I was typing into a closed thread about apologists:
I came here because I was beside myself after learning that my whole life was a big fat lie.
Mormons use circular logic to defend their church. Should that surprise you?
There are still the vagaries of “spirit” to contend with, but those can be separated from toxic Mormonism. It’s part of being open minded. Mormonism leaves you with the job of sorting out what does and doesn’t matter. Maybe that’s a skill I was forced to learn, so I’m better off for it. So thanks, lying assholes in SLC.
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This leads to last night’s dream about King Arthur being the archetypal story of the English language. Excalibur being pulled from the stone represents the evolution of the English language. Socially, it’s been used for many major innovations in civilization. It’s kind of weak for spiritual topics though, at least compared to something like Hindi. Hindi leans hard the other way. But since I’m not going to learn Hindi, I’m stuck with English.
Mormonism uses English to describe spiritual concepts. All of those concepts and memes pre-date the church. They were collected by a professor of theology, John Smith at Wellesley College, and found their way into this new religion that Joe and his friends cooked up. But it’s all built on a substrate of the English language. So it has the limitations of that.
All English speaking religions are going to have that problem. I think that’s why society is so unbalanced in the direction of the material. It’s the way language has evolved.
I keep having nightmares about me exposing the temple in front of Mormons and my family and they all end up chasing me and shooting at me. It's been a crazy week.
My casual search for Professor John Smith of Wellesley College has not yielded results. Might your worthy Prof. Smith be John Edwin Smith, of Yale?
I'm interested in following up the notion that language has an influence on how one's brain functions. I want to see if there's any support for my notion that Spanish-speakers are better lovers...
We are aware of several basics: every religious belief system (simple or complicated), known to mankind has it's own unique list of words in their language that have unique meaning not often compatible with standard dictionary meanings. In addition, English, as we all know, is a combination of multiple languages, with different pronunciation, and often different meanings. English is a language that evolves. Every year more new words and their meanings are added to the dictionary. Also,all religions fall under the general definition of a cult, as well as many other groups.
Changing our mind about our religious choice of belief system which typically makes up our entire World View, comes with some unique challenges. We soon find we are faced with learning the standard definition of many words, people outside the Mormon culture, for instance, have no idea what we are talking about, or mistake our use of certain words for something entirely different than what we mean.
Add to all of that, religious logic and reasoning has it's own parameters for conclusions based on a base belief or assumption of certain metaphysical, visionary, supernatural beliefs that are accepted as facts. In addition, to accepting their chosen religious sacred books as literal.
Religion infused government has often been the bane of many civilizations that did not go along with the ruling systems.
Changing our mind about our belief system aka World View coming out of Mormonism is a bit of a conundrum!