Posted by:
Henry Bemis
(
)
Date: March 13, 2024 03:10PM
Is it just me?
Or are Latter Day Saints not just stupid, but astonishingly stupid?
I mean, I have trouble believing my eyes.
COMMENT: Yes, it is just you! LDSs, as a group, are not stupid, much less astonishingly so.
Now, in order to counter the above (and support this post), you need to convince me, and hopefully others here, that LDSs are cognitively deficient in some way. It is not enough to identify "stupid" beliefs that you think they might have. You have to be able to explain how such beliefs were arrived at by logically faulty and cognitively deficient means.
In the vast majority of cases, LDS beliefs are not "logically" suspect, and display no cognitive impairment. In other words, they are not logically inconsistent, and there is no apparent "screw loose."
The question thus becomes whether, and to what extent, their views are consistent with the "evidence" *in conjunction with their stated values." In this case, "evidence" includes their subjective experience of the world, and "values" includes the degree in which they require evidence to confirm or disconfirm such values. So, theoretically, you can make a general list of LDS values, such as:
1. Meaning of life;
2. Immortality
3. Meaningful social relationships
4. Moral authority
Etc.
and then ask whether LDS's belief system--however evidentially weak, supports such values. In other words, their evidentiary standard might be deemed less because the value support tradeoff is for them greater.
Now, admittedly, sometimes this calculus conflicts with what we would identify as 'objective reality.' But that is not a problem of stupidity, but at most a question of personal priorities. That is why my own TBM sister, who is very smart, told me once that Mormonism "Is just who I am."
So, 'stupid' is not the right word to use when disparaging Mormons generally. This is why we recognize that they can be 'smart' in every other way outside of their religious faith. Personally, my frustration with Mormons (and other religious folks) is social and political; that is, when their beliefs take on dogmatic metaphysical commitments that infringe upon the rights of others and are manifested in the political process through oppressive, and objectively unsupportable, laws.