Posted by:
windyway
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Date: March 18, 2017 11:33AM
"Faulkner writes with a macabre sense of morals with a background of overt racism. Salinger,Twain and Dickens saw their worlds as an admixture of greed, violence and remarkable moral stances. If we all wrote our life stories on RFM there would be mistakes, disappointments, moral lessons learned and passed on."
And Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley, and Zora Neale Hurston, even JK Rowling, to name a few...and many of their characters are better developed and portrayed more intimately than those in the BofM.
;)
One line I love in Persuasion by Austen is Anne describing how she distrusts Mr. Eliott because she never sees him respond to anything geuinely with "burst of feeling," rather he has a constantly curated demeanor with her. Here, Austen is talking about how we, epistemologically, learn about the true nature of a person and with better accuracy and how important it can be to know this.
And it's exactly this type of depth that began shattering my testimony of Joseph Smith. I learned about him because I met someone who lied, who lied so much that his lies impacted people's lives in major ways and he never recanted. And I knew, I know, that such a man cannot be a prophet.
I spoke about that on my first post here:
http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1939464,1939464#msg-1939464This is my experience in my life: my parents came out of dysfunctional families and produced their family that functioned better. They are always trying to draw themselves closer to Christ and His goodness. We kids, even the ones who left the church years ago, follow in those footsteps: we're trying to be good and genuinely happy, too. We believe that there is life in that.
So what the hell happens when you've built a life around this concept--your family, your friends, your perception of how things work best at church, it all flows from this concept--and then you see a person who, though perhaps a pitiful human being, is actively doing evil that hurts people? His friends say he has spiritual gifts, he says insightful things in Sunday School, he can be smart and charming, but he is also lying about you to the bishop, the stake, the police, the government, his wife, his kids, his friends...he assaults and intimidates. (Some of the things he's said remind me of Uriah Heap, btw.)
Me, I realised that God can choose from better vessels than such a man! I realised that even when he said "good" things he was building his case to add legitimacy to his lies, so even his "good" was essentially evil.
I used to think that, with Joseph Smith, he could have been a prophet even if he really screwed up. Now, I know he could not have been a prophet that I could sustain, because I understand what liars look like and the damage they do. When you deliberately engage in continuing, major deception, you absolutely cannot be a credible mouthpiece of the Lord.
Magical thinking pretends to bridge these gaps somehow or resolve these contradictions, much like the abused might become convinced that being abused is for their own good.
It is amazing to me how much this experience with the liar we know has corresponded to the rise of Trump, btw. And then there's the parallel where at first I though Utah would reject him, but in the end they didn't. I tend to think that the same magical thinking that can tolerate jerk leaders and "prophets" is what makes it easier for Mormons to be enthralled by Trump. I wonder if it will ever click with some of them like my personal experience with a major liar clicked for me.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/18/2017 11:36AM by windyway.