Niadna wrote:Res Ipsa wrote:There are two types of people in the world: those who put people into categories and those who ...
Oh, nevermind.
Seriously, what do you get out of creating these categories and then assigning folks to them? Do you choose how to interact with them based on their category or as individuals?
yep.
Or rather...sometimes.
What that really was about was trying to differentiate the honest critic, who sees something s/he honestly has a problem with and respectfully addresses that, from the folks who use insulting language, from the folks who do physically obstructive and perhaps even harmful, things.
Loose categories, sure, but the thing is, I'm tired of the Mormons who think that every critic is as 'anti-Mormon' as the folks who shot Sardius Smith, and I'm just as tired of the folks who think that the Haun's Mill thing was justified because some Mormon gave a speech saying that Mormons would defend themselves if they were attacked.
There's a pretty wide variety of opinions out there, and I just don't think that "Mormon/Anti-Mormon" covers it.
I totally get your frustration with folks who divide the world up into Mormons and anti-mormons. But is the right solution just to create a couple more labels to slap on folks? In the first place, it seems kind of odd to me to classify 7 billion people in the world based on their stance toward a minority religion. I mean, I'm an avid boardgamer. I likely spend more time board gaming than you spend in church. But it wouldn't occur to me to categorize people based on their stance toward boardgaming.
But the real problem with this type of taxonomic exercise, in my opinion, is that the labels don't really tell you anything important about the person. Instead, one slaps a label on a person and then reacts to the label instead of the person. For example, under your taxonomy, our poster Shulem would be an anti-mormon. He has, what I believe are honest and deeply felt objections to Mormonism, but he doesn't express them in a respectful manner. If you slap the anti-mormon label on him, you are simply going to miss who he is and why he feels and expresses himself the way he does.
The point is, the labels obfuscate rather than reveal. If you and I are having a discussion and I speak disrespectfully, you can address that disrespect without slapping a label on me. Frankly, that's what many LDS folks do when presented with any criticism of the Church: they label it as "anti-mormon" and use that as an excuse to disregard the substance of what the person says.
Your mileage may vary, but my experience is that genuine and productive discussion requires one to abandon labels and to try one's best to listen and understand what the other person is saying.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951