Quasimodo wrote:If you had been raised in some other religion, would you have the same attitude?
I was raised by an inactive or, at best, marginally active mother and a non-member father. Virtually none of my maternal relatives were active, none of my paternal relatives were members, and, through high school, not a single one of my friends was a Latter-day Saint. My interest in the Church grew, initially, out of reading a book that we had inherited from my maternal grandmother, who died, herself marginally active and in another state, when I was five.
That doesn't furnish really promising material, in my opinion, for arguing that I'm a product of irresistible childhood indoctrination.
ShadowFax wrote:Perhaps you have much different definitions of fear, shame and guilt.
Unlikely.
ShadowFax wrote:Once you become unbiaste enough, and objective enough, you will see it for yourself.
Another's failure to see things the way you see them is decisive proof that the other person is biased and not objective?
Buffalo wrote:Of course you don't. You're paid not to. :)
Ah yes,
the ever-gracious false accusation that I'm paid for apologetics and am, therefore, a dishonest mercenary.As one of your own number pointed out the other day, there is a reason that active Latter-day Saints, by and large, will not participate here. And it's not because of your powerful arguments or your giant throbbing brains. Lay not that flattering unction to your souls.
ShadowFax wrote:I remember doing an excercise where I'd write down a Mormon doctrinal commandment, or hope/reward, and then write down the techniques used to implement the doctrine, teach it or keep it in place.
I can't remember there being one LDS doctrine that wasn't driven by the emotions of fear, shame or guilt on some level of it's implementation.
Maybe there are one or two.
I used the words
dominant and
prominent for a reason.
I suppose that, so long as the Church hasn't given up the notion of varying levels of reward or glory in an afterlife and the understanding that these are related to degrees of faithfulness, it will always be possible to construe its message as essentially one of shame, fear, and guilt.
But I have never perceived its message to be such, and I frankly suspect that, if you polled believers, their sense of the Church would prove to be, overwhelmingly, more like mine than is the Jonathan-Edwardsesque image some portray here. Reading a few on this board, I could almost believe that they were raised in one of Charles Dickens's or Daniel Defoe's orphanages, or by a caricatured group of psychologically unbalanced 1920s nuns, rather than in the Church with which I'm fairly familiar.
We're a cheerful, optimistic, and
positive bunch, on the whole. Very
much so, in fact. I remember George Will writing a column, many years ago when I was a student, after he had just spoken at BYU. He noted the striking cheerfulness of the place, even in the morning
and without coffee [!], and suggested that perhaps just a bit more
angst might actually be
good for us. He didn't seem to recognize the agony of our burdened souls, etched into our guilt-ridden faces.
There's no point in arguing this, though. No argument is going to convince me that my decades of experience as a member and a leader of the Church in several states and countries were illusory, or that my perception of life lived as a Mormon is fundamentally inaccurate.
I'll just sit back as the insults and
ad hominems come in. I've got several other things that absolutely must get done tonight. It would be shameful for me to let others down with regard to them, and I would feel guilty and would fear what they might say. (Curiously, though, not a one of them has anything to do with the Church. They're just obligations to colleagues -- several not even at BYU -- and to students.)