Twice!

First one, in response to our First Vision story where the Father introduces the Son, totally pwned me by ever so gently showing me that verse in Mosiah about the Father being also the Son. Being the senior I stuttered that it meant they were one in purpose. He very calmly said, no look at it again, it emphasizes their being one and the same over and over. I was aghast, and angry at myself (narcissistic and deluded that I would one day be a GA, that's for another post) that I didn't see that coming and stormed into my room to study the verse.

Second, was talking to some bum in a depressed area by the sea (only ones that would let us in to talk), somehow we talked about the Pre-existence. He simply said, if we're all brothers and sisters, then I can't marry that hot young thing (gesturing to a young woman strolling at the beach) because that would be incest. My first instinct was to explain genetics to him, but then cog dis set in. Of course we quickly bore our testimonies and got out of there.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/20/2011 05:33AM by charles, buddhist punk.

I recall discussing with an investigator Laban's head being cut off by Nephi. The conversation went something like:

Investigator: "Wouldn't there be a lot of blood?"
Me: "Yes, of course."
Investigator: "Why would Nephi then put on clothes that were soaked with blood?"
Me: "(loss for words...drrrrrrrrrr)" lol.

Not really "pwned" -- realistically, the ones who know the most about Mormon doctrine are probably the ex-mo's, and I didn't run into many of those on the mish; the ex-mo's I did run into were typically those who had run hard in the other direction, into fundamentalism.

Any denomination of Christianity will invariably be bogged down by its own contradictions, which is why there are so many sects out there, and probably why many ex-mo's become agnostic or atheist.

As far as Laban and the blood, you can take the head off a critter (or a person) and ensure all the bleeding goes downhill, leaving the body untouched. I worked with a girl at the Y whose job involved guillotining various animals for brain studies; we got to be quite expert at decapitation without leaving a mess.

You guillotined animals at the Y? That must have been interesting... LOL

Err, round these parts "the y" means the ymca. Hahahaha what a demented mental image you gave me...

Guillotining animals at the Y?

Was this part of a FAIR/FARMS study to prove Nephi could put the clothe on? ;)

Neuroscience, studying the effects of cocaine (some of the only legal coke in Utah County) on the brain. Most of the study animals used were Norwegian rats. There's actually a medical guillotine device created for such purposes, which we found to be ineffective. In the end, we used straight tinsnips most of the time.

... wanted to know all about the Church welfare system -- he'd heard it was great and wanted to know all about it (multiple visits/"lessons"). This guy was very wealthy so it wasn't for personal improvement reasons that inspired his interest.

Not know much about it I did the research ... which, of course, leads to TRUE knowledge. I became disaffected by the Lard's true (lower-case) welfare system -- thus I basically LIED to make the church's program look better than it was.

Yeah, it was on my mission that I realized that it was US [LDS missionaries] that twisted meanings and contexts of the Bible to make it support our doctrine. I was always shocked how, despite the fact that the Lords' servants in scripture always confounded the un-believers and words were given them in the very hour they were needed, I found that I was usually the one confounded.

I served in St. Louis, MO, 2002-2004. Lots of people there really know the Bible.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/15/2013 12:00PM by almostthere.

I've talked about this before but I never get sick of it:

I was only pwned once in my mission.

My trainer and I casually approached a guy watering his lawn in San Diego and we did the usual GQ intro.

The long story short is that none of our fallacious tricks worked on him because he was a very intelligent, logical atheist.

We couldn't identify anything that we could attack, and what we had to offer he wasn't buying.

He just ever-so-nonchalantly tore us to shreds with a smile on his face as if he was swatting a fly away.

He was paying more attention to his lawn than to us, and yet still seemed to reduce my trainer to tears, and I had no idea what had just happened.

I wish I could find that guy and shake his hand.

for kolobian:
Would be interested to hear how he accomplished that. Could come in handy should a similar situation arise, it _would_ be very interesting to be on the other side of the fence this time.

It's been a pretty long while since the conversation took place, but I got all my best lines from that guy. I would use them on other missionaries when we were "role playing" during companion study. I always pwned them too.

Basically, we approached this nice dude who was minding his own business watering his lawn, which is to say that we trespassed onto his property and interrupted him in the middle of what he was doing.

We GQ'd him: "have you ever spoken to missionaries before?"

He said no but he knew who we were and he politely told us he wasn't interested because we had nothing to offer that he was interested in.

I was a noob, so I told him we had the most important message he would ever hear in his entire life and it came from god, and did he want to know what it was?

He raised an eyebrow and said something like, "oh, your god has told you how to cure all the diseases of the world?"

This is where I stepped back and let my trainer take over. He'd hit me in 2 places I'd never been hit before. The first place he hit me was to marginalize my belief in god by calling it "my god" as if I made it up. Nobody had ever placed a possessive pronoun in front of the word god before and it stunned me.

The second place he hit me was that I'd never considered that if we had an open lifeline to the one true god, why didn't we have meaningful, functional information about the world like how to cure diseases? My mind started racing to find something awesome god had told us about the world but I came up blank. So I stepped back.

My trainer stepped up and said, "what church do you go to?"

The guy started laughing. LAUGHING. Nobody had ever laughed in response to that question before. Most people in San Diego take the church question very seriously. You've got Shadow Mountain in El Cajon, a million catholic churches, and a few megachurches scattered about.

But this guy just laughed and said "why would you assume I go to any church?"

So my companion said "do you believe in god?"

To which the dude said, "which god are you referring to?

My companion said, "there's only one god and he's our heavenly father. He loves us so much blah blah blah only son blah blah yadda yadda return to live with him."

So the guy said "prove it."

Oh man, I'd only been out a month or so but still, nobody had ever in my life questioned the existence of god until this moment and I was stuck. I just looked at my trainer who I assumed had gotten this question a million times but he looked like someone had told him santa wasn't real for the first time.

I realize now that he just didn't want to lose face in front of his greenie (me).

So here we were: unable to establish common beliefs like the preach my gospel guide said to do; unable to identify anything the guy believed that we could attack like the preach my gospel guide said to do. We had nothing to go on.

So like any good theist does, my companion started throwing out ridiculous logical fallacies to try to prove god.

First he said, "all things denote there is a god." A stupid quote from the book of mormon if there ever was one.

The guy said, "what things? Can you point at one thing that proves a god exists?"

So my trainer said "you, and me, and trees, etc."

The guy said "these are all naturally-occurring phenomena with natural explanations, no supernatural entities required."

So my trainer said "how do you think the universe got here?"

The guys said, "how do you think your god got here?"

This went on for a while. We'd try a fallacious argument, he'd shut it down. We'd get loud, he stayed on an even keel.

Long story short, we got to the testimony portion of the show.

This was the first time I heard of confirmation bias. This is the first time someone asked me how I could honestly distinguish between feelings from my brain vs. feelings from a ghost.

This is where I realized I couldn't honestly say I "knew" the church was true. I could only honestly say I "believed."

My trainer stormed away from the conversation with tears in his eyes. We went back to the apartment and he went and prayed for over an hour. Then he came back out and acted like nothing had happened.

I was never the same. And after that point I never tried to teach anyone who didn't already believe in a god. I only ran into a few more atheists and I just kept it moving.

When I introduced the Book of Mormon to a man in the first discussion, he said "Great. More ridiculous, infantile fairy stories like in the Bible. God must think we're a bunch of ten year olds." I didn't really know how to answer that.

My introduction to the idea that truth can't be determined by feelings was from a man I was talking to on the street during my mission. I tried to explain the idea of the Holy Ghost to him and he laughed. He said if he went to a scary movie, his heart would race and he would get all excited and shout at the girl to not go out there alone, but he knew none of it was real. He pretty much had me on that one.
Another time a guy asked me what happened to the gold plates. When I answered he didn't even have to laugh to make me feel stupid. I felt stupid just giving the standard "dog ate my plates" response. I remember thinking, "What the hell did I just say?"

I used to wonder if the discussions were intentionally written to unravel the whole tapestry of crazy with any questioning so that we would look bad for telling the truth and not the Church. Of course they're going to ask what happened to the golden plates, because that would be undeniable proof! But no, they left it up to us to say "Uh, the angel took them back up to heaven." and look like a buffoon. You'll notice Hinckley had no trouble denying major doctrines to avoid looking bad.

After I bore my testimony, this guy said, "I don't doubt that you felt a special feeling, but how do you know you didn't just work yourself up into it?" I am not sure how long it was before I was able to close my mouth.

My first first teeny tiny minuscule doubt. I with I could thank him. The irony was, he had no idea how small the feeling was that I had worked myself into. I was basically running on two chills and a shiver.

I also remember running into a few exmos. One of them made a comment that stuck with me- we had debated for a few minutes on his doorstep, and I, of course, was reduced to bearing a testimony. He cut me off as I was just starting and said, "Now you're gonna bear your testimony. I did the same thing when I was on my mission. I remember how it works." Then he said something about how meaningless it was. I was shocked again.

I did that same thing with a couple of missionaries about a year ago, less the "on my mission part" (I never went). They also seemed surprised that I had ever had a testimony.

Few people in Taiwan knew much about Mormonism, so it was unusual when I sat down with a calm 20-something guy who laid out a whole list of questions dealing with the historicity of the Book of Mormon, DNA problems, etc. All I could do was encourage him to pray and read the Book of Mormon.

I was aware of some problems before my mission and had somehow developed the though process that there will never be any physical or scientific evidence that supports a literal interpretation of Mormonism (probably to try our faith). The problem I couldn't reconcile was why does BYU, FAIR, General Conference talks, etc., make it seem like this evidence does and will exist.

Eventually the lack of supporting evidence and mountain of damning evidence became indistinguishable from what I expected of a fraud and I had to leave.

I wish I could talk to that guy again--he really did his homework before meeting with us.

@Chris,

When did you serve?

I have a friend who served there, too...LOL

He was from Utah, but grew up in Idaho, I think.

We tracted out a psychiatrist. He listened to us politely and then asked about your sex lives. Totally threw me off but intrigued me

I never got pwned on my mission. I argued way too well and never ran into anyone that actually had valid research. Everyone I talked to that was anti had the kind of information that we would laugh at here at RfM. It is the stuff that is silly and not helpful, the strawman stuff Mormons use to show that all antis are stupid. Had I actually run into someone with valid research and information that I have found more recently, I might have had some interesting distress. Might not have gone to BYU, etc. Who knows.

i was in Japan on my mission. one evening i was giving the first discussion to a couple. when i got to the part where god the father and jesus h christ appeared to joseph smith, the wife burst into hysterical laughter and said through her guffaws, "USO!" translated literally as "LIE!" or loosely as "NO WAY!".

where does one go after that?

I was in Nagasaki and came across this man who knew the bible quite well and taught at University. He was very educated and humble. We were giving him the discussions. He would politely listen, do the assigned reading, etc. So, after a few visits we asked him to give the prayer. He said something like "Didn't Jesus teach us in the New Testament to pray in secret? I can't find anywhere that Jesus told us to pray in public." We stammered around and tried different angles but couldn't give him a satisfactory answer from the Bible.

Another guy had us on one of the articles of faith, "we believe in being subject to kings, magistrates, rulers in obeying honoring and sustaining the law." He asked about polygamy. If you believe in following the law, why did your church violate it for so long? He said he would have more respect for an organization that stuck with its principles and violated the law, rather than one that pretended to do so or changed its teachings for the government.

We asked a Christian man we had taught a discussion to about reading The Book of Mormon. He said he found it hard to comprehend, but when it broke into the stuff out of The Bible, it made sense and flowed nicely. We just sat there for a minute, then moved right on.

Another lady we were getting ready for baptism told us that she believed The Book of Mormon except for God turning people's skin dark colors as punishment. She said that she was certain the only reason Africans and Central/South Americans had darker skin was because they were in warm climates with a lot more sun and that's that. So we just left it at that as well.

Weak, stupid, 20-year-old boys. I should have listened to the still, small voice both times.

One guy on the street told me the Book of Mormon was a fraud, so I asked him if he had read it and prayed about it. He answered that he had both read it and prayed about it with real intent, and received the distinct impression that it was a fraud. I was floored and walked away assuming that he must have been lying.

Oh, yeah, I had a number of those, as well. One I remember most was coming back for a second discussion with a really nice Christian guy. When we came back, he stopped us at the door and handed us the BOM in a large ziploc bag. He said when he prayed about it, he felt God telling him it was evil- so evil, he put it in a ziploc and kept it outside overnight until he could give it back to us.

I got a few questions that made me wonder.

The killer was:

"If you have a prophet, what has he prophesied?"

That question still haunts me today. How can you have a prophet without prophecy? Name a relevant prophesy in last few decades?

Some others:

"If your church is God's only church, why is it some small?" or "...why have I never heard of it?"

"Why are all your leaders old white men?"

"Where are the Golden Plates now? I'd like to see them."

My favorite:

"Whatever happened to Sam? He just disappears from the story."

First of all I am not familiar with the word or term Pwned?
What does that even stand for?

I will go along with the theme of what others have written. We had tracted into a Jw who was being shunned for some reason. We felt very sorry for him and he seemed very receptive to us. We had a first discussion that went very well, because basically we were doing all the talking and leading him through the whole thing. The next time he met us he basically ripped us to shreds with his knowledge of his church and our own. I was shocked and didn't even understand half of the stuff he was telling us but it makes more sense now.

Also in my very first area there was an elder who sat in our district meeting and would say the church was a load of shiz. I was so taken back that he was saying all of this stuff. I remember the GA coming out and yelling at him in our zone conf. because he was such a smart ass. He had a come back for everything and made fun of everything relating to the church. I couldn't understand why he was wasting his time and when I asked him why he came out if he didn't believe he said to get a new car. That was the only reason. And he told the mission president this too but he was never sent home, although I think he was warned a few times to cool it. Also when he was being released he wrote a long letter to the Mp pres. (we all had to do this) and also one to the area GA about his experience. He had me and a few others read it and it was so negative and demeaning to the church. By the end of my mission even I was sympathetic to him and his criticisma of the church I don't know what happened to him after that but even to this day I have been curious.

Elder Goodwin, are you out there? He served in the DesMoines Iowa Mission in 89-91. I believe he was from Utah.

From Urban Dictionary, here ya go:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pwned

Basically, it's a misspelling of the word "owned" or being dominated by someone more superior. Its roots are found in the gaming world, allegedly.

I had almost that exact same experience with a very sincere JW. He really did read and pray about it, and he said what stuck out to him were anachronisms (synagogues) and incorrect doctrines (Father and Son being ONE). Off the top of his head he had refutations to all my answers, and he didn't even have to look up anti-Mormon lit. He told us that he felt that he was where God had lead him to be, and no offense, but he felt he had just put gotten religion under his belt. It blew my mind.

Maybe you can tell, but my mission was a real eye-opener.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/16/2013 12:23PM by almostthere.

Had I gone to a place where people would actually talk sense to me regarding the Bible, I think I would have left the church on my mission. Fortunately or unfortunately I went to Japan and only taught a very few select people, only one of which was baptized.