valuable in any of its manifestations. Not everyone in the world wants to read Aquinas. I suppose those who don't do not count.

That is why Dr. P. continues to baffle me on this point. He is genuinely concerned about the Sister in Parowan, but then he forgets that many such women belong to other churches, and other churches may actually do as good or better in meeting their particular needs.

[_Physics Guy]

My contact with Mormons may well not be a representative sample. I guess I really only know Mormonism from a handful of blogs and boards, which could possibly skew a bit more egghead than the average ward meeting. And so I guess I should also give more benefit of doubt to JWs. I haven't looked at their blogs and boards, if they exist. My JW period was pre-internet.

I haven't really been a lifelong student of smaller religions. I was interested in JWs for a year or so in grad school after some of them knocked on my door, then around ten years ago I got interested in Scientology after Anonymous drew attention to it. My interest had settled down into occasional monitoring when a curious chap posted on an ex-Scientologist board about how he was going to add Operating Thetan powers to his Melchizedek Priesthood powers and use them to solve major problems in computer science. Or something. The board really didn't know where to start with that but it began my current Mormon phase.

[_Lemmie]

My contact with Mormons may well not be a representative sample. I guess I really only know Mormonism from a handful of blogs and boards, which could possibly skew a bit more egghead than the average ward meeting. And so I guess I should also give more benefit of doubt to JWs. I haven't looked at their blogs and boards, if they exist. My JW period was pre-internet.

I haven't really been a lifelong student of smaller religions. I was interested in JWs for a year or so in grad school after some of them knocked on my door, then around ten years ago I got interested in Scientology after Anonymous drew attention to it. My interest had settled down into occasional monitoring when a curious chap posted on an ex-Scientologist board about how he was going to add Operating Thetan powers to his Melchizedek Priesthood powers and use them to solve major problems in computer science. Or something. The board really didn't know where to start with that but it began my current Mormon phase.

Wow. Theta-Melchizedek powers combined? To be used “in” the world even though they are not “of” the world?? No wonder the board was flummoxed. His comments during a F&T meeting must have been quite interesting!

In any case, what an interesting introduction into Mormon world. I’m curious how you found this board? Did you find any other boards first? Was this board recommended?

[Guest]

Too bad, really. I would not denigrate someone else's faith as shallow and superficial. Historically speaking, all of these religions spring from pretty much the same place, so this is just a matter of the snobbery of one group in the same overall tradition looking at others. Manichaeans saw themselves as Christians. Mormons see themselves as Christians. Jehovah's Witnesses see themselves as Christians. Essentially, Cahill is saying that these other versions did not produce Aquinas, so they are crap. I suppose, but the success of one imperial version of Christianity to produce an Aquinas does not make Christianity itself any more or less valuable in any of its manifestations. Not everyone in the world wants to read Aquinas. I suppose those who don't do not count.

I agree with most of this, though at a certain point I do think there is a debate to be had that isn't about snobbery (for another time). Peterson will denigrate all he wants, of course, but I see all of that as an evasion of his obligation he sets for himself in play-acting the role of a Mormon intellectual, because the intellectual value or contribution of a given religious tradition is a relevant question in light of that role. Accepting the premise that a religious tradition relies on an intellectual tradition for longevity and depth, what have Peterson and the FARMS people done about that in the case of Mormonism? What book in the past forty years has come out of their activity that has a had not merely a significant intellectual contribution but has had effects beyond that rarified arena? My god, the guy calls his blog "Sic et Non," presumably a reference to scholasticism, but the value of the scholastics is precisely that their work had significant and long-lasting impact outside of the universities of Paris and Oxford and beyond the high middle ages. What book produced by the FARMSians looks like it might have that kind of impact within Mormonism? Come to think of it, what books have they actually published since Nibley? Sorenson and Skousen are the only ones who come to mind. I find it revealing that Peterson focuses on the Mormon presence in institutions, as if mere membership in a club constitutes intellectual contribution.

The FARMSians seem to take it as a given that Mormonism has intellectual substance merely because of its cosmic claims; their progressive bêtes noires accept the standard academic assumption that the concept of intellectual substance is simply a tool of power. The result from both camps is blithering nonsense. Peterson can disturb this balance of vapidity by publishing his multi-volume Mormon Summa he promised long ago—any news on a publication date yet?

I would, of course, agree with Mr. Cahill that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints hasn’t yet produced its equivalent of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. However, mainstream Christianity took twelve centuries to produce St. Thomas — he died in March 1274; it’s not coincidental, by the way, that one of my sons, born on that same date, bears his name — and the Restoration, not yet two centuries old, doesn’t seem to me to be doing dramatically worse on the intellectual front than the early Christians were at roughly AD 218.

He named his son after Thomas Aquinas, so that must be a start. But again, this personality behind the blog called "Sic et Non" seems wholly unaware of the whole Christian tradition going back to the sub-apostolic age. Let's start with that: who is the Mormon equivalent of Justin Martyr—Hugh Nibley, I suppose is more of a Tertullian—and any day now we should get our Aristides of Athens or Athenagoras or Tatian or Quadratus any other number of early Christian parallels. But let's not play that silly game; let's instead recognize that each of these were early parts of a tradition that already produced an Augustine or Maximus the Confessor—let's leave Aquinas or Abelard out of this for now—so where is that Mormon tradition in the making?

Moreover, for various reasons, I’m not convinced that Latter-day Saints should generate their own Summa Theologica. And St. Thomas himself might agree with me on that. The famous story is told of some sort of revelation given to him on 6 December 1273, roughly four months prior to his death, in the Dominican monastery at Naples. Although his works are voluminous, St. Thomas never wrote another line thereafter. He dictated nothing more to his socius, Reginald of Piperno. When Reginald begged him to continue with his work, Thomas replied “Reginald, I cannot, because all that I have written seems like straw to me [mihi videtur ut palea].”

He completely misses the point of this story. It's not that St. Thomas was suddenly struck by a sense that it had all been in vain—thus, there would be no reason for Mormons to engage in this futile process is how Peterson takes it—but that this experience showed St. Thomas (and really, the listeners to this story) that even St. Thomas had barely scratched the surface of understanding. It is not an illustration of futility, as Peterson takes it, but an admiration of St. Thomas through the paradoxical expression of his humility. It is meant to motivate one to study in humility, not to take refuge in platitudes and evade the hard work of faithful intellection.

Failure to produce a Summa is not, in my judgment, tantamount to shallow superficiality. There is, I’m convinced, great depth in the doctrines of the Restoration — whether or not we’ve done much thus far to explore that depth.

Yes, for example? He's had forty years to feel St. Thomas's scratch marks. Nothing from this entry, or any other on his blog, suggests that he's been convinced this great intellectual depth exists because, as he would have us believe, he has waded into it. We get nothing but splashing in shallow puddles from Sic et Non. It is a travesty that this blog title appears in Google just beneath the Wikipedia of the real Sic et Non. It should be many, many pages away from that venerable work.

But the Church and the Gospel aren’t intended solely or even primarily for Thomist philosophers or Hegelians. Our services and Sunday school classes aren’t academic seminars in historiography or systematic theology. Like every other broad demographic group, the Saints are mostly people who don’t spend hours each day worrying about ontology, epistemology, counterfactual conditionals, or Angst in the works of Sartre. And the saving message of the Gospel is for them, every bit as much as it is for intellectuals and artistes.

Again, completely missing the point of what people like St. Thomas accomplished and the point of fostering an intellectual tradition in the first place. And as it turns out, Mormons who think about Mormonism for more than a few minutes and then go online to explore their curious actually are confronted by serious questions of ontology, epistemology, counterfactual conditionals ("what if I had experienced more of life before dropping two years of my life, ten years of tithing, and having three kids with this person..."?) and experience tremendous angst.

Only an intellectual could retreat like this into a soft bed of cheap platitudes, supported by nothing but half-grasped anecdotes: "You commoners don't need to worry about this stuff—trust me, for I named my son after a famous smart person and I am a smart person for a living!—just go to church and be content with what they give you there. Beyond that, it's much too difficult to understand. Just leave that to me."

[_Physics Guy]

Not just straw, but Utah straw. No wonder Thomas never wrote more.

Duns Supreme Court was understandably discouraged as well, I would guess.