McGuire, at MDD board, wrote:
...Here is the challenge - your frustration is over discrepancies between the various explanations and descriptions that the LDS Church has offered over time, and what you perceive as the reality. At this stage in my life, I have no interest in discussing what frustrates you. I have no interest in defending the Church on these points - other than to point out that I think that there are reasonable explanations for the narrative that the Church presented and the way that it changed (even if I don't agree with the reasons, and even if I don't agree with the explanations or narratives). I have three interests -
1: I am interested in the way that early Mormonism produced scripture. There are a lot of facets to this - but my interested is rooted in contextualizing the claims about the production of that scripture (in this case the translations) within my post-structuralist and post-modernist worldview. To this end, I am interested, for example, in discussing how the process of translation (of the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham) function in terms of communicative acts. I am interested in how the language of the texts reflects the potential for being a translation. If you have read my presentation (that I linked earlier) you would see where Skousen and I have very different views of certain aspects of the process for these texts and what the implications of those aspects are. In particular, I am interested in the difference that it makes for us to understand Joseph as a reader and not as an author of translation. This is part of the reason why I engaged this thread.
2: I am interested in the history of the narrative. That is, I am interested in how the discussion about the translation of the texts changes over time. It is fascinating to me, for example, that our dialogue in the LDS Church about translation of scripture shifts dramatically around the beginning of the 20th century with the widespread introduction of higher criticism injected into that translation process. Part of what fascinates me is how the LDS Church reverses its position in some ways about what makes a translation good or reliable. In particular, I am highly interested in the ways in which the descriptions about the translations and the texts are appropriated from other contexts and other texts - and the way that these ideas, once presented, spread and influence later discourse in the LDS Church.
3: I am interested in the purely philosophical questions about meaning and the way that we read.
So, we get to this discussion. You wanted, I think, to have a discussion about the Church's role in getting people to believe something that wasn't accurate - and how Skousen's perspective runs counter to much of what the LDS Church has taught over the past century about translation. I don't disagree with this. And at the same time it isn't of any interest to me. I would never have engaged if I had understood that issue. Don't get me wrong, I can sympathize with people who are left trying to understand how they should feel about these kinds of discrepancies. I just don't have the patience for it. I also don't have a lot of patience for people who want to insist that the Church's view on translation has been a monolithic view since the very beginning. This doesn't fit with the history that we have available to us now. Finally, it was irritating in that I recognized that there was a gap between what you were talking about and what I was talking about - and when I asked you, you suggested that I was merely being an apologist trying to reframe the issue. This wasn't my goal - it was an attempt to discover where (if anywhere) we had compatible foundations from which to discuss...
Wow. I have wondered how apologists deal with the issues. They 'have no interest in what frustrates' others. and this--this is just surreal:
"I have no interest in defending the Church on these points - other than to point out that I think that there are reasonable explanations for the narrative that the Church presented and the way that it changed (even if I don't agree with the reasons, and even if I don't agree with the explanations or narratives)."
They simply have "no interest" in defending what they don't agree with, but they still see Smith as a reader of translation, not the author. Well, except for the Book of Abraham because we have the papyrus and we know he didn't correctly "read" a translation.
Good thing we don't still have the gold plates or we might have to conclude Smith didn't accurately "read" that "translation" either!! And then of course we could handwave that issue away by simply having no interest in defending the LDS church's position.
What a way to compartmentalize.
