John Dehlin on the Immorality of Mormonism!

[_Lemmie]

How does it happen that people hide information that advantages them and disadvantages others?

Really?

When one of your starting assumptions for the foundation of your moral thinking is that the universe is ruled by a cosmic alpha ape who values loyalty-testing for its own sake, and that getting onto the good side of that being is of the utmost importance for everyone, and if you trick people into complying with the alpha ape they will benefit, things get pretty twisted up pretty quickly. Moral up becomes moral down, so to speak.

I don't agree that their thinking is valid but since I once subscribed to it, I feel like I understand it a bit, and I feel like I can be a bit sympathetic and understanding of the deluded.

“Cosmic alpha ape.” Lol.

Re your point about their thinking, I can understand, for example, but have an extremely hard time finding acceptable things like “lying for the lord.” In that sense, a group feels they are acting morally, right? I can acknowledge that THEY think it’s moral without agreeing with them that it actually IS moral.

[_Meadowchik]

The quote is under the "Holy Ghost" topic without attribution.

This is an interesting wrinkle that I haven't thought about too much: statements only attributed generically by the website or the newsroom. But the question of validity of generic "church website" quotes is only going to enlarge given these patterns. The essays are an example. No attribution, so while they possibly serve as a legal representation of the church, their validity within gospel norms is unclear and certainly not well understood.

I distrust that lack of clarity especially by an organisation of its means and authority, and it appears to be another example, although more nuanced, of misrepresentation and authoring confusion.

[_Kishkumen]

No. When your posts are inconsistent, they are viewed as inconsistent.

My views are definitely inconsistent with your and honor's opinions. They are not internally inconsistent.

You implying that another person’s considered assessment of your statements is really and only just an attack on you, solely due to you backing the LDS church, is just irresponsible and lazy. You flip flop regularly on your feelings about the LDS church, and have done so for a while. It’s not pretty to watch, and certainly isn’t a good representation of academic methodology.

Let me help you out here. It is not an attack on me. It is evidence of a strong bias. honorentheos is not interested in understanding the LDS Church on its own terms. He is mostly interested in making negative moral judgments against the Church. This disagreement boils down to just that. I want to understand it on its own terms. He wants to call me soft on the Church for doing that. As do you. He also wants to call the Church's treatment of history immoral.

OK. Shrug.

When I try to understand the LDS Church on its own terms, you call me a believer!



Oh, dear me. I am sure that one is getting a lot of laughter from actual believing onlookers. Few things could reveal your bias and misunderstanding of what I am doing better than this.

Specifically, rationality is not part of your assessment when you can say that the suppression of an extremely relevant document by a significant leader of a church absolutely happened, but it doesn’t really constitute an example of a church suppressing relevant information. There is clearly something else underneath your posts in this thread, but I’m done too. You are welcome to the last, irrational word. Other commenters are at least being consistent.

Well, it is good of you to only take the second to last irrational word. Yes, I don't blame the entire Church for what Joseph Fielding Smith did. Shocking, I know.

[_Lemmie]

The quote is under the "Holy Ghost" topic without attribution.

This is an interesting wrinkle that I haven't thought about too much: statements only attributed generically by the website or the newsroom. But the question of validity of generic "church website" quotes is only going to enlarge given these patterns. The essays are an example. No attribution, so while they possibly serve as a legal representation of the church, their validity within gospel norms is unclear and certainly not well understood.

I distrust that lack of clarity especially by an organisation of its means and authority, and it appears to be another example, although more nuanced, of misrepresentation and authoring confusion.

Totally agree with that. It’s also extremely difficult to search for and land on the essays, the drop down menus are inconsistent and unhelpful in finding information, and even their publication and updating seems buried. It’s a pattern of obfuscation that reads as disingenuous at best, if not outright dishonest.

[_honorentheos]

During a period of being a poor student I lived next to a couple who were, frankly, criminals. They were supporting a drug habit and spoke about crime as if it were just another job a person might have. They had a son who was about 5 or 6 and he spoke of being a criminal as if they were his heroes and he was clearly being raised with a moral foundation that didn't match one that society as a whole would get on board with let alone find sympathetic. I felt bad for the kid but no degree of sympathy changes the facts that what he was being exposed to and taught to value was unethical. His upbringing was unethical. Everything about that situation left me wondering about how parents can be such screw ups.in their kids lives and made a lasting impression on me. But one of those impressions included the fact his story is hardly unique. And while I feel sympathy for the kid, the law is all the more important for being both a constraint as well as a disincentive acting against those forces.

Put bluntly, at some point you have to pick a lane or be a dangerous driver yourself.

I fail to see the relevance that an example of conscious wrongdoing without even a perceived higher benefit has to any argument I have made.

Look, if you think that LDS leaders are just conscious deceivers then you are attacking this problem from a very different angle than I am and you are going to come to a very different result. That is okay. I can respect that. But don't pretend you are engaging my argument with examples like this.

You fail to share their perspective on what is the higher benefit but frankly they did see one and would defend it in similar terms. They didn't see what they were doing as wrong. Illegal? Sure. But not wrong. It was society at large that was in the wrong and oppressing them. You reject their belief because you recognize their perspective violates fundamental moral behaviors as codified in law is all. It also helps that you don't have an emotional attachment to them. Like others watching this thread and scratching their heads over your and Kish's insistence the perogitive of the church mitigates the harm so who are we to judge, you recognize in the example above the need to maintain a non-relativist moral position. It didn't matter to you they find a higher purpose - making a living and feeding their family/drug habit - because you recognized there is a fundamental wrong in their behavior that matters to you.

Being consistent with your moral position matters. Even if you can acknowledge the person you see as behaving immorally or unethically has reasons they believe make it helpful rather than harmful according to their worldview. You can see how it works here. That's how it should work everywhere including when one evaluates the ethics of the LDS Church's behavior.

[_Physics Guy]

Having good intentions has to count for something, and acting decently according to one's lights. People are bound to make honest mistakes or just see the world differently. So for me to criminalize every divergence from my own ideals would be dumb, because I'm fallible—and at my age I should know that.

Relativizing everything to the point where self-consistency is the only moral criterion can't make sense either, however. It's too easy for even absolute monsters to make the case that they are merely acting consistently according to their own values. Evil is almost never a matter of violating one's own personal code, after all, because the only people who ever deliberately do anything which they acknowledge is seriously wrong are people who haven't bothered to execute the minor mental gymnastics that are needed to concoct an excuse.

The defense of acting according to one's own values is like the defense of only following orders. It might provide a certain amount of extenuation, but not an unlimited atonement. Feeling that grave crimes were not crimes cannot be an excuse. At some point, letting oneself feel that way is an immoral act in itself: when your conscience should have been blowing the whistle you had it driving the getaway car.

So I'm pretty sure that morality needs a hard-to-define middle way, from which one can err on both sides. To err on one side is to be stupid or hypocritical, but to err on the other side is to let down victims and condone evil. Because the middle way is hard to define, though, it's easy to hear someone else's standing up for the middle way as a defense of either one error or the other. To those defending Mormon leaders in this thread, it seems to me, the other posters have been blindly condemning religious leaders just for the sin of thinking differently. To those accusing Mormon leaders, on the other hand, the defending posters have been supinely insisting that the Brethren are just boys being boys.

That's too bad, because I have the impression that there's less real disagreement here than apparent.

[_honorentheos]

Hi Physics Guy,

I don't disagree with what you say above, in particular when it comes to the treatment of others where a good deal of humility and recognition of one's own fallibility is only prudent. And especially when one is in a position to elevate a moral judgment into law, criminalizing behaviors as you said.

In this case, it seemed necessary to find an example where the party in question did not see the consequences of their actions as immoral, but rather furthering a their own aims that contrasted strongly with how most people would view it, while noting there was reason for being sympathetic. The need, in my opinion, being to force the recognition home that there is always more to the story, so to speak. People usually do act based on their own beliefs of what is for the greater good, or at the least in the moment they don't see themselves doing harm. But one shouldn't then throw their own moral reasoning out the window and say it doesn't apply when judging the behavior and resulting harm done by others.

Lemmie was right, in more ways than one, but in particular when noting there had to be more to what was going on in this thread than a discussion of the subject. There's history and baggage, and the subject was barely about morality or even the behavior of the church. Once I disagree with Kish it inevitably becomes about whether or not certain people know their place when their betters tell them what to think. It can be funny, but it's the kind of egotistical dick swinging that shouldn't be done in public yet here we are.

[_Meadowchik]

Totally agree with that. It’s also extremely difficult to search for and land on the essays, the drop down menus are inconsistent and unhelpful in finding information, and even their publication and updating seems buried. It’s a pattern of obfuscation that reads as disingenuous at best, if not outright dishonest.

And it seems to be continuing. I think I mentioned it upthread, but the recent issue with the racist quotes in the new lesson manual illustrates the pattern, too. In early January 2020, Apostle Gary Stevenson said the inclusion was a mistake, and that "they" became aware of it "late last year," and that they wre instructing local leaders to tell the members to refer to the online version for the correction. However, to my knowledge, there's no reports of any units receiving top-down instructions. The only anecdotal examples of such message getting through are cases of individual members bringing it to the attention of the leaders, and then leaders then checking the statement from Elder Stevenson. There doesn't seem to be any readings of letters from the FP about it in Sacrament meeting.

It seems to me that instructions should have been easily passed down as soon as the mistake was known, to prevent misunderstanding at the local levels. I wonder what is going to be the impression given to the members in poorer countries without knowledge of Stevenson's remarks (or a translation of them) and without regular internet access? Who will be taught this and led to believe it? It seems so negligent that it might even be intentional.

And the damage that this kind of negligence and silence can do is real.

[_Physics Guy]

That's again a point where authority makes a difference, I think, because people with authority have a wider range of degrees of intention. An ordinary person may simply intend to do X or not intend to do it, but for a leader with authority there is the third, higher level of intention, namely the level of making sure that X happens.

Because of this, it's not enough for a leader to protest that they meant to do X, or to point to token measures that demonstrate good intentions towards X even though they didn't actually work. If X didn't actually happen then it means that the leader didn't mean X enough.

[_Kishkumen]

Relativizing everything to the point where self-consistency is the only moral criterion can't make sense either, however. It's too easy for even absolute monsters to make the case that they are merely acting consistently according to their own values. Evil is almost never a matter of violating one's own personal code, after all, because the only people who ever deliberately do anything which they acknowledge is seriously wrong are people who haven't bothered to execute the minor mental gymnastics that are needed to concoct an excuse.

The defense of acting according to one's own values is like the defense of only following orders. It might provide a certain amount of extenuation, but not an unlimited atonement. Feeling that grave crimes were not crimes cannot be an excuse. At some point, letting oneself feel that way is an immoral act in itself: when your conscience should have been blowing the whistle you had it driving the getaway car.

So I'm pretty sure that morality needs a hard-to-define middle way, from which one can err on both sides. To err on one side is to be stupid or hypocritical, but to err on the other side is to let down victims and condone evil. Because the middle way is hard to define, though, it's easy to hear someone else's standing up for the middle way as a defense of either one error or the other. To those defending Mormon leaders in this thread, it seems to me, the other posters have been blindly condemning religious leaders just for the sin of thinking differently. To those accusing Mormon leaders, on the other hand, the defending posters have been supinely insisting that the Brethren are just boys being boys.

It is apparent to me that people believe I am being a moral relativist, but I am not. I believe that individual leaders have done wrong in their handling of historical issues. I do not give whoever it was--probably Joseph Fielding Smith--a pass for hiding the 1832 account. I did say that I sympathized with a difficult situation, but that is not the same as condoning. I also do not condone Elder Packer going after Mike Quinn for publishing scholarship that showed the Church continued polygamy on the sly after the First Manifesto. I have a very difficult time being sympathetic with Elder Packer.

Indeed, I think there has been something of a troubling culture of authoritarian handling of LDS history that must be addressed at the same time we discuss the difficulty of dealing with the apparent incompatibility between the faith narrative and the scholarly history.

Here is where I lose people who hold themselves to be faithful Mormons. There is an unfortunate authoritarian strain in Brighamite Mormonism that has very troubling ramifications and, frankly, a deeply morally troubling record. I believe that strain continues today in such statements as President Oaks', "It is wrong to criticize the leaders even if the criticism is true." I know this has been addressed to defend Elder Oaks on this point, and my intention is not to attack him personally, but there are too many other indications that strict obedience to the leadership is demanded in a way that causes me a great deal of discomfort.

When the overwhelming authority of the leaders of the Church is brought to bear on individual members to punish them for pursuing historical truth, I find that to be unacceptable.

I am not a moral relativist, whatever impression may have come about either through my own words or the way others on this thread have interpreted them and thus depicted me.

That said, I think it is reasonable to suppose that believing leaders and members will not want to leap to negative conclusions about their faith drawn from scholarly history. This is one reason why the faithful narrative will not be swiftly edited or new scholarly history immediately promoted by the Church. Arguably it would be irresponsible for the Church to update its narrative swiftly in response to scholarly discoveries that would be difficult for them to integrate into a faithful perspective. We ought to have some sympathy for that conundrum and not rush to impugn the apparent failure not to embrace new, alternative narratives of Church history, no matter how sound the scholarship supporting them.