Clark Goble Has Passed Away.

[_Uther]

Just chatted with him a few days ago, and am sad to hear of his sudden passing. Young children losing their father is a harsh reality indeed. He was the type of guy that leaves me with positive hopes for Mormonism.

Sometimes I catch myself in contemplating the words "there are other worlds than these", with a hope that somwhere on a plane ortagonal to the event horizon, there is a place where the human light and love, memmory, intelect and relation will remain beyond time, instead of fading away like drawings on a sandy shore.

[_MsJack]

I am so sorry to hear this. I knew of him but don't believe I ever interacted with him.

My condolences to his family.

[Guest]

Just chatted with him a few days ago, and am sad to hear of his sudden passing. Young children losing their father is a harsh reality indeed. He was the type of guy that leaves me with positive hopes for Mormonism.

Sometimes I catch myself in contemplating the words "there are other worlds than these", with a hope that somwhere on a plane ortagonal to the event horizon, there is a place where the human light and love, memmory, intelect and relation will remain beyond time, instead of fading away like drawings on a sandy shore.

Sounds like you knew him better than most of us did, Uther. Did you chat with him occasionally? Frequently?

In any case, I was a lot more upset by this than I thought I would be because, whatever my disagreement with him on various issues, I could expect that he would at least know his way around a lot of the out-of-the-way points. I enjoyed it when he recommended that I look into Don Bradley's work. And, I have to hand it to him--he actually posted here. So many people now avoid this place like the plague.

[_Kishkumen]

Oh my, this one is so very very sad. He was a good guy.

He was my introduction to Mormonism on the internet. Many years ago I was interested in philosophical aspects of Mormonism so I typed "philosophy Mormonism" into Google and the first page I ever visited on the subject was Goble's Mormon Metaphysics. I posted a lot there for a few months enjoying the conversation while it lasted. He would have a burst of posts and then go silent for weeks or months. The first time it happened I was sad and missed the conversation partner.

We share a lot in common. Both BYU physics majors, he graduated 5 years before me. We both had a lot of interests in philosophy. We both ended up in programming. So sad and scary when someone so close in interests and age passes away. I hope his family is well and wish the best for them.

This one hits closer to home for you than it does for many of us, although, I must admit, as far as age goes it hits close to home for me too. I lost a high-school friend to a brain aneurysm a couple of years ago. He was 50.

Perhaps the best way I can remember Clark is by reading more of what he wrote. I am glad the internet has preserved quite a bit of that for us.

[_Kishkumen]

This just hurts my heart. I'm sorry to hear this. I was decent friends with him, but when I figured out things wouldn't work for me, he never condemned me or made fun of me but always willing to talk and share his ideas and insights. I enjoyed bantering with him. I wish the best for all his family. A sad day.

I am sorry for your loss, Philo. Of all of us here, it seems you knew Clark best. In fact, from my perspective, you and Clark practically belonged to the same small sub-tribe of Mormon geeks. I like to think that I am a peripheral member of the same sub-tribe, and this is why the death of a man with whom I never conversed in person hits me harder than one would otherwise suppose.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Sometimes I catch myself in contemplating the words "there are other worlds than these", with a hope that somewhere on a plane ortogonal to the event horizon, there is a place where the human light and love, memory, intellect and relation will remain beyond time, instead of fading away like drawings on a sandy shore.

That's beautiful. I hope his family is able to move forward knowing they had a good man, a good father, and a great example of how to be within the scope of living here in Utah.

As a side note, when I discovered he worked at Los Alamos and was a physicist, to whatever degree he was, it elicited fond feelings I have for an ex-FIL who is also a physicist out at Los Alamos. The people I met out there were a different breed, and one couldn't help but admire their thinking and the lives they lead. They're very interesting, as was Mr. Goble.

- Doc

[_Stem]

I'll miss him. I think I've had hundreds (perhaps reaching into the thousands) of conversations with him over the years. They were always pleasant. I don't remember any being unpleasant. On top of that I think he really tried to hear and understand what others were saying, even if it sometimes delved into talking past each other or got hung up on misunderstanding. I don't think he was oversold on his position, and frequently accepted the agree to disagree end. He took seriously critical thinking and accepted, it seems to me for the most part, that assumptions ought to be challenged. I saw him tangle with the faithful and the critical, and he did so with goodness and grace, for the most part.

I too ventured to his blog over the years and found him insightful. I don't' mean to over-praise him...but he was a good guy, in my estimation. I had a feeling he wasn't very old and at times mentioned his family. I could tell he was devoted to them.

[_Kishkumen]

I'll miss him. I think I've had hundreds (perhaps reaching into the thousands) of conversations with him over the years. They were always pleasant. I don't remember any being unpleasant. On top of that I think he really tried to hear and understand what others were saying, even if it sometimes delved into talking past each other or got hung up on misunderstanding. I don't think he was oversold on his position, and frequently accepted the agree to disagree end. He took seriously critical thinking and accepted, it seems to me for the most part, that assumptions ought to be challenged. I saw him tangle with the faithful and the critical, and he did so with goodness and grace, for the most part.

I too ventured to his blog over the years and found him insightful. I don't' mean to over-praise him...but he was a good guy, in my estimation. I had a feeling he wasn't very old and at times mentioned his family. I could tell he was devoted to them.

Thank you for sharing those memories with us, Stem. To give credit where credit is due, you are a pretty reasonable fellow yourself, so it does not surprise me that you and Clark would get along very well. I kinda wish I had been a fly on the wall listening to your interesting conversations with him.

[Guest]

I think the thing I liked about Mr. Goble was he was willing to actually put himself out there regarding his nuanced view of Mormonism. Very few Mormons will actually get into the weeds of their fan fiction, so it was interesting to see someone do that. For example, and from his postings on this forum:

My pet very tentative theory is that God was mortal in a different universe and this universe is one of his creations. The fall would then be partially entering into this universe.

There's definitely a lot left undeveloped in Mormon theology. And it's pretty key doctrine that a lot is left to be revealed (including most of the Book of Mormon left to be translated).

Granted, he'd often punt to other thinkers and philosophers in an attempt to establish a sort of intellectual superiority and when pressed to explain himself he'd again punt to other thinkers and then insult you for being a dummy, which was his prerogative. I also felt he'd often use heavily laden words, thick with with philosophical implications, but never really went beyond establishing that he could use heavily laden words, thick with philosophical implications, and if you pressed him on those statements he'd, again, refer you to a paper or book or utilize another heavily laden word thick with philosophical implications, as if to imply he read all of it, understood it perfectly, and you were an asshole for not doing the same.

Think of it as a sort mopologist's gish gallop. You never really know if they actually understand what they're posting because it becomes a huge, layered, mishmash of competing ideologies all in an attempt to underscore the possibility that Mormonism is viable, you know, since there's just so much crap out there, so why not?. In that vein, he was in good company amongst Mormon apologists.

For example, in an exchange with Philosophee about the Book of Abraham he demonstrates this tactic perfectly:

The doctrines in the book of Abraham are the most peculiar and weird doctrines because there is absolutely no evidence for them. None. And it is the lack of evidence that gives the book of Abraham bad PR, not because it says something weird.

Isn't that true of nearly all religious belief? It's weird just because they aren't things the average American is so used to that they don't seem weird anymore. To my eyes there's nothing nearly as extreme as the resurrection or Trinity in the Book of Abraham. Honestly most of the doctrines are pretty mundane.

Ho hum. The Book of Abraham is a theological mess.

That's not to say they're scientific claims of course. But believe me if you study much advanced physics the stuff there is far weirder than anything Mormons teach. It's just that socially we trust scientists (well except for the rising skeptics on global warming, vaccine safety and such things) and if you want to put forth the effort (few do) you can find pretty overwhelmingly persuasive evidence for the claims. With religion there's not that public evidence to turn to.

Ho hum. If you were as brilliant as I am you'd understand just how mundane all this nitpicking is. Yawn.

On and on and on.

So. While Mr. Goble was undeniably an interesting apologist, in that he gave it a good effort, I found his tactics to be condescending, vague, dismissive, and shifty. But, what else are you going to do when you choose to maintain an adherence and belief in Mormonism? You have to find ways to make it work.

- Doc

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

In the 'Gold Plates and UFO Photos' thread, I believe DarthJ really boiled his approach to apologia down with this gem of a post:

Clark, you know that other thread you're in where MrStakhanovite is saying, not in so many words, that Mormon apologists are full of crap? It's a general consensus that in a narrative, you should show, not tell, and I for one appreciate your showing, not telling.

For example, your tone policing. I mean, yeah, I do buy it that you're so thin skinned, you're really put out about my snarkiness. But in the context of your handwaving away some observations about your religion that you're not able to refute, it looks a lot more like you're trying to distract from an issue that you're not only not able to address, you still haven't correctly identified. Yeah, you get it that someone is saying something unfavorable about your favorite Palmyra village magician, but as I will explain below, you still aren't articulating the core problem.

Further to the full of crap thing, you're trying to style yourself as this man of letters in your online persona, but then you reflexively retreat to your Sunday school worldview that Lucifer's cackling minions are persecuting you for your righteousness.

You really think snark like that is conducive to conversations? I'm sure it makes you feel much more powerful and better about yourself. If you need that for your well being, more power to you. Given your response I confess I'm not entirely sure if you want me to respond in kind or be polite and charitable. Could you clarify that for me? I'll admit I have no psychological need for it but can do it if you need me to be snarky too. I like to help people.

Look, you can hold yourself out as the aforementioned man of letters, or you can retreat to the simplistic pat answers of an Ensign article, but you can't do both. It's as old as the written word that people use sarcasm to make a serious point. It should be unremarkable to you that people do that. I guess it's a mixed blessing that you don't seem to understand how ridiculous this statement of yours looks to an outsider.

In this instance, the point I was making is that there is a vast amount of information refuting your facile assumptions about what UFO phenomena mean to people, that information is readily available to the point that it's effectively common knowledge, and you have no apparent interest in finding out whether your assumptions are accurate before announcing them as fact.

For what it's worth, though, it's self-defeating when you ask permission--even rhetorically--to be a smart ass. It's even worse when you act like it's a threat. By all means, be snarky. I have no doubt you will be as sharp and as edgy as a pair of kindergarten scissors.

And speaking of psychological needs, if you want to know what projection looks like, it looks like talking about the good old college days when you found amusement in tricking credulous UFO believers into thinking they saw a spacecraft, but then start yammering about people other than yourself supposedly feeling like a big man by making fun of other people.

I notice that your response, such as it is, decidedly omitted my comparison between your college hijinks and the Kinderhook Plates.

Then there's this:

In all your comments I noticed you didn't provide any numbers regarding the number of adherents who gain religious meaning from UFOs. Do you have any? I thought that was what you were upset about - my skepticism that there were millions of Americans in that category.

That's a pretty bold statement, given that all my comments included the results of a couple of Google searches. On its face, what you're saying here means you went through all of the links in this searches and never saw any numbers about how many people see religious meaning in UFO phenomena.

And then, when someone points out to you that among the links in those search results, which were necessarily part of "all my comments," that surveys indicate that millions of people in the U.S. believe in UFOs, you offer the following mischaracterization:

It's goal moving to note that the number of people who believe in aliens is not the same as the number of people who think aliens have visited earth which is not the same as the number of people who have religious experiences tied to aliens purportedly visiting earth? And it's goal moving for my skepticism that millions gain religious meaning from UFOs isn't the same as people believing in aliens?

There's definitely some goal moving here. But I'm not doing it.

And this:

The New Age is much, much broader than UFOlogy types. I don't think you can infer much about the latter from the former.

Now we come back to the narrative technique of "show, don't tell." Because you're telling everyone that you absolutely for sure understand what the point of this thread is, but then you show that you really don't.

See, you're conflating two different things. One is how many people believe in UFOs, which Screech correctly predicted you would try to deflect from by throwing up arbitrary distinctions between UFO believers and religious believers and so on. And that second thing is what the point of the OP and the rest of the thread is.

You can't move the goalposts, because there are no goalposts. There is no clear, cogent distinction between people who believe in UFOs in general, people who find religious meaning in UFO phenomena, New Age spirituality, and the kind of organized religion promulgated by people like Billy Meier, L. Ron Hubbard, or Joseph Smith. There's a significant overlap in many of these---and if you don't believe me, feel free to consult "NHM and also aliens disguised as humans live on Earth" expert Warren Aston---not least of which is because there's a similar mindset at work in accepting these beliefs.

Not only is there no meaningful distinction, and in fact a significant overlap between all of these areas of belief, you haven't even tried to offer any kind of demarcation. All you're doing is a protracted "Nuh-uh! Nuh-uh! Nuh-uh!" It's a reasonable inference that this makes you uncomfortable not only because it says your church isn't particularly special in the grand scheme of things, but because you see this as guilt by association. Except that the issue is that this isn't guilt by association, because it's not trying to lump one thing into another category. It's that Mormonism is in the same category.

You're implying an obvious distinction without articulating one. So, for example, you dispute that Scientology is a "UFO religion," even though Wikipedia editors have included it under the rubric of "UFO religions." That's a strange thing for a person constantly talking about his philosophy background to say, given the fluidity that the term "UFO" itself has. A UFO, by definition, is an unidentified flying object. By the actual meaning of the term, NOBODY believes in a UFO religion, because NOBODY finds religious significance in seeing an object that they can't identify. Bill Meier identified what the things in those pictures were: not only alien spacecraft, but alien spacecraft from a specific race. And yet you're not quibbling about Billy Meier's group being called a "UFO" religion.

That's because, as you have acknowledged in this thread, in common usage the term "UFO" means space aliens and/or their vehicles. Which means someone is making an affirmative claim about identity, which means incongruously that most people don't mean "unidentified" when they say "UFO." Since the root term itself does not in practice have a rigorous, consistent definition, it's quite disingenuous for you to insist that there must be some rigorous, consistent definition of what a "UFO religion" has to be.

At this point, I will remind you of another part of my post that you chose to omit, in which Mormonism is identified as a UFO religion because Moroni's appearance to Joseph Smith has so many trappings of a close encounter of the fifth kind.

Cough.

Since "UFO" in the vernacular is a synedoche for "space aliens and/or alien spacecraft," you're not really making the case as to why Scientology is categorically excluded from being a UFO religion. Or Mormonism, which I will again remind you worships an extraterrestrial entity who physically lives on another planet.

Come to think of it, I seem to remember seeing a movie somewhere that depicted Peter, James, and John coming from another planet to visit Earth.

Then, as if your non-category errors were not enough, you're asserting that I have failed my burden of proof because I haven't demonstrated how many of the millions of people who believe in "UFOs" (sic) are religious about it.

And it's goal moving for my skepticism that millions gain religious meaning from UFOs isn't the same as people believing in aliens?

No, it's not goal post moving, it's a non-accidental fallacy of equivocation. It's not accidental because in another thread, you're all about Kant and other philosopher discussing concepts that touch on questions that are broadly religious, like meaning in life, one's place in the universe, ethics, and so on. So you obviously know that "religious meaning" is not limited to organized religion. But in this thread, when it makes you uncomfortable that there's no meaningful distinction between those rubes you tricked with fake UFOs and yourself, who thinks Nephi was a real person, now "religion" has to be of the formal type, in which there is a top-down bureaucracy, demands for money, and a weekly funeral for God.

What you're doing is disingenuous because it has been pointed out in this thread that both skeptics and religious scholars frequently see UFO phenomena as categorically religious in nature---that belief in UFOs is per se religious because of both the characteristics that make someone believe and because of the meaning they derive from that belief. And because you have elsewhere demonstrated that you have at least read works which suggest that religious questions encompass far more than organized sitting in the pews.

Or maybe you're back to your appeal to self knowledge, in which if it seems to you that the existence of alien intelligence and its putative contact with humanity doesn't perforce involve religious questions, it must seem like that to everyone else. (Note: lest you confuse my post with the methodology of a Mormon apologetic tract, the following are offered as examples, not proof texts.)

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2016121 ... ions-react

https://www.livescience.com/48208-relig ... -life.html

https://www.space.com/13152-aliens-reli ... anity.html

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ll-survive

https://www.jstor.org/stable/24458392?s ... b_contents

https://link.springer.com/article/10.10 ... 017-9605-y

And by the way, maybe the reason people think you're saying that hardly anyone gets religious meaning from UFOs and just wants to see a spaceship is because you keep explicitly saying that.

However again, to be clear, my skepticism was never about those surface parallels. I've stated that several times now. I'm not quite sure why everyone thinks I'm denying them. Now I think in depth they completely break down, but I completely understand why people who think Joseph was a con artist and fraud think the parallel is exact. My skepticism never was about that. It was explicitly about thinking most people who believe in UFOs are just interested in the spaceships and not these religious issues. It's a simple point. Thus far no one's addressed it presumably because it's a trivial point I suspect most people agree with me on. But it has nothing to do with the original point you were making. For some reason everyone wants it to be.

The reason why everyone thinks that has something to do with Gadianton's original point is THAT IS GADIANTON'S ORIGINAL POINT.

Again. I want to underscore that I really think Mr. Goble, as a human being, father, and man was great. I do. I'm not making that up, nor am I being facetious. But we do see what Mormonism does to good people. It forces them into impossible philosophical positions that end up turning them into oft times surly types with a superiority complex. It's unfortunate he felt the need to defend Mormonism, but lucky for us he did because he provided a LOT of great reading material.

- Doc