And if it were contagious we'd all end up like this:
Krispy Kreme and Mormon Apologetics are a danerous combination.
Daniel, one quick question before you apparate into a cloud of red smoke: Are the rumors true that you and a handful of MoPologists, Agro professors, stonecutters, NoHomers and a few Templar are at the heart of a secret order known as "The Order of the Sacred Tapir"?
In fact, what of the head of BYU's Sheri Dew School of cosmetology who submitted that the Three Nephites will be found riding tapirs into Missouri the day Christ Returns to Adam onDi ahman?
And crawling on the planet's face Some insects called the human race Lost in time And lost in space...and meaning
Mercury wrote:And if it were contagious we'd all end up like this:
I wondered how long it would be before Scratch began circulating the pictures he's taking from his car, parked across the street from my house.
Mercury wrote:danerous . . . apparate
English, please?
Mercury wrote:Are the rumors true that you and a handful of MoPologists, Agro professors, stonecutters, NoHomers and a few Templar are at the heart of a secret order known as "The Order of the Sacred Tapir"?
Think, mercury. Think. If I admitted it, it wouldn't be secret any more.
Mercury wrote:Are the rumors true that you and a handful of MoPologists, Agro professors, stonecutters, NoHomers and a few Templar are at the heart of a secret order known as "The Order of the Sacred Tapir"?
Think, mercury. Think. If I admitted it, it wouldn't be secret any more.
Well well then. You are pretty insistent on that.
I have a good idea. You and Dan Brown can get together and do investigative research together on Mormonism. Why, you even write via the same methods. Your a shoe in to ghost his next novel. Poor Nibley. He would have been great at the thin conjecture and logical leaps needed to write good pseudohistorical nonsense. Oh, wait! Hmm, You know what, on second thought I should stop talking. The Tapirs could be watching...
And crawling on the planet's face Some insects called the human race Lost in time And lost in space...and meaning
Gadianton wrote:Just curious what your opinions are on the current FAIR/MAD board. I checked in over there, looking for a thread to borrow from and came up empty handed. Anyone have any idea how happy FAIR/MAD management is with the current state of their board?
I wonder if the moderating has taken its toll. Most of the contributors in the threads I skimmed through seemed very, very green. The critics are pretty mellow and drowned out by numbers. Maybe there is some revenge for the admins there to relish, but doesn't FAIR/MAD have loftier goals? Given how they are enamored with "scholars"? I always thought they were a little embarrassed by newbie apologists, and it seems to me they've got a board full of those now. The "old crew", bad as some of them were, you have to admit were fighters. It doesn't appear to me that protection has strengthened the stock, maybe it's time for them to let the wolves in to thin out the herd?
They let a few people waste a lot of bandwidth. For every Smac97, they have five other posters who post 10 times as much without adding anything. It's not a matter of "newbie" apologists -- it's a matter of too many cheerleaders for a very small team. It's always been a problem but now it's worse.
"And yet another little spot is smoothed out of the echo chamber wall..." Bond
I don't know Steuss. I don't find much useful on the MAD boards these days, but I daresay you and I have different interests in regard to religion in general: the fact that I'd overlooked, or not even recognized the threads you mention seems to confirm this.
That said, I did find interesting and informative things there a year or two ago. I don't just mean "things I agree with," either, because I wanted to see other viewpoints most of all. I found it interesting to observe the ways in which a deformed postmodernism was marshaled to the defense of the a highly foundationalist body of belief. Re-inventing Mormonism as anti-foundationalist is interesting as an abstract proposition, but quite distant from the practical living of the religion and, most importantly, its political and ideological effects. Above all, it struck me that such maneuvers were always at bottom deployed only opportunistically; something to be picked up or dropped as stop-gap crisis management wherever the dike needed current reinforcements. But once I'd grasped how that game worked, what else was there?
Runtu's comment that its all become an obsession with "winning or losing" seems to sum up the discursive atmosphere at MAD.
What I wanted to see was something else: the way contemporary Mormon believers dealt with various issues: believers who were neither (reactionary) absolutists nor (reactionary) opportunists. Looking back, a discussion board devoted to an increasing rigid form of religious apologetics was the last place to find what I wanted.
I do find the views of believing/active/or still attending Mormons who post here of interest. Jason, asbestos, gaz, liz, harmony and others (and I don't see them as at all similar or occupying similar positions) are interesting and helpful to me as I think about contemporary Mormonism in relation to its entire history. There are a few similar voices still on MAD but I don't see them posting as much as I do those who strike me as working from within a world view not dissimilar to a superstitious peasant in a dank medieval hamlet, or any eary 20thC fascist (lest anyone think this too much, I hesitated over the discription, but could find nothing else strong enough to capture the unhesitating endorsement of violence and condemnation of others I often see there). It's funny, but using the Shadian chapel vs. internet distinction (one whose criteria I find useful if not the terminology) MAD is filled with far more chapel than internet Mormons these days. The "Bloggernacle," on the other hand, now there's some Internet Mormons!).
From the Ernest L. Wilkinson Diaries: "ELW dreams he's spattered w/ grease. Hundreds steal his greasy pants."
