Giving out a challenge when you think the outcome will favor you, but then backing out when someone takes it seriously and is about to call you out on your bullshit.

Mormons are so guilty of this. "Explain away the Book of Mormon" they say. "You can't do it." So, you take the challenge and come up with some compelling ideas, and they immediately appeal to your better nature not to attack their beliefs, or they just walk away. But when they are alone with no one around but each other, people prone to agree with them, or their youth who are too naive to know any better, they say, "no one has ever explained this book away. They can't do it. Many men professing to be wise have tried and were made fools."

This double standard, this speaking out of both sides of their mouth, is clearly displayed in Holland's talk "Safety For the Soul" given in the October 2009 Conference. He spends the talk oscillating between challenging his audience to test the Book of Mormon and becoming angry that people would dare challenge the Book of Mormon. He clearly intended his talk for believers, maybe a few on the edge, but no one else could possibly hear his bullying and mistake it for anything else.

I was a missionary struggling with my faith in 2009. I'd heard enough of the church's baggage to get a sense that something was horribly wrong. These antimormon lies were true and historical, yet no one ever taught them to me. Then I heard this talk and everything seemed ok for a little while longer.

Because he convinced me that all the hullabaloo surrounding the Book of Mormon was just Satan's mist of darkness. He persuaded me to simplify it. Look at the fruits. Look, Joseph died for his belief in the Book of Mormon, doesn't that say something? Trust that. So I did. If I wanted to pursue my thought process down the other path, he had just spelled out that I would be as illegitimate in my course as those groping in the dark for the great and spacious building, and also possibly an assentor to the blood of Joseph Smith.

Surprisingly, he mentions the Spaulding and Ethan Smith theories, and also the theories that Joseph was a deranged schizophrenic when he wrote the book, that, or a cunning genius. "None of these frankly pathetic answers has ever withstood scrutiny," he declared with his emotional appeal in hand (the book that Hyrum so openly read from shortly before Carthage). I wish I could go back to that young boy, just barely out of his teens, and tell him that that statement is not valid if he is just going to use it to excuse himself from scrutinizing it. Think about it! If it can withstand scrutiny, then there is nothing to fear by looking into it thoroughly! Holland achieves some limited sense of legitimacy appealing to this, but then he intersperses it with bullying and insults against all and any who try. It really is despicable to dupe someone into remaining under your authority, because if they don't they are somehow guilty of a martyr's blood. Fuck you, Holland, for doing this to that 20 year-old boy.

So, is there a word for this? You issue a challenge that seems falsifiable — you know, go for the scientific legitimacy to reign in those troubled by "so-called" logic and science — but then scare them, paralyze them from wanting to hear anymore from those critics, and hyperbolize anything they have already heard into oblivion. Leave no option but the miraculous one.

It's a logical appeal asking us to concede that the universe is illogical. At every turn, Mormonism sasses the scientifically-minded, and then, after they are deflated or chased out, dons the robes, names, and mystique of science to bolster its own legitimacy to the sheep it almost lost to it.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/26/2015 06:41PM by Cold-Dodger.

Hey Cold-Dodger,

I think this scenario is covered with two terms: argument from ignorance and argumentum ad bacculum (argument backed by a stick).

Argument from ignorance: claiming the absence of evidence confirms your position. The statement that none of the theories against the BoM present evidence to disprove the text makes the text true.

Argument backed by a stick: appealing to force rather than provide a conclusion to the argument. Anyone who attempts to provide evidence disproving the BoM is an agent of evil and an accessory to murder.

Have you read Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World yet? He devotes an entire chapter to logic and provides a thorough list of logical fallacies. The two terms above are examples of these fallacies.

Hope this helps!

Related to another of your posts, about finding meaning in suffering, Sartre (I think) says: freedom is what you do with what's been done to you. You might like Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for meaning and Albert Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays.

That's 3 philophical texts, all fairly dense, but you seem like a philosophical guy. Your story often reminds me of my own, and these three books helped me on my road. Recovery is beautiful; someday you'll get here to share the view.

Happy reading on your travels.

molly

TBMs tend to practice the logical fallacy of "appeal to authority" when they are challenged in their beliefs. The church authorities are not experts in anthropology, archeology or science. It is impossible to argue with closed minds.