So he has read a couple of books, been to a pretty good school, I understand that Holland has a Doctorate. Is that a Doctor of DoDoism???

My question is "which definition of "dodo" was he referring to?

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/dodo?s=t

2. Slang . a dull-witted, slow-reacting person.
3. a person with old-fashioned, conservative, or outmoded ideas.

Tough call. Could he plausibly deny both definitions, simultaneously?

RG

"A person with old-fashioned, conservative, or outmoded ideas?" Well, to me it sounds like he is the poster child for a "dodo."

I was in London last week and went to the Natural History Museum to see the dodo. Suprisingly, Holland looks a lot like the dodos on display.

Stuffed?

... or did he mean "dildo" - an English slang term for ... well never mind. Aye, there's the rub.

Is he denying the dodo ever existed? What has he and the Church got against the dodo, anyway?

If this man has read a couple of non-Mormon books, this would make him a giant of Mormon intelligensia.

Poor dodo.

Elder Holland represents my loss of naivity about the church the most out of the apostles.

He was the first new apostle in my experience, called when President Benson died in 1994. My entire church activity up to that point had been under the same stable set of "brethren" for 5 years, including my mission. Prior to that I came from an inactive youth and had only been passively aware when President Kimball died.

This was my Santa Clause time in the church, meaning that my understanding of the nuts and bolts of the church would have seemed naive even to a TBM, notwithstanding me being an RM.

For example, I thought President Benson was a political progressive. An older nonmormon on my mission teased us about his "everyone-eat-one-more-egg-a-day" campaign in the Eisenhower cabinet. I had never heard of the John Birch Society, and it wasn't until I was an exmo fifteen years later that I found out Benson was a right-wing-nut. I assumed the church would have been pro-civil-rights, and I thought that it was only with great reluctance that the church ever banned blacks from the priesthood...same as with polygamy, under the threat of the now-proverbial "flaming sword" (we didn't want too, the Lard made us do it...what a relief, He was only testing us...we don't have to sacrifice Isaac after all...oh wait, we already did...hey next time the Lard tests us by commanding us to do evil, lets make Him proud by saying "we know you're just testing us Lard and that we're NOT supposed to do it").

I thought apostles lived on their own savings or dividends. Even as an RM I didn't know the GAs were paid a salary. I would have thought only their church expenses were paid. And, I wasn't aware that there's a corporate-management elite in the church, insiders who get perks in many other ways besides their "modest stipend".

I thought Elder Holland in particular was a fresh, energetic, spiritual straight-talker. And, he was the first GA who I knew someone who had known him personally, who spoke well of him. That gave me warm fuzzies and I felt a personal partiality to him.

I thought the apostles were, well...apostles.

They're not.

I have to admit it's saddening to see someone who was an apostle to me, like a Catholic or other christian would use the term, become just a man near the top of a corporation which is in almost every way analogous to the tobacco companies before they finally lost their campaign to pay damages...damages they fought for decades to deny with a professional cadre of lawyers and apologists...who outright lied while their customers died.

Watching any old clip of a tobacco defender now is almost too shameful to watch. I have an aversion to watching recordings of people making fools of themselves, and I don't think I'm going to watch Holland's BBC interview. It's pathetic that such an otherwise capable man is reduced to saying we're-not-a-cult-because-I'm-not-a-dodo, not the stuff of PhD's, nor real apostles for that matter if ever there were such a thing.

And, by using the term "dodo", by the way, he unwittingly shows our collective disregard for this bird as a euphamism for an obsolete pushover. Ironically, the church is exactly that, but the dodo shouldn't have been.

It's relevant to me because a biology education kept me from being an even more dogmatic mormon than I was, and it was a safety net that bounced me to secular humanism on the rebound from "religion".

The dodo is a vivid example of evolution. The bible certainly doesn't explain how flightless birds (including some that don't even have vestigial wings at all like the moa) made it back to islands in the middle of the ocean after the ark let them off in Turkey. The dodo, then, is a veritable miracle bird showing the power and wisdom of God to put flightless birds back on islands they can't fly to.

Amos2, I understand so much what you wrote. I couldn't have written it down better. Your thoughts about ETB are exactly my experience. The idea that the Q15 were sacrificing so much to dedicate their lives, or should I say to consecrate, to the Lord was what he missionaries taught me and what I conviced myself to believe. The only difference is that something inside me didn't buy it 100%. Whenever I saw the adoration on the top dogs I felt uneasy, I always thought it was me. Well, it was me, the real me who had been burried by the mormon me.

Your post just made me think that another reason to send young men on missions is that they truly believe, many o them anyway, and can convince converts like me, the "golden" ones, to join. I was not the financially, emotionally or socialy needy convert many missionaries find. My husband and I were at that point looking for a church to join so that we could raise our family in it. The missionaries were so confident and seem sincere we ended up joining. The missionary who baptised me was from SLC and would speak of "the prophet" with such conviction I ended up loving that 'prophet' without knowing him, except his name Ezra Taft Benson.