Plur1bus: Apple TV+'s indictment of Mormonism

[Limnor]

Syed quotes Leon Festinger (the guy who studied The Seekers) saying something like "The more someone has sacrificed for a belief, the harder it becomes to abandon it — even when that belief is shown to be false."

Something similar happened with the Millerites and the “Great Disappointment.” The disappointed faithful just redefined what fulfillment meant.

[malkie]

Do you see how they managed to gaslight themselves in order to protect what they wanted to believe? They convinced themselves that the wrong road was the right road to take, and taking the right road initially would have been the wrong road, so they really did experience revelation and God's lie wasn't really lying. Get it?

Yeah I think I get it. Trust is maintained because revelation is always correct after you get where you didn’t know you were going. It’s the hoppy taw hopscotch game.

I’ve been thinking about who bears the burden—or fault if you want to look at it that way. Joseph seems to bear responsibility for introducing the idea that revelation can be wrong but still right in purpose. But the believer bears responsibility for consent, for accepting that trust no longer requires truthfulness, only getting where they want to go. And sometimes getting where they didn’t want to go, until it is explained that the believer really did want to go there.

Makes me think of the sick members who are required to have the faith not to be healed - they may not want to go there either.

[Equality]

Yeah I think I get it. Trust is maintained because revelation is always correct after you get where you didn’t know you were going. It’s the hoppy taw hopscotch game.

I’ve been thinking about who bears the burden—or fault if you want to look at it that way. Joseph seems to bear responsibility for introducing the idea that revelation can be wrong but still right in purpose. But the believer bears responsibility for consent, for accepting that trust no longer requires truthfulness, only getting where they want to go. And sometimes getting where they didn’t want to go, until it is explained that the believer really did want to go there.

There's an example in book (I think it's Black Box Thinking by Syed) where he references a UFO Doomsday cult (The Seekers). The cult was lead by a charismatic leader (actually a female in this case) who prophesied that the world would be destroyed by a flood on a specific date. Her followers committed to the prophesy, they gave up jobs, relationships, money etc because they believed that a UFO would arrive and rescue them before the apocalypse. The specific date for the doomsday event came and went. Nothing happened. Instead of turning on the leader whose prophesy had failed, and instead of abandoning the now demonstrably incorrect belief, the core followers simply reframed the failure. They claimed that their faith had saved the world from disaster. The world had been spared because of their devotion. The failed prophesy became "proof" of their importance and of the correctness of their beliefs. In other words, the failure strengthened their belief, and they doubled down on it, rather than weakening it. Core Mormons are on the same spectrum as the The Seekers.

Syed quotes Leon Festinger (the guy who studied The Seekers) saying something like "The more someone has sacrificed for a belief, the harder it becomes to abandon it — even when that belief is shown to be false."

I think you are referring to Leon Festinger's book When Prophecy Fails, which is a classic (even if the experiment itself would not pass ethical muster today).

I discuss it in connection with the Trump cult in one of my 5 blog posts on the Epstein files at my Substack:

https://shazbotvexed.substack.com/p/the ... irect=true