Why did you feel the spirit when Sam carried Frodo up Mount Doom?

That's when I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Brother Gamgee was truly a formerly-known-as-Mormon.

Ha ha ha ha...I felt it at an Ozzy Osbourne concert.

The same reason that I sometimes cry when I see a movie or read a book. A good story can create some profound emotions, even if the story is fictional.

It's scary how powerful stories can be in programming people's minds.

I'm always amazed by how frequently I come across people whose understanding of history is based entirely on Hollywood movies. It seems that they should realize that "based upon a historical event" or "based upon a true story" means that it's not the actual historical event (or even necessarily even a nearly accurate portrayal) and it's not the true story. But people love to hear good stories. Stories are how they understand their world.

Paul H. Dunn's stories were based on historical events and based on true stories. (For example, WWII really happened and there were soldiers with guns. Also Paul H. Dunn really played baseball when he was younger.) The problem was that none of the elements of Paul H. Dunn's stories that made them interesting and worth listening to...ever really happened. People suspended their disbelief because they wanted the stories to be true. They wanted to believe that Mormon faith and rules really made a big and positive difference and would reliably protect them in an otherwise dangerous and unpredictable world.

I know I got sucked in to some extent as a kid. (I even got Paul H. Dunn books on birthdays and whatnot.)

Why did I feel it when I later found out I had made a mistake, and the relative actually was born in a different town.

The feeling is clearly not a mystic guarantee of the "trutfulness" of any information.

I've learned to begin asking the following questions: "What key labels are being used? What thing is being labeled? Why is this particular label being attached here? Who benefits from using this label? And who was controlling the labeling machine when this label was affixed to this product?

So...why did I feel the spirit when....?

What label is being used? Answer: The Spirit.

What is being labeled? Answer: My feeling about a [Paul H. Dunn story].

Why is this label being used? Answer: Because if it's really the Spirit (and not just an ordinary human emotional response that cannot be relied upon as a signifier of truth or proof of anything), then it's essentially a message from God, the omniscient creator of the universe and that must mean that the story being told is true and any conclusions logically based on the story must be true and must be followed as reliable principles.

Who benefits from using this label? Answer: If the label is true and accurate, everyone benefits. If the label is false, the person using the label is hoping to benefit from perpetrating a fraud. (In Paul H. Dunn's case, he sold books and tapes, he built up his authority and reputation as a leader, and he scored points with his organization by promoting the organization.)

Who was controlling the labeling machine? Answer: The church (via its various authorities and spokespersons) is responsible for affixing the "feeling the spirit" label to virtually any and every emotion that promotes the authority and image of the church. The only reason why anyone listening to a Paul H. Dunn story would think that their positive emotional response to the story was a case of "feeling the spirit" is because this is how it was interpreted for them by church leaders. A pattern had been established for them through countless church meetings, firesides, conferences and so on that whenever a church leader speaks or tells a story and good feelings result...that is "feeling the spirit."

Concerning Paul Bunyon Dunn, I was a kid taken in by, hmmm, let's see.....

1. A fireside talk that was finally exciting, had some humor, and the speaker was not 3 x's my age.

2. I was indoctrinated extremely well to think that the cult leaders were not cult leaders and, also indoctrinated, to think and act as I was told.

3. Critical thinking and facts were not part of Mormonism's lesson books. And, definitely, not a part of its formula for success - you know obey, obey, obey and all will be well.

Repeat #'s 1, 2, and 3 right up to Kolob's front door.

I felt the "spirit" the three times I 've seen Queen + Adam Lambert. I was in the midst of two rock gods, Brian May and Roger Taylor. Actually cried a few tears of joy.

I did see Paul Dunn and the Osmonds together at a fireside once. His stories were pretty incredible. He was a good story teller.

-Dennis

Dennis Moore nli Wrote:
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> He was a good story teller.

So was Joseph Smith :)

ificouldhietokolob Wrote:
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> Dennis Moore nli Wrote:
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> > He was a good story teller.
>
> So was Joseph Smith :)

Yes indeed! Bwwaaahhh! ;)

The authenticity of a story has little to do with "warm, fuzzy feelings" listening to it. It can be a Fairy Tale.
Our emotions give us a response depending on how we are interpreting what we are seeing and hearing. If we are told,(conditioned), as in Mormonism, that when you feel good, it's "the spirit" then that is how it's interpreted.

What we used to believe was "feeling the Spirit" is simply us feeling emotionally moved by something. He told stories to stir up that sort of emotional reaction and we equated it with some magical being causing us to feel that way.

As CrispingPin noted, we can feel that same emotion even when we know that what we're reacting to is fictional. But when we know it's fictional, we don't equate it with "the Spirit."

Funny how we didn't notice that the feeling was exactly the same in both cases.

Because you were a kid and trusted those whom you were told were good men.

My wife and mom both taught in public schools, though my wife did so for only three years. They both heard at teacher-motivating inservices the story [that probably every teacher in the U.S. has heard or read at some point] of a fifth-grade boy whose mom had died and who was falling deeply into the cracks, but fortunately was rescued by his fifth-grade teacher once she got her head out of her @$$ and started to treat him decently. I won't go into the details of the story, but it supposedly often left teachers in both tears and goosebump upon hearing it for the first time. The story is sappy, but my wife heard it for the first time when she was both hormonal and exhausted from the rigors of teaching kindergarten full-time while attending law school full-time. I remember that she came home crying, then could barely get through the story because she cried so much in retelling it to me over a ten o'clock dinner that night.

It's a great story, and it SHOULD be true, but it is, unfortunately, fiction. Snopes.com even has an entry refuting the story's authenticity. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/teddy-bared/ In a televised sermon, The Reverend Robert Schuller passed the story off as his own, telling it as though someone in his family was the teacher, Paul Harvey reportedly told the story in one of his broadcasts as well. Others told the story with their own variations. In a postscript to a particular version of the story, Dr. Theodore Stoddard, the grown-up Teddy, is wrongly identified as an oncologist for whom the Stoddard Cancer Center at Iowa Methodist Hospital is named. (Snopes says the center is actually named for an engineer named John Stoddard. No doctor with the name of Theodore Stoddard is on record as ever having practiced medicine at Iowa Methodist Hospital.) The actual author was a woman named Elizabeth Silance Ballard Ungar, who wrote it for a Baptist publication. Silance said the only factual basis to the story was that someone she knew who taught Sunday School was given a half-used bottle of perfume and a piece of costume jewelry that had belonged to his mother by a little boy in her Sunday School class who had recently lost his mother.

The Holy Ghost doesn't hold any sort of a monopoly on goosebump production. A good story will always be a good story. Paul H. Dunn could have made a few minor adjustments and could have done great things with the Teddy Stoddard story, which would have allowed even more people to feel burning in their respective bosoms and to gain testimonies of Paul H. Dunn.

The Paul H. Dunn version of the Teddy Stoddard story probably would have gone something like this:

(1) A fifth-grade teacher is at her wits end, trying to figure out what to do to help one of her students -- a student who seems to be having a particularly hard time and is at risk of falling through the cracks and doomed to a hard life if things can't be turned around.

(2) Not far away, Paul H. Dunn, was inspiring a team of little league players with pro baseball player tips and was regaling them with the story about the time that he was playing a charity game to raise money to build an orphanage for 500 kids in Palau. As he recalled in his story, a cynical billionaire had pledged to donate 50 million dollars, but only would pay if Dunn's team won the game. The billionaire had cackled cynically, thinking that Dunn's rag-tag team would never win.
But, amazingly, when all looked bleak. Dunn was up to bat and had hit a ball straight down center field. At the same time, the backside of Dunn's pants ripped open exposing his temple garments as he slid into first base, with bases loaded, and he didn't stop sliding on his backside until he had hit every base, pushing the other players forward, until everyone had made it to homebase. It should have been easy enough for the opposing team to take care of things before anyone from Dunn's team could score. But all members of the opposing team had just stood there frozen in shock watching the spectacle of Dunn sliding along from base to base on the backside of his garments. As he told the little league players, it was the funnest time he ever had getting 50 million dollars from a greedy billionaire.

(3) After telling his very true, 100% accurate, undeniably factual baseball story to the little leaguers, Dunn was suddenly prompted to go down the road to a nearby elementary school where, by chance, he saw a young boy on the sidewalk with a dejected look on his face. Dunn immediately felt drawn to the boy. As he got close, he saw tears in the boys eyes. Dunn pulled out a handkerchief, not realizing that it was not just any old handkerchief. It was a hosanna shout handkerchief that he had used when participating in a "hosanna shout" ceremony in the temple the day previously. He had mistakenly put it in his pocket instead of one of his ordinary hankies. As he dabbed at the boy's eyes, shots rang out. It was a drive-by shooting by local gang-bangers. Dunn felt something hit the handkerchief with tremendous force. A bullet! Oh, no! Surely the boy had been shot in the eye and would soon die. But as he looked down he saw that the hosanna hankie had completely absorbed the kinetic force of the bullet, which had fallen harmlessly to the sidewalk. "It's a miracle!" the boy exclaimed excitedly.

(4) The boy's teacher ran out to see what had happened. She was so relieved to see that the boy was okay. It turned out that she had let her temple recommend lapse many years ago and was slacking in her church commitments. "What happened?" she asked. Dunn told her about the hosanna hankie and how blessed they were that he had just recently been to the temple, where God is able to bestow his greatest blessings and even deliver miracles ahead of time, to be revealed at later times outside the temple--just like that bullet-stopping hosanna shout hankie.

(5) The teacher thanked Dunn for being there and for reminding her of her long-forgotten temple vows. "I'm going to start going to the temple again!" she said, "so that I will be in a position to bless my students when they are most in need."

(6) The boy looked up at both of them and beamed. The love he felt from them and from heavenly father, through the power of the temple hankie, gave him just the courage he needed to turn his life around. "I'm going into law enforcement after I finish school!" he declared. And, as Dunn would proudly recall many years later, the boy became the top law enforcement officer in the world and often called Dunn by telephone to catch up and to get advice on complicated law enforcement matters.

The degree to which you channeled Paul H. here is uncanny.

I know, huh?
I could almost hear the Utah accent as I was reading it...

That 5th grade teacher story sounds a bit like that Cipher in the Snow; which has also been shown to motivate educators.

It's certainly of the same genre.

Because he was a talented actor. Other talented actors make me feel "the spirit" quite often.

Con artists are known for their charm and charisma.

My last living uncle is a con artist. He prides himself on being a talented actor, well read, educated, etc. He's a snake oil salesman in a suit jacket.

Paul Dunn was a well crafted liar. It does make you wonder how many more there are, who are just better liars than he was at the top of the dung pile in the GA.

BeenThereDunnThatExMo Wrote:
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He told good stories with half-true ideas (as I have studied a few of his talks to understand who is this Paul Dunn character that Mormons are talking about.); even though he lied to gain power. He always used emotions to sell the ideas, and you heard the truth, but ignored the lies. I will post the idea I'm trying to communicate in a new thread.

Pres Monson was a bigger liar of fabricated stories, and he got to the very top. The LDS church is full of occultists at the top, but not all of them. Only solid reasoning can spot the liars.

I called the author of "Blood on the Doorposts", and he claimed he left the occult powers and joined Christianity by the song "amazing grace"--pure emotion. What a liar. He told me Faust was a an occultist that helped him out move from the black witches to the white witchcraft in Mormonism, then he was "saved" by Amazing Grace.

But he lied. There are a lot more that just "a few" occultists at the top. And he never abandoned his occult beliefs to pretend he is a Christian. He just moved deeper into it to deceive the Christians, just like Joseph Smith fooled the Mormons. Reason is the only way out of the confusing ideas.

TBH, I have for a long time strongly suspected that many (if not most) of the top leaders have no belief at all in principal claims made by and for the church. By this I mean the whole divine founding, divine inspiration, Joseph Smith was a true prophet (not profit), the temple rituals are divinely revealed....you know the standard beliefs that the flock is constantly exhorted to believe and bear testimony of.

I often get pushback (without persuasive argument) that this notion is too cynical.

But after observing the way that they have acted, the decisions that they have made and the things they have said to different audiences over the years, I think the evidence and arguments favor my view.

They may, at best, feel some responsibility to keep the little lambs in the flock protected from what they think will be a mind-shattering, life-destroying exposure to the truth that it's all false. But for the most part, I think they just dig the gig. They love the attention, the adulation and the perks. (And I think the financial benefits (including the ability to send Churchco business and contracts in the direction of friends and family) are probably much greater than people realize.)

Because Paul Dunn was a master manipulator at yanking people's emotional chains, in a MORmON context as they allowed it, and MORmONISM is all about emotional manipulation prevailing over reason to benefit LD$ inc's MORmON church scam.

LD$ Inc's 12 (or 15) ASSpostHOLES were not so edified when their underling Paul Dunn was selling a lot more books than they were.

Putting on my TBM hat, "you felt the spirit because the MESSAGE was still true."

I was at a youth confernz in the 60's when TSM was a newly minted apistle and as he was speaking I felt nothing but boredom.

That feeling... That feeling that you had at that moment in time, when a specially anointed, appointed and multi-jointed Apostle was speaking?

Do you know what that feeling was? I'll tell you...

What you were feeling is what is known in sacred history as the "Witness and Confirmation of Ennui"

I have experienced a very profound and powerful Witness and Confirmation of Ennui in numerous Churchco meetings. Such experiences helped make me what I am today. ;o)

I'm pretty sure that the FP and Qof12 were completely okay with Paul H. Dunn telling fibs and tall-tales to entertain and inspire the sheep. They would have continued to be totally fine with it too...if he hadn't been caught out doing it.

Boyd was probably so pi-ss-ed at his pesky nephew Lynn and his silly journalistic ethics that made him research Dunn's stories and then have the audacity to tip off the sheep concerning the falsity thereof.

Hadn't Boyd made it clear that "The Mantle is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect"? Then Lynn had to go and use his intellect. And Dunn lost his mantle or, more specifically, lost his Mickey Mantle story.

(Did you know that, according to various Dunn stories, he had personally met and interacted, sometimes even playing ball, with: Joe Dimaggio, Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, Willie Mays, Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth?

Virtually all of the biggest names in baseball known to Dunn's generation.

It would be like me telling folks about my personal experiences and interactions with Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain and Lebron James and how I had thrown the ball around with some of them and how many of them had personally encouraged me to keep playing basketball because they knew I'd be great at it. So hilarious!)

The Mormon church held those firesides precisely so gullible members would feel that "spirit" and become more obedient.

Total emotional manipulation.