God and Man at FAIR: The Sunstoneization of Apologetics

[Guest]

Given recent developments at the MDD board, in which TBM posters have been savaged, held up to character assassination and moral ridicule by leading members of the FAIR moderator team for supporting and defending the official position of the Church on race and the priesthood ban and for encouraging a philosophical position of coloerblindless and dismissal of race as a meaningful category of human relations that needs not divide and balkanize human beings in there interactions with each other, and for arguing for a view of black people as brothers and sisters of equal value, potential, and possibility with white people, and equally as personally responsible for the their conduct, reaction to life circumstances and conditions, and potential to rise above the challenges presented by mortality as white people or any other people, a few questions are in order.

I would like to put these questions to the mods and the sanctimonious leftists who ran roughshod over my character and motives in lieu of rational, critical discourse and debate, but as I'm sure they do not perceive anyone who disagrees with them as worthy of their condescension, I put this out in public as food for though regarding the future of apologetics and of FAIR as the major face of the apologetic movement in the public sphere.

The Cornel West/Darrick Bell/ H. Rap Brown wing of the apologetic movement that apparently controls discourse at the MDD board will doubtless find all of this deeply "offensive" (that wonderful catch-all value that, for the elite leftist intelligentsia, whether LDS or non-LDS, substitutes for reasoned debate and philosophical substance, but the questions should be asked nonetheless.

1. If the priesthood ban was racist, as this coterie of LDS intellectuals claim, why have the Brethren not admitted to such? Why have the Brethren left it to the neo-orthodox LDS "apologetics" elite to "out" the Brethren here?

2. From whence comes the deep resistance to the concept of colorblindness and the idea that blacks are equal participants in both the rights and duties of a free society?

3. If the Book of Mormon clearly teaches that skin color, among other means, is used by the Lord, among a original core of culturally distinct people, as a marker or symbolic representation of anti-Zionic cultural characteristics, what are the probable consequences of excising this from church teaching without the approval or assent of the Brethren?

4. If the Book of Mormon teaches that any changes in physical appearance designating cultural distance from a Zion culture do not represent innate characteristics but only cultural attributes that are responsive to free agency, why the resistance to those teachings as "racist?" What would count for modern liberal Mormons influenced by secular ideological trends as a legitimate symbolic representation of separation between the Lord's people and a culture hostile to gospel standards?

5. How is a confrontational, oppositional stance to official church teachings justified by LDS "apologists" whose core mission, one would think, is to defend the Church, not just against religious anti-Mormons, but also against secular ideologies and intellectual fashions?

6. How is the intellectual excommunication of other apologists as politically incorrect heretics productive or positive manifestations of the apologetic mission?

[Guest]

Droop,
the difficulty arises in the assertion that the ban was not racist.

To answer your first point. The brethren assert the ban was not racist. So what? Just because the brethren say it was not racist, does that make it so? Clearly the defining character of who the ban applied to was the possession of black blood, or black ancestors. This was later relaxed in terms of Polynesian vs African black, but it always applied to those of African black blood. For the brethren to now admit that the ban was racist would be paramount to either admitting that god is a racist, or that BY led the church astray. Neither is acceptable to the church as the church's paramount objective these days is protecting its image.

To answer your second. It was taught by the church/brethren for 100+ years that the blacks were inferior. Are you surprised by the resistance? Are you also surprised by the condemnation of this teaching by the newer generation? Some who were never exposed to these ideas, while others would like for it to quietly disappear. How can anyone truly teach that while there was a ban on those of black decent, it was not racist. This assertion strains rationale. So the young excoriate Bott for perpetuating what once was openly taught....... and the church condemns racism, without owning up to its racist past. Who can make sense of it? Not I.

As I don't have time for all of the points let me ramble.

To say that it was a mistake, the institutionalization of the bias of Brigham Young, makes Brigham a racist and the church astray.

To say that the ban was of divine origin, but that modern revelation cancels out previous FP missives of a doctrinal basis for the ban being based on worthiness in the PE as evidenced by lineage, means that at some point the brethren were led astray, and makes god a racist.

The rub lies in the way the ban was practiced. To say that it was not based on some one possessing "negro blood" is to deny history.

Please delineate the other possible scenarios............


--Edit (as I am not heading out running yet)--

Point 4.
It is in my opinion impossible to separate the idea that god curses people with a skin of darkness and racism. This idea may have been palatable during Joseph Smith's time. This may have even been palatable by the majority of members until a short time ago, and possibly by even a large percentage of the populace of the western world. But now, it is viewed as a racist teaching pure and simple. The idea appearing in the Book of Mormon and "of god" only coincides with the beliefs of the believing. To the skeptic, critic and non believer it is racism.

Point 6.
I have said Mormon Dialogue is a misnomer. There is no dialogue there that runs contrary to the views of the mods. There is little discussion of ideas contrary to the mindset of the apologist. I tackled some of the more popular apologist directly on their misapplication of facts and was immediately banned, even though I did nothing more than show and prove that they had their data in error. I personally attacked no one. I was not critical of the church. I just said your facts are wrong, and asked what was the application of the facts proving. The only reason Kevin is tolerated there is he has academic credentials. I think true discussion is key to the free exchange of ideas, and said exchange leads to growth. The degree of moderation there against any critical discussion is to me, very revealing to the weakness of the espoused positions.

[_moksha]

Yeah, Droopy is right. The planation will never be the same now that the MDD moderators have joined the Union. Still for some, old times there will not be forgotten. I guess it is best to look away, look way, look away Droopy Man.

[_Tobin]

I agree with Steelhead. It is just ridiculous to see the lengths that many members (and leaders) of the Church feel they need to go to defend or avoid addressing this topic directly. I am Mormon and fully recognize it was a racist doctrine introduced by BY and have no problem stating it was such. It has no bearing on my faith in God or belief in many truths found in Mormonism. If it discomforts some that feel they should be correct and right because they are members of this Church, so be it. I welcome this problem because it highlights how disingenous they are about this especially when they claim "they don't know" why it happened. It is deceitful and shows a blindness to their own poor assumptions about the Church and the human (and imperfect) nature of it.

[_Buffalo]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJhnWgs5 ... ntrinter=1

[_Darth J]

If the priesthood ban was racist, as this coterie of LDS intellectuals claim, why have the Brethren not admitted to such? Why have the Brethren left it to the neo-orthodox LDS "apologetics" elite to "out" the Brethren here?

To his dying day, Charles Ponzi never admitted to committing fraud.

Therefore, he was not a con man.

[_Gadianton]

Given recent developments at the MDD board, in which TBM posters have been savaged, held up to character assassination and moral ridicule by leading members of the FAIR moderator team for supporting and defending the official position of the Church...

Yet you still do not believe the Internet Mormon / Chapel Mormon distinction exists?

I agree with your Post Droopy, TBMs should not be censured at MDD for stating the Church's official position. And it's even more hypocritical given these apologists know the ban is doctrine as surely as they know there is but one Hill Cumorah that is found in New York.

[_Gadianton]

The brethren assert the ban was not racist. So what? Just because the brethren say it was not racist, does that make it so? Clearly the defining character of who the ban applied to was the possession of black blood, or black ancestors.

It doesn't make it so, but it does make it official church doctrine, doctrine every moderator at MDD ratifies during their temple interview and also when sustaining the GAs at conference time. It is hypocritical for the mods to berate Droopy and others for accepting what the Church teaches. And even when TBMs hold racist views, it is wrong for moderators to use their moderator powers to silence opinions.

What this shows is how thoroughly threatened the apologists feel on this issue.

[_malkie]

The brethren assert the ban was not racist. So what? Just because the brethren say it was not racist, does that make it so? Clearly the defining character of who the ban applied to was the possession of black blood, or black ancestors.

It doesn't make it so, but it does make it official church doctrine, doctrine every moderator at MDD ratifies during their temple interview and also when sustaining the GAs at conference time. It is hypocritical for the mods to berate Droopy and others for accepting what the Church teaches. And even when TBMs hold racist views, it is wrong for moderators to use their moderator powers to silence opinions.

What this shows is how thoroughly threatened the apologists feel on this issue.

Gad, don't you know that it is wrong to criticize MDD mods even if the criticism is true?

[Guest]

Yet you still do not believe the Internet Mormon / Chapel Mormon distinction exists?

This has nothing to do with Shade's artificial Chapel/Internet dichotomy, and everything to do with what appears to be to me a presumptuous sense of intellectual and moral superiority among some of the highly educated, advanced degreed intellectual elite within the apologetics community that has little, if anything to do with the Internet and much more to do with the substantial time they have spent embedded within the cultural and intellectual environment of contemporary academe and, in particular, within elite institutions of higher learning such as Harvard, Brandies, Claremont, and other institutions where the modern tenured Left thoroughly dominates the culture, academic philosophy, and academic content of intellectual life.

Some of them have apparently found this overall environment congenial, have absorbed some fairly substantial elements of the regnant intellectual orthodoxies, and now approach the Church, in some areas, in a spirit of enlightened and "progressive" ark steadying.

Some have also quite clearly imbibed and adopted the pose and style of sanctimonious moral denunciation of principled intellectual disagreement that defines the contemporary tenured Left as well as their counterparts in the mainstream media and the arts.

I began to see sometime back (about the time of the Will Schryver dust up I think) when I was indignantly attacked and finally banned for criticizing and denouncing Angela Davis, that something was amiss. Now, if one is among people, said to be educated, and even highly educated, in America, and one is set upon with anguished cries of moral outrage for attacking Angela Davis (or anyone like her), one is clearly among those who have a worldview and perception of fundamental human issues so vastly different (regardless of whether they are LDS or not) from one's own, that one looks about for some way to orient oneself to where these others are coming from, philosophically. The answer, of course, is the average cultural anthropology, sociology, history, humanities, political science, theology, literature, or, most particularly, any of the many eponymous ideologically grounded "studies" departments of most colleges and universities in the nation, and one is not surprised to find the most extreme and entrenched radicalism in the most elite institutions (and especially the Ivy League).

All the stuff I now see over at MDD trying to attach itself to the Church - feminist concepts, postmodernism, attitudes toward racial issues emanating almost entirely from the Left; socialist/collectivist ideas of economic and social dynamics (and the endless hobby horse of trying to graft these into the UO and LoC), and generally a "neo-orthodox" attitude to the more controversial points of LDS doctrine that attempt a syncretistic blending of Church teachings and other concepts selected from the "progressive" intellectual and political sphere, are all identifiable as classic progressive ideological approaches with an LDS gloss or coloration.

The banmania aimed disproportionately at certain posters, and especially when either no reason is given or the reasons are clearly ad-hoc (new, novel ones seem to appear all the time) is suggestive evidence of the mentalities at work.