huckelberry wrote:To all or any, Is there some actual real world indication that the church is being destroyed? The idea hits me as bizarre and delusional, then I remember I have no actual contact with the church. It could be folding up and I just am not yet been made aware. There is a fellow where I work who is a member, we say hello but have not had occasion to discuss the state of Mormonism with him. I have two siblings living distantly who are quite active. We do not discuss the church. The place could be folding up and I just have not yet heard.
The picture seems similar to the obsessive worry about Mr Peterson. I suspect Harmony is right, that he is doing fine.
I think that the internet's impact on the LDS church is much like water erosion over time. The LDS church has staked out a very bright line: either it's claims to being led by Jesus, it being his one and only church and that to be saved one must have the saving ordinances performed by LDS authorities, OR it is, as Hinckley put it, a fraud. That's just the most recently dead prophet, and certainly the only dynamic, assertive one in decades.
The internet has opened some flood gates about JSJr, Brigham Young, the Hoffman affair, the Book of Abraham and those silly Facsimiles and even sillier Explanations, etc. that show those willing to look that given the dichotomy from the Lord's recent prophet, Hinckley, the LDS 'truth claims' are in all probability bogus. The more that look, the more that leave the LDS church. The Letter to a CES Director by Runnels is something that upon reading causes one to doubt the LDS church and its leaders, making it more difficult to doubt one's doubts about them.
I don't think we're yet at the point where the erosion has become a gusher of mud carrying the silt downstream, and cutting deep and quickly into the LDS membership. But it is very muddy and that point could occur rather soon. Until then, the internet is just cutting into the number of active LDS in a rather slow way. The only thing that the LDS leaders have thought to counter it is to castigate the internet as bad, that place where pornography exists readily available almost everywhere. That it concerns the FP/12 as an existential threat was demonstrated by Uchtdorf's opening words at the last conference of warning against getting information about the church from the internet. The very first thing in a two day, 10 hour conference.
