Wyatt opens up

[Everybody Wang Chung]

Let's not forget when Allen Wyatt tried to interfere with Grant Palmer. There was a pretty lengthy discussion about this over at exmormon.org. Here are just a few of the opening comments:

Part 3

Allen Wyatt of FAIR. He has lurked on a ex-Mormon mail list then used the information he gleaned there to disrupt support of a historian, Grant Palmer, who has recently written an honest history of Mormonism,

Subject: Wyatt of FAIR registered "savegrantpalmer"
Date: Dec 06 06:36
Author: Eric K

The following is from our mail list:

Thanks to several computer-savvy people on this list, we have learned that the person who registered the website and intends just to "sit on it" is Mr. Allen L. Wyatt, of Arizona:
Discovery Computing Inc.
PO Box 2145
Mesa AZ 85214


Mr. Wyatt also happens to be the owner of the FAIR-LDS.org domain, the very prolific (but unofficial) Mormon apologetic website.

It is not a major revelation that individuals such as Allen Wyatt subscribe to an exmormon list, but WHY do they subscribe? Is it ostensibly to help people or to be, as Stalin once dubbed sympathizers, as "useful fools"? To be on the church payroll or to make money from Mormon publications and to subscribe to the exmormon list has sinister connotations. Big brother desires to watch us all the time. Even though the majority of us are out of the church, they attempt to continue to exert control over our lives. Wyatt's registering savegrantpalmer is but one example. He only learned of that from reading the exmormon mail list. It was discovered that he has been subscribed to the exmormon list since December 2002, under the e-mail address awyatt@dcomp.com.

My loathing for Mormon apologists has reached an all time low.

Eric

Subject: Re: Wyatt of FAIR registered "savegrantpalmer"
Date: Dec 06 07:14
Author: Troll

I suppose you never visit an official or 'unoffical' LDS website?

Subject: Re: Wyatt of FAIR registered "savegrantpalmer"
Date: Dec 06 07:38
Author: Eric K

Years ago when I registered exmormon.org, I could've obtained the domain Mormon.com. It was available then. I believed it to be unethical to obtain that name since I was no longer a Mormon. If I had purchased that domain, I could've sold it for 10's of thousands of dollars as some porno operator did a few years back. Wyatt discovered the interest in savegrantpalmer by lurking on the mail list. He has no interest in Palmer. He only wanted to disrupt things. I believe it to be a question of ethics. That is a subject about which FAIR and FARMS know little. I do not visit LDS sites with intent to disrupt their operations.

Eric

Subject: Re: Wyatt of FAIR registered "savegrantpalmer"
Date: Dec 06 07:23
Author: Glo

Interesting, isn't it, the depths God's one true church has to sink to in order to keep perpetuating itself.

https://www.exmormon.org/Mormon/mormon376.htm#Part%203

[huckelberry]

I respect your perspective on your experience. I see why the Tanners were valuable to you. From my point of view, people who convert to other religions are best served by living their new faith, not by running a counter-ministry directed at the old one. I’m just not in favor of that, just as I do not go around trying to convince people to leave the LDS Church myself. It does not line up with my personal ethos at all.

People believe in religion because of faith, not because of history or reason. Anyone can poke holes in another faith. That is the glass house. If a person wants to attack a religion, it does not take too much effort to find its flaws. Protestant Christianity is no less vulnerable. What it enjoys is the power of cultural dominance in the US. From that position it picks on other religions, calls them Satanic, demon-inspired and whatnot. This is the kind of intolerance I have real problems with. People complain about Mormonism’s apostasy narrative, but it is not nearly as aggressive as the Satanic or demonic accusations.

Kishkumen, with mixed reactions to your observations I found myself thinking of the role of demonic accusations in the gospels. I am troubled, to make an understatement, by the role such accusations have had Christian history. (heresy hunt, war with differing Christian groups, witch hunts abuse of non-Christian people.) Considering the role witch accusations have in the gospels, it is not Jesus tossing accusations about but his accusers accused him of working with the devil and in a sense that is what he was executed for.

It would be more in keeping with Jesus to use judge not as a guide and avoid making witch craft accusations. Be more in tune with Jesus than with the fear and pride of power that nailed him to a cross.

Yea, I just threw a stone and I think it needs to be thrown again until people convert away from viewing outsiders as outside of grace.

I was puzzled by your comment separating faith from reason and history. I am not familiar with any actual humans of faith who are not concerned with history and reason. Even those people with dubious reasoning work at the role of reason. I can see that faith includes something else besides reason and history as clearly many people who are concerned with those do not participate in faith. At least faith involves a difference in approach. I like thinking of the difference as involving a recognition of value and a harmony. But it likely involves a variety of things not all of them good or helpful. I am sure more than a couple people might observe faith catering to pride and a desire to feel like you know more than you do. It might also play on fear and maybe even that thrill of fear that ghost stories hold. I think those dimensions of faith can lead to witch hunts and war.

I do not think faith should be held outside of criticism and even doubt. It needs the clarification, and sometimes stones.

I have certainly seen reason to think of antiMormon presentations as more of the problem than a help. I watched a utube of some guy explaining he went into the subbasments of the SL temple and met alligator people who were shape shifting Mormons. I'll resist a temptation to call the guy a witch. He was certainly full of ... and at a far end of cult ministry fanaticism. There is a distorting fanaticism which can infect critical views of Mormonism. I do not see the Tanners as engaging in that. I have not made a thorough review of all there material to be sure they are guiltless. I feel they do better that some stuff I have seen.

I was out of the church for some ten years plus before I read any Tanner material (or other anti Mormon stuff) so it is possible to consider the church without their help.

[Kishkumen]

If you move out of an apartment that you strongly suspect is leaking carbon monoxide, should you just concentrate on setting up your new apartment, or should you warn the people who move into your old one?

I don’t think that analogy works. Leaking carbon monoxide is lethal for everyone. Churches like the LDS Church work for some, not for others.

[Kishkumen]

I was puzzled by your comment separating faith from reason and history. I am not familiar with any actual humans of faith who are not concerned with history and reason. Even those people with dubious reasoning work at the role of reason. I can see that faith includes something else besides reason and history as clearly many people who are concerned with those do not participate in faith. At least faith involves a difference in approach. I like thinking of the difference as involving a recognition of value and a harmony. But it likely involves a variety of things not all of them good or helpful. I am sure more than a couple people might observe faith catering to pride and a desire to feel like you know more than you do. It might also play on fear and maybe even that thrill of fear that ghost stories hold. I think those dimensions of faith can lead to witch hunts and war.

I do not think faith should be held outside of criticism and even doubt. It needs the clarification, and sometimes stones.

I am not saying that history and reason play no role in people’s faith. But their faith is not principally rooted in history and reason. Most people believe for spiritual reasons, not because of historical or rational arguments.

[Kishkumen]

To continue for huckelberry:

{I}f we answer in the affirmative that God raised Jesus from the dead, we’re going to find that what it means to us that such a thing happened will have to be almost completely different from what it meant to the original people who experienced and believed it. We will find that we do so on the basis of faith—faith informed by and answerable to reason, but faith all the same. And we will find that a whole world of possibility is opened to our imaginations about what it can mean that Jesus rose from the dead given our context that did not and would not have occurred to our forbears given theirs.

See: https://open.substack.com/pub/perennia ... dium=email

[huckelberry]

To continue for huckelberry:

{I}f we answer in the affirmative that God raised Jesus from the dead, we’re going to find that what it means to us that such a thing happened will have to be almost completely different from what it meant to the original people who experienced and believed it. We will find that we do so on the basis of faith—faith informed by and answerable to reason, but faith all the same. And we will find that a whole world of possibility is opened to our imaginations about what it can mean that Jesus rose from the dead given our context that did not and would not have occurred to our forbears given theirs.

See: https://open.substack.com/pub/perennia ... dium=email

Kishkumen, I hardly wish to dispute the role of faith which you are pointing to. I did wish to take a bit closer look at what that means or how it works. I read your linked article. it is a thoughtful presentation.

But that Paul also came to believe that Jesus was the messiah meant that, for Paul, the point of Jesus’s resurrection was to enable him to fulfill his role as the heavenly warrior, judge, and king in the parousia, which Paul expected to occur within his own lifetime and which was already quite late by the time that he penned his first letters. This was also, presumably, based on everything we can feasibly know about Jesus and his earliest followers, what they thought was going to happen, what they understood the point of Jesus’s resurrection to be.

I think it pretty clear that this is early understanding held by Paul. I do not think that is as true of later thought In Romans. That becomes a disputable point because Paul does not spell out a position for the questions observed in the article in Romans. He is attempting to look further perhaps skipping what was clearly an unknown.

Reason applied to experience is creating change in the understanding of Christian proposals as noted in this article.

[Doctor Steuss]

Wyatt's complaint is equivalent to saying it's the fault of the CES letter that people leave the LDS church.

And the Angel of the Mormon Church did say unto the member, "Stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself." Lo, the member could not, for the Angel of the Mormon Church was hitting the member with their own hand.

[huckelberry]

To continue for huckelberry:

{I}f we answer in the affirmative that God raised Jesus from the dead, we’re going to find that what it means to us that such a thing happened will have to be almost completely different from what it meant to the original people who experienced and believed it. We will find that we do so on the basis of faith—faith informed by and answerable to reason, but faith all the same. And we will find that a whole world of possibility is opened to our imaginations about what it can mean that Jesus rose from the dead given our context that did not and would not have occurred to our forbears given theirs.

See: https://open.substack.com/pub/perennia ... dium=email

Kishkumen, my thought yesterday on this post was a bit rushed so I went back to review your link further and found interesting comments by people far more qualified than I am. They are worth a look. I still find my thought seeing Paul's thought as opened ended trajectory helpful at least for me.

The first comment is from David Hart who starts quoting the author David Armstrong:

"But that Paul also came to believe that Jesus was the messiah meant that, for Paul, the point of Jesus’s resurrection was to enable him to fulfill his role as the heavenly warrior, judge, and king in the parousia, which Paul expected to occur within his own lifetime and which was already quite late by the time that he penned his first letters."

I believe that to be demonstrably false in the sense that it is a wildly reductive reading of the significance that Paul attributes to the resurrection (into which we are baptized, after all, and which therefore is a transforming spiritual event that is intrinsically and ontologically salvific, apart from any putative messianic expectations). If you are using the language of "warrior" here as metaphorically as Paul himself uses the image of triumph over the powers, then I suppose it's all right. But, since Paul never speaks of Christ as a "warrior" but only as a kind of victor, one should not embroider his metaphors with imagery of one's own. Many a Caesar was proclaimed a victor and many a runner in a race without either ever being called a warrior. An Augustus could be crowned victor for achieving a peace by any means, including diplomacy. Moreover, Paul does not speak of any future struggle with heavenly powers on Christ's part; he speaks of a victory already won through the resurrection and ascent into the heavenly places; once again, to speak of Christ bringing about a final "hypotaxis" of the powers has no necessary connection with any language of "theomachy." That's all in the past for Paul. What comes next is the final reordering of cosmic order, by assigning everything its final place, purging evil works (the only thing he ever describes as being burned away), and handing the whole package over to the Father tied up with a bright bow. Every time you impose on the text images of a Davidic liberator-warrior-king, you are assuming something that the actual texts do not warrant and against which the much more "ethereal" language of those texts seems to militate (to use another metaphorical word).
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David Armstrong
23 hrs ago
Author

Thanks. I'm open to revising my view on this, but my thought on Paul's eschatology is shaped by the following from within his letters: a.) I do think he evokes the Son of Man traditions in the logion he attributes to Jesus in 1 Thess 4:13-18, even if he doesn't use that language exactly; but the archangel's shout and the trumpet also seem to imply to me, at least, a vision of an arriving emperor with his military entourage; b.) Paul does talk about the Day of the Lord, and he does use talk of wrath (e.g., Rom 2:1-29) and conflagration (e.g., 1 Cor 3); c.) Paul talks about Jesus as messiah, and Davidic messiah, in his corpus, when he has other available models for understanding him, and assigns him some degree of militaristic role at the end-time (I cannot, for example, see what else Christ subordinating the powers in 1 Cor 15:20-28 is supposed to look like). These all imply some degree of belief on Paul's part in Christ as eschatological warrior, though I'm open to the idea that the primary warfare he envisions is between divine powers (especially since, as recently clarified, I don't actually buy a zealotic Jesus as historical).
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David Bentley Hart
Writes Leaves in the Wind
22 hrs ago

A combination of Stoic and Temple imagery, none of which suggests anything other than a triumphal procession for the victory already won—which is only metaphorical in its military tropes. Hypotaxis is not a word that need imply any violent suppression. And “the Wrath” is whose, precisely, and what? As for the conflagration of 1 Corinthians 3, does Paul mention anyone whom it destroys? It’s curious that you recognize his metaphors and allegories elsewhere but assume a curiously anomalous literalism when he’s talking about re-ordering the heavenly powers. The word “violent” is meaningless here, unless you think he really believed that Jesus would have to deal with armed resistance among the archons.
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David Bentley Hart
Writes Leaves in the Wind
22 hrs ago
·edited 22 hrs ago

In fact, I would say it’s ridiculous to think Paul envisages Christ as a militaristic ruler. Of what? There’s nothing in the Epistles like the eschatology of Revelation. It seems clear that Paul expects something like a cosmic ecpyrosis in which all things passing are replaced by a new cosmos, one in which Christ has reordered the powers by the spiritual victory he has won over death in ascending through the spheres, and the Father becomes all in all. The notion that any of this involves some sort of real violence within terrestrial time is totally absent from anything he says. Metaphors of victory over corrupt spiritual powers are not literal pictures of some actual historical conflict.

I am remembering that this individual Hart is the author that our Stem was very critical of. I have not read any of his books but I find his comments invite me to consider reading Hart further.

[Marcus]

Wyatt's complaint is equivalent to saying it's the fault of the CES letter that people leave the LDS church.

And the Angel of the Mormon Church did say unto the member, "Stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself." Lo, the member could not, for the Angel of the Mormon Church was hitting the member with their own hand.

what a perfect caption, that perfectly fits.

[Kishkumen]

Hey, huckelberry! Thanks for delving into the responses. I had missed Hart’s. He is one of my favorite theologians, if he is the person I am thinking of.