Actually, seth, it is called evolution. You are a changed man than when you first came to FAIR/MAD. You have become more bitter and angry in your posts about the LDS church. I call it hanging out too much with the wrong crowd. You are losing your objectivity. And you know this. Reading your posts these days, I can smell the bitter tranquil anger through my computer...something is changing your cyberpersonality. At times, at MAD, you would engage in discussion and at other times, the sour grapes would turn up in your other posts. You have become weighed in negativity.
Actually, Miss Taken is a lot closer to the mark than you'd think. I have at times been able to more effectively moderate my tone, but you can find very jaded posts going back to my beginning on FAIR last July or so. I'll link to one such thread below.
The fact is, I will freely admit that I moderated my tone somewhat on FAIR/MAD from my earliest posts in order to be less "in your face" with people. But that hasn't meant I was moderate in my beliefs. I've seen the mental gymnastics, the "playing semantics" to explain away and excuse damning evidence which serves to demonstrate how uninspired by God this whole church is, and so forth, right from the beginning. I've only become more jaded since then. Repeated exposure to mind-boggling feats of mental ducking and weaving to avoid the unpleasant reality that the church is simply a man-madeinstitution like every other church out there, has really worn on me.
There's only so much excusing of Joseph Smith's exploitation of religious authority to obtain sexual relationships with a great many women, most often behind his own wife's back, and seeing people then sing Praise to the Man who Communed With Jehova, before I begin to despair at the human condition. There's only so many times the Book of Abraham arguments can be rehashed and still see people say well, you know, maybe there's more parchment that was lost, or maybe the BoB simply serves as a mnemonic device pointing to the actual Book of Abraham, or whatever. Come on, anyone else in the entire world would see the apologetic arguments and LAUGH. They are ridiculous. But they aren't ridiculous to someone who depends on them to keep their faith "safe".
And I'm getting sick of Smac's obsession with homosexuals and their "agenda". Give me a fscking break! Homosexuals are like what, 3% of our population? Why can't we just leave these people the hell alone? I utterly and totally reject the paranoid "us vs. them" mentality that promotes the idea that the gays are out there to convert all the heteros to gayness. It's unbelievable. And you know what? Some of the TBMs on that board keep linking to utter trash from World Net Daily or whatever other paranoid Christian Right agenda rags, breathlessly exclaiming that some student group at some stupid school somewhere tried to teach the incoming freshman not to hate their gay co-students, and OMG the Sky is Falling, this is surely one of the Signs of the Times. Give me a freaking break. It absolutely blows my mind that people can buy into the Christian Right's siege mentality as much as they do, and put any faith or credence in such "news" sources.
Anyhow, Why Me, for your reading pleasure, read this example of my earlier posts on MAD, during what you might have considered my more polite and "less bitter" era.
http://www.mormonapologetics.org/index. ... 1207992421From the post above:
I will point out, however, that James Talmage, Henry Eyring, and others never were saddled with the huge number of "inspired" opinions they subsequently had to retract that Bruce R. McConkie produced.
Breed'em Young and Parley P. Pratt used to argue points of doctrine (Adam-God amongst them) via editorials in the Deseret News.
Ah, for the good old days, when Mormon General Authorities used to have and express opinions. Everyone is so bland these days, not willing to say anything about anything, and not willing to stand by the utterances of their predecessors either. Where is all this much-ballyhooed "revealed truth" these days? Did "revealed truth" go the way of Adam-God, Blood Atonement, and our insupportable former racial prejudices against the accursed "Darkies"?
As you know I have enjoyed my dialogues with you. Hopefully, the old seth will return, if not, you are heading for RFM heaven. Balance is the key to life on LDS sponsored boards.
You'll see more moderately-toned posts by me. I've been active in this church for all but the last year or so in this church, and I still go to church, at least sacrament meeting, almost every Sunday, because my wife wants me to. I'm used to interacting with Mormons, and I can find myself speaking comfortably on some topics with TBMs. As far as going to RFM goes, dude, you don't know this, but I read and posted at RFM before I ever registered or posted at FAIR/MAD. I didn't post a lot, but I did post, and read for a while. I actually can't take too much of RFM, and only go there every few weeks now just to see if there's anything up. There are a lot of people on RFM who are so against the church that they will believe almost anything that's said against it. I'm not like that. I believe the church isn't true, that Joseph Smith was a conman and a sexual exploiter of women by abusing the religious authority they granted him, that he made up the Book of Abraham and a lot of other things that Mormons saddle themselves with mentally. However, I draw the line at things against the church that I think are factually supportable, and I'm only interested in a rational and logical approach to it, not the irrational approach I've seen from some RFMers. I don't want to criticize them too much. It is what it is over there. It just can't hold my attention, and never will, for very long. But yeah, I know there are a lot of people over there who feel angry because they've been fooled and lied to their whole lives about the church. Well, maybe not "lied" to, since the church members and leadership, for the most part, actually do believe what they're saying. But what they're saying is
simply not true, and when some people realize they've dedicated years and years of their lives, and thousands and thousands of their dollars, to something that's just as myth-based and fantasy based as the Jehovah's Witnesses or the Roman Catholic Church, or the Hare Krishnas, or whatever, they get angry and bitter, and some of them will act that out on RFM. You know what? It's not my place to judge them. Because they
have been mentally conditioned by sincere but mistaken and misguided people into doing and believing things that are ultimately untrue.
Why Me, I honestly cannot understand this Pascal's Wager you are living out on these boards. I can only conclude that you believe it will avail you somehow in the end, if the LDS church is in fact true. Well, I don't believe it will, and I'm willing to face up to that, take the bull by the horns, and admit to myself, privately and publicly, that the church I belong to, and to which I have devoted so much in the past, and which my family members are devoting so much to all around me in my family, every week, month after month, year after year, is simply not true. It's man-made, an invention of Joseph Smith and his early co-religionists, evolved over time through Brigham Young and a lot of subsequent leaders, down to this time. But it's still an invention of the mind of man, and not Truth, Revealed Religion from God, or any of that.
