I ran across that phrase today. I means no matter how high we elevate nonsense -- put it on an altar, build a monument to it, attribute it to a deity, claim it's sacred -- it's still nonsense.
Like – you can’t make chicken salad with chicken shit?
Like – Alice said after reading JABBERWOCKY?
“It seems very pretty," she said when she had finished it, "but it's rather hard to understand!" (You see she didn't like to confess even to herself, that she couldn't make it out at all.) "Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas--only I don't exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that's clear, at any rate---" – Alice
Big full-sheet portrait of JS, you know, the most BLONDE one. Title is "the Prophet Joseph invites you..." JS is a frontal insult to RS. The first three presidents were his wives, portaits hanging on every RS room wall, with no mention of their strained history of marrying JS AND BY! Zina was married to her first husband the WHOLE time! Snow denied that JS was a polygamist, a bald-faced lie. Talk about "nonsense on stilts". They paint flattering portraits, erect flattering stutues, tell flattering legends...but when yon know the reality of it, they just make you sick.
That's an interesting point amos - why doesn't the Morg use the real picture of JS? They don't use fake, altered version of BY and he was pretty damn ugly.
At least, that was the note in the JS section of the gallery of the presidents in the Church History Museum when I was there a few years ago. Meantime, down stairs, they had a collection of JS portraits that were done when he was alive. You know, the pudgy, puffin-like profiles that don't look anything like the ones the church likes to use. The church also has the death mask, so they should know exactly what he looked like. But the church is just playing ignorant so they can keep pushing the Ken doll version of JS, along with the myth of his monogamy and perfect marriage to Emma.