Answer to Harmony and Analysis
Posted: Fri Dec 29, 2006 8:11 am
This is a continuation of a particularly obnoxious thread that I felt needed to be responsed to under a new heading.
Harmony, if you really cannot do any better than to tell the most fantastic falsehoods about a people and a culture of which you are most clearly abjectly ignorant, you should at least be polite and intellectually honest enough to sit down and shut up about it.
It is precisely--PRECISELY--this kind of lack of intellectual integrity, a phenomena that virtually defines the active professional or amatuer ex-Mormon culture, that makes civil, productive discourse and debate with critics of the church of this type an exercise in futility.
Wade is on to something here. The longer I stay here, and in other forums such as this, the more obvious it becomes that the only real value of doing so is as an object study of the psychological dynamics of a tiny sub-population of the disaffected adherants of a system of religion for whom that system of religion has become both the locus of control of much of their lives (even though they claim to have "left" it) and the focus of displaced anger, rage, guilt, frustration, inner conflicts and the pain and regret of choices made or conditions experienced in life. The Church becomes a kind of "dumping ground" for all the failures, frustrations, unfulfilled expectations, and all the real or perceived unfairness, abuse, and suffering, self imposed or inherant in life, that cannot be negotiated and worked through in a healthy and self honest way.
Vapid slurs against the LDS people, such as they are "not a forgiving people" only serve to underscore the suspicion that what we really have here is not primarily intellectual dissent, but externalized manifestations of inner issues that remain well hidden lest the real truth be exposed and threaten the entire system. And we can't have that because then the focus could no longer be on the scapegoat but would instead be turned on the person themselves and the real life issues that have created a compensatory need to attack, impugn, slander, and demean the faith and sacred beliefs of others.
Its always incredibly threatening to be confronted by one's real self and the personal accountability one holds in relation to the nature of that self and the path one has followed during its nurturance and development, at least when the choices made or the conditions under which that self has developed have been less than healthy or severly traumatic or disadvantaged in some way. But unless that confrontation eventually takes place, in an appropriate and mature manner, little further growth can take place, and endless conflicts with external entities who now bear the brunt of the anger, bitterness, or hatred that would otherwise be turned against the self, will continue as the real conflicts and inner turmoil remain masked behind various presenting problems. Ever onward will continue the relentless conflict and contention with others over contrived external issues that preserve the defense mechanisms that have been created to protect the person from the threat posed by the acceptance of and the taking of responsability for their own life circumstances.
Loran
Coggins7 wrote: Plutarch, I only have one thing to say. Give up. Relent. Surrender. There is no hope.
Even Jason is slowly, ever so slowly beginning to show some true colore here, and its painful, to say the least, to see yet another head spinning exercise in tendentious mudslinging at things most here clearly have virtually no understanding of (but actually think they can fool those who do know with their verbiage).
Mormons who don't go on missions are not thought of as second class citizens by members of the church. They are not stigmatized, they are not ostracized, they are not thought less of, and nothing is held against them by "the church" Anyone who says that this is the case is a smiling ear to ear liar and should now remove him or herseslf to the flat rock from which he or she emerged.
I did not go on a mission. I have never been punished or otherwise kept out of church callings or activites becauses I didn't. Nobody I have ever known has ever held it against me, nor shunned me because of it. The Bishipric in my Ward when events transpired such that I chose not to go, held nothing against me. This does not mean they were not dissapointed. This does not mean they would have rather I had gone. I would have rather gone. It was the damn dumbest mistake I ever made in my life, second only to my first marriage.
Yes, it is a duty. Yes, it is a commandment and mandate from the Lord. Yes, there is pressure, and so what?
There is also pressure on young LDS men to do a lot of other things, and many of those are or the either utterly trivial, compared to going on a mission, or stupid, immature, or unambiguously evil
If you don't like it, don't worry about it, its none of your business. Find another church, get a life, eat, drink, and be merry at Dairy Queen, pull up your pants, turn your hat around, and get a job.
You're talking nonsense, Loran, as usual.
If a missionary goes out because of duty, or commandment, or mandate, or pressure, they're going out for the wrong reason. There is no reason to serve a mission, EXCEPT if one feels a personal call to go. All other reasons/excuses/commandments/mandates are unacceptable reasons and result in poor missionaries and poor mission experiences for those who really WANT to be there. So if you don't really want to go, STAY HOME.
As far as the other, not only are young men who choose to not go stigmatized and ostracized, so are young men who go, and serve honorably, but have to come home because of medical reasons. We are not a forgiving people, and we jump to wrong conclusions on a regular basis. We assume that when a young man comes home early, he did something bad enough to get sent home. I've seen this phenomena played out over and over again, the old biddies (male and female) gossiping about the young man... was it sexual? how did he break the rules? was he too wimpy?... when in reality, the young man came home because he got a parasite that couldn't be treated in a 3rd world country, or his appendix burst and he almost died, or he ruptured a disk in his back and had to be released. Honorable releases, but those young men were trashed because of gossip and rumor.
Who knows how far up the priesthood food chain you could have gone, had you served a mission. Good grief, Loran! With your understanding of the gospel, you could have been a bishop by now... or a stake president! At the very least. Too bad, though. You didn't serve a mission and now you'll never know what potential you squandered.
Harmony, if you really cannot do any better than to tell the most fantastic falsehoods about a people and a culture of which you are most clearly abjectly ignorant, you should at least be polite and intellectually honest enough to sit down and shut up about it.
It is precisely--PRECISELY--this kind of lack of intellectual integrity, a phenomena that virtually defines the active professional or amatuer ex-Mormon culture, that makes civil, productive discourse and debate with critics of the church of this type an exercise in futility.
Wade is on to something here. The longer I stay here, and in other forums such as this, the more obvious it becomes that the only real value of doing so is as an object study of the psychological dynamics of a tiny sub-population of the disaffected adherants of a system of religion for whom that system of religion has become both the locus of control of much of their lives (even though they claim to have "left" it) and the focus of displaced anger, rage, guilt, frustration, inner conflicts and the pain and regret of choices made or conditions experienced in life. The Church becomes a kind of "dumping ground" for all the failures, frustrations, unfulfilled expectations, and all the real or perceived unfairness, abuse, and suffering, self imposed or inherant in life, that cannot be negotiated and worked through in a healthy and self honest way.
Vapid slurs against the LDS people, such as they are "not a forgiving people" only serve to underscore the suspicion that what we really have here is not primarily intellectual dissent, but externalized manifestations of inner issues that remain well hidden lest the real truth be exposed and threaten the entire system. And we can't have that because then the focus could no longer be on the scapegoat but would instead be turned on the person themselves and the real life issues that have created a compensatory need to attack, impugn, slander, and demean the faith and sacred beliefs of others.
Its always incredibly threatening to be confronted by one's real self and the personal accountability one holds in relation to the nature of that self and the path one has followed during its nurturance and development, at least when the choices made or the conditions under which that self has developed have been less than healthy or severly traumatic or disadvantaged in some way. But unless that confrontation eventually takes place, in an appropriate and mature manner, little further growth can take place, and endless conflicts with external entities who now bear the brunt of the anger, bitterness, or hatred that would otherwise be turned against the self, will continue as the real conflicts and inner turmoil remain masked behind various presenting problems. Ever onward will continue the relentless conflict and contention with others over contrived external issues that preserve the defense mechanisms that have been created to protect the person from the threat posed by the acceptance of and the taking of responsability for their own life circumstances.
Loran