Radio Free Mormon: Elder Ballard Blows Up the Church

[_DrW]

Apologists can either deny he said that or else insist that he was referring to a one hour time period after this presentation.

One hour sounds about right, assuming that he left right away and was thereafter driving or stuck in traffic for at least 58 minutes.

[_Craig Paxton]

I almost never, ever, take the time to listen to Mormon-related podcasts - basically because i find it takes so much more time than it would to absorb the essential points of the same material presented in text form (For professional reasons, I am quite good at rapidly gutting a document through such techniques as diagonal reading.)

This one, however, I decided to listen to while shaving and showering. It turned out to be such a well-presented and fascinating talk that I continued to listen until it was finished. I'd say to any lurking Mormon: if you listen to anything, listen to this.

It's basically about recent public claims by apostles (Elder Ballard in particular) that the CoJCoLDS has 'never hidden anything about its history'. The podcast takes this claim to pieces, leaving not a wrack behind.

Example: did the church hide the 1832 First Vision account, which mentions only one personage in the vision, rather than the two in the better known version? (NB - the point is not whether this version is, on an objective estimate, an embarrassment to the church, but whether the church itself thought it was embarrassing enough to conceal it from members.)

Yup. Joseph Fielding Smith found this account in the 1930s, in a journal in Joseph Smith's own handwriting. He cut out the relevant pages with a pen-knife, and locked them away in his vault.

When the story eventually leaked to the press in the 1960s, Joseph Fielding Smith taped the pages back into the journal, and arranged for a young Master's student to 'discover' them, so that his previous concealment would be ... well, concealed. The Master's thesis in question was not however made available to the public - until it leaked to the (Mormon critic) Tanners, who published it.

And there are twelve other examples, all of which falsify the 'we never concealed anything' claim. The fact is, on the contrary, that top church leaders can be seen having concealed significant aspects of church history from the members over and over again.

The evidence base for that assertion is clear enough to convince any normal secular historian. The leadership simply lies to its members: meanwhile, it demands their unquestioning trust ...

Great synopsis. I can't imagine what Ballard was thinking by stating so emphatically that the church hasn't hid or whitewashed its history. I don't know what universe he lives in but...in this universe his claim has been exposed as ridiculous and unfounded. While I won't call him a liar...I will go as far as calling him grossly uninformed about something that he should very well be fully aware of. It borders on gross incompetence, negligence and the willful misstating of reality.

[_consiglieri]

I will go so far as to call Elder Ballard a liar.

There comes a point where I am not willing to give any benefit of the doubt to church leaders on certain issues.

This is one of them.

[_Philo Sofee]

I will go so far as to call Elder Ballard a liar.

There comes a point where I am not willing to give any benefit of the doubt to church leaders on certain issues.

This is one of them.

Which truly does lead to the perfectly natural question, if on this, on what else are they lying about? There is no way to tell. All the more reason to now vigilantly follow the evidence, and believe precious little they ever say on any subject. Truly! Not in a mean spirit, but a careful one.

[Guest]

Just got back from Thanksgiving vacay and saw this thread.

Thanks for all the kind comments, everybody!

My notes are really pretty crummy.

To let you see what I am working from, I will take my actual notes and copy them below.

Here goes nothing!

__________________________________

Some notes and stuff.

Wow, you did an hour+ podcast with that? Impressive. Well, I'll wait patiently for somebody to transcribe it and post it, because, to be frank, your notes don't do the podcast justice.

That is a compliment...albeit perhaps a backhanded one. :)

PS. I have no problem calling Ballard a liar.

[_RockSlider]

I listened to the whole of the actual broadcast. That oriental girl is a convert of two months!

Watching the youth in the audience taking notes, I remembered my experiences in the audience of the great ones, hanging on every word, trying to have eyes to see and ears to hear the mysteries of God which I fully expected were there.

The answers presentation was weak sauce. As Consig noted about the whole thing being 'scripted', I would not be surprised if a committee of those mentioned who categorized the 4k questions were not heavily involved in 'speech writing' for the two of them.

Answers from God, or from a committee?

[_consiglieri]

The oriental girl (are you paying attention, Dr. Shades?) also crossed my mind after she said she had been a convert of two months.

I wondered how she would feel if she knew the two gentlemen sitting opposite her on the stage, men whom she believes are apostles of the Lord Jesus Christ, were up there lying to her face.

These are thoughts that don't leave me feeling particularly uplifted.

[_sunstoned]

Listened yesterday morning. One of your best.

What's the source (or sources) for the Joseph Fielding Smith story? My understanding is that there's little to no questions that the account had been removed from the journal and later taped back in, but how it was Smith, when he did it, that he stored it in a safe, and that he had it taped back in once it's existence had leaked?

I also covered this in detail in the third episode of RFM.

For your consideration.

http://www.mormondiscussionpodcast.org/ ... h-history/

And yes, the Dialogue article referred to by oliblish was my primary source.

They are loving this podcast over on reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comme ... that_they/

[_cwald]

They are loving this podcast over on reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comme ... that_they/

At MAD too. Here is how Calm/Nemesis justifies the removal of the journal pages that spent 30 years in JFS safe.

It is better not to try and mindread even if that makes you feel warm and fuzzy and secure about your own conclusions.

People put things in vaults for multiple reasons. Duncan is simply pointing out we don't have enough information to identify which one or both or something else was the motivation for the FV version to have been removed from the book.

Vaults protect, vaults hide, vaults restrict.

Maybe someone carelessly removed the pages out of curiosity or selfishness, later they were found by or brought to (out of remorse or perhaps a desire to share the 'wealth') someone else who was very upset at the mistreatment, who desired to protect them from further damage and therefore placed them in the vault away from greedy fingers until someone who knew how to properly repair them was found. They may have been forgotten, someone with the right skills may not have been found, perhaps someone else not knowing the plan to do it right or not caring decided to stick them back in with what was at hand.

Maybe someone read them, was horrified it wasn't word for word, cut them out and intentionally hid them and later after thinking it over realized they had over reacted and returned them...poorly.

I can think of a number of other scenarios because we don't know if it was 1 or more persons involved, the precise timing nor is there any commentary at the time as far as I know.

Anything constructed outside the basic facts is speculation.

[_cwald]

And it gets worse.

UtahTexan wrote: Withholding and hiding are two different things

Duncan wrote: mplied though in hiding something is deliberately hiding something which is I asked how do we know that Pres. Smith deliberately hid that document? maybe he put it in their for safekeeping and forgot about it.

UtahTexan wrote: I can withhold something from you without hiding it. In fact, in Court, the judge often withholds evidence from the jury, but the evidence is far from hidden.

http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/698 ... s/?page=11