Anti-Mormonism, Another Take

[Physics Guy]

If Rotary Club members picketed Lions Club meetings, and went door-to-door handing out anti-Lions pamphlets, that would be unseemly. Much as individual people might prefer their own club to the other, it's just not appropriate to meddle that much in anyone else's decision about which club to join.

It's also silly for cycling enthusiasts to accost gymnasts and urge them to get out of the gym and onto the trail, or for IPA drinkers to maintain long-running podcasts that do nothing but mock anyone who likes stout.

Picketing the local gun club and advocating gun control laws might not be quite the same thing, though. Warning middle-aged runners about impending knee trouble and suggesting the transition to low-impact exercise could be a kindness. Urging people who drink four litres of Cola per day to switch to mineral water, and warning them about diabetes, might be annoying as hell but also a good thing to do.

So I don't think I can accept a blanket rule against criticising anyone else's religion. In many cases the religious differences are just matters of personal taste and individual choice, and nobody has any business disputing. Yet there can be things that people choose to do, and like to do, and with which they identify, and of which criticism upsets them ... that still should really be criticised. Some cults are just bad, and everybody in them should leave them, and the only issue is how best to help them to leave.

Unfortunately people disagree about which of their disagreements should be disputed. Rightly or wrongly, somebody may believe that my choice of club or sport or beverage or church is such an urgent problem that they are morally obliged to try to help me change my ways.

Up to a point I think that the principle of tolerating individual differences obliges me to tolerate this different view that they have, and not complain too much when they try to "help" me. If in the name of privacy or tolerance we forbid people to try to do what they sincerely think will help other people, then I think we may lose too much. That would be a baby step towards stopping people from trying to help a stranger in trouble, because the trouble is the victim's own personal issue that does not concern strangers. Up to a point we should be encouraging people to act as well as they see how to help others. That probably includes responding to misguided efforts at help with gentle correction rather than indignation.

Past a point, though, I don't think we have to let people do whatever they think best just because it's what they think best. Some people are convinced by hallucinations that they have to commit serious crimes. They may not be morally competent criminals but we don't just let them act as they see fit.

Is anti-Mormon activism past that point, or only up to it? I don't know, in general. I'm not going to crash Sunday worship at the local ward to throw around evangelical tracts. I'm not even going to be anything but polite to young missionaries who greet me politely on the street. If I met some kind of Mormon zealot who was ranting loudly about having the only real church on Earth, though, I might be tempted to raise some issues about polygamy and the Mormon Scriptures.

[Marcus]

I'm having a difficult time understanding the position that fact-checking the truth claims of a religion is equivalent to "attacking" that religion.

[I Have Questions]

I'm having a difficult time understanding the position that fact-checking the truth claims of a religion is equivalent to "attacking" that religion.

Especially a religion that has openly invited fact-checking…

“If we have truth, [it] cannot be harmed by investigation. If we have not truth, it ought to be harmed.”
J. Reuben Clark

[Kishkumen]

No more scenarios. I just found it interesting to explore what I saw as an illogical double standard in how you viewed things. I’ve concluded it’s not the act of attacking a religion that bothers you, nor the accuracy or validity of the attack, it’s who the perpetrators are that determines wether you find it acceptable or not. I’ve not come across that way of thinking very often.

Then you are drawing incorrect conclusions based on limited data.

[Dr. Shades]

You find the Tanners' motives to be in poor form, but do you find any of their information on Mormonism to be inaccurate?

[Kishkumen]

You find the Tanners' motives to be in poor form, but do you find any of their information on Mormonism to be inaccurate?

Do you think it is possible to draw incorrect conclusions using facts?

[Gadianton]

Is anti-Mormon activism past that point, or only up to it? I don't know, in general. I'm not going to crash Sunday worship at the local ward to throw around evangelical tracts. I'm not even going to be anything but polite to young missionaries who greet me politely on the street. If I met some kind of Mormon zealot who was ranting loudly about having the only real church on Earth, though, I might be tempted to raise some issues about polygamy and the Mormon Scriptures.

It's a complex phenomena. My mission was white, very Christian, and middle-upper class. I was prepared for anti-Mormonism and even looking forward to it. The only way that could have been possible, is if I didn't take it very seriously as an actual threat. I'd heard a story about missionaries in the area being stoned by Christians (rocks thrown at them but they were uninjured) and I was hoping for something like that as it would have been a great story.

Instead, yes, there was a ton of anti-lit and I got set up for ambushes by ministers and I got yelled at a few times, but, ultimately they were quite nice to us. The same folks whose church had anti-lit available in the lobby would insist on giving us dinner, or when we were looking for a new boarding, this aggressive guy got on the phone and called a bunch of his friends trying to find a place for us (as it was the Christian thing to do apparently). A dentist I went to with a huge metal ichthus on the wall of his office (that we laughed at of course) refused to charge me on account of us being missionaries even if it was for a false religion.

As one lay minister put it before breaking down and chastising me in tongues, "You Mormons are good people, but your doctrine is from the pit of hell."

[Kishkumen]

Some cults are just bad, and everybody in them should leave them, and the only issue is how best to help them to leave.

How do you propose to get them to do so, and what is your standard for deciding when this is a moral imperative? You see, as you may recall, there are criminal laws that are used against dangerous "cults." I recall very vividly how criminal charges were brought against Lyndon LaRouche, the head of a political cult, back in the 1980s, and he was convicted. That did not end LaRouchism, per se, but it did really inconvenience LaRouche himself.

[Failed Prophecy]

I'm having a difficult time understanding the position that fact-checking the truth claims of a religion is equivalent to "attacking" that religion.

Especially a religion that has openly invited fact-checking…

“If we have truth, [it] cannot be harmed by investigation. If we have not truth, it ought to be harmed.”
J. Reuben Clark

And especially a religion that has canonized attacks on other religions in their scripture:

I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that: “they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.”

[Rivendale]

I'm having a difficult time understanding the position that fact-checking the truth claims of a religion is equivalent to "attacking" that religion.

Especially a religion that has openly invited fact-checking…

“If we have truth, [it] cannot be harmed by investigation. If we have not truth, it ought to be harmed.”
J. Reuben Clark

It should be noted Clark walked back this statement and essentially started walking the party line. P24-26 from Quinn's book J. Reuben Clark the Church years.

By 1917, however, Reuben was asking himself some religious questions that took him years to resolve. In one personal memo he began, "If we have truth, [it] cannot be harmed by investigation. If we have not truth, it ought to be harmed." From that premise he added the observation that scientists and lawyers (like himself) were not blindly believing and that they must refuse to be deceived by others or by their own wishful thinking. "A lawyer must get at facts, he must consider motives -- he must tear off the mask and lay bare the countenance, however hideous. The frightful skeleton of truth must always be exposed ... [the lawyer] must make every conclusion pass the fiery ordeal of pitiless reason. If their conclusions cannot stand this test, they are false." During the same year the increasingly introspective lawyer asked himself the questions: Are we not only entitled, but expected to think for ourselves? Otherwise there does our free agency come in? His answer was a resounding: "If we are blindly to follow some one else we are not free agents.... That we may as a Church determine for ourselves our course of action, is shown my the Manifesto [abandoning the practice of polygamy]. We may not probably take an affirmative stand, i.e., adopt something new but we may dispense with something." Perhaps he had never before questioned the assumptions that lay behind some of the simple faith of his youth, but at midlife J. Reuben Clark, Jr. proclaimed that there must be no forbidden questions in Mormonism.

The directions to which his philosophy of religious inquiry led him were indicated in his musings about two essentials of Mormonism: the revelations of Joseph Smith, Jr. and the Church belief in progression toward godhood. As he examined the revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants concerning the structure of the Church government, Reuben Clark wondered to what extent Joseph Smith's reading or experience, "his own consciousness," had contributed to what he set down, and when Reuben pondered the Mormon belief in the potential of individuals to attain the godly stature of their Father in Heaven, his logical mind boggled a bit. "Is Space or occupied portions of it divided among various deities -- have they great 'spheres of influence'? War of Gods -- think of wreck of matter involved -- if matter used -- or would it be a war of forces?" In his mid-forties, he regarded these as legitimate doctrinal inquiries but soon realized that each question concerning doctrine led to other questions, each of which was further removed from rational verification. Reuben soon came to the conclusion he described in later years to the non-Mormon president of George Washington University: "For my own part I early came to recognize that for me personally I must either quit rationalizing ... or I must follow the line of my own thinking which would lead me I know not where."

But J. Reuben Clark soon recognized where an uncompromising commitment to rational theology would lead him, and he shrank from the abyss. "I came early to appreciate that I could not rationalize a religion for myself, and that to attempt to do so would destroy my faith in God," he later wrote to his non-Mormon friend. "I have always rather worshipped facts," he continues,"and while I thought and read for a while, many of the incidents of life, experiences and circumstances led, unaided by the spirit of faith, to the position of the atheist, yet the faith of my fathers led me to abandon all that and to refrain from following it.... For me there seemed to be no alternative. I could only build up a doubt.