RayAgostini wrote:
That's the argument I've often read here, and elsewhere, that MAD-style apologetics has turned many away from the Church. It made me quite anti-Mormon for a while.
My mistake. I thought you had written MormonDiscussions.com, not MD*D*B. I know that a number of Mormon Dialogue & Discussion Board exiles have come here after being trashed there, so doubtless it has helped some people along the road to apostasy. Whether that number competes with the Tanners or not I can't say. The Tanners have been around many years.
Ray A wrote:
I'm not only taking about missionaries, but stake presidents and bishops. I think you grossly underestimate their general ignorance of these matters.
Ray, you are free to feel as unconcerned as you like about all of this. I am concerned about my friend John Dehlin. To me the matter is not some abstract issue about what the real chances are. For me it is a matter of personal connection with John. I don't want him to have to deal with the Mopologetic slam in one of their "scholarly" journals.
If your average bishop "Down Under" does not know DCP, I am not sure what that proves about your average bishop in Utah. BYU is much more a part of the Utah world than it is the Australian mindscape, I would imagine.
Ray A wrote:
What also puzzles me is that anyone would think that should this "hit piece" be censored, and that's what it amounts to, it's going to come out anyway, in other forms, in other publications, on FAIR, and FAIRWiki, and on the FAIR blog.
You delude yourself.
Might as well tackle it head-on once and for all.
Ha! That's hilarious, Ray. I have
no doubt whatsoever that these weasels will continue to do their dirty work. If anyone is deluded here, I think it is you. You seem to grant absolutely no significance to the existence of pseudo-scholarly print journals that the LDS Church spends good money to support and house at BYU. They don't publish this stuff for ____ and giggles, Ray. They do because scholarly journals lend a certain authority to words that wikipedia does not. Doubtless they will continue on their smear parade in whatever sneaky, underhanded ways they can. But their little slams in wikipedia don't carry the same weight as a 100-page hardcopy journal article written in scholarese.