I was a missionary once and looking back at where I was when I was in your shoes I can honestly say I was clearly misled and lied to by omission. Nobody ever breathed a word to me about all the extra marital affairs Joseph and Brigham had with their followers wives. Not a word about why Oliver Cowdery was really excommunicated, for witnessing Joseph engaging in a dirty, nasty, filthy affair with his 16yo housemaid. Not a word about why he really destroyed the Nauvoo Expositor Press, because it told the truth about his illicit affairs. But now it’s all on the internet and you do know. That’s the difference between you and me. I didn’t know. If I had, I never would have wasted a minute selling Joseph’s Myth.
You do know and you are out here, despite that knowledge, still selling Joseph’s bogus Myth. That is the definition of delusion, maintaining erroneous beliefs, despite superior evidence to the contrary. So if by ‘brainwashed’ you mean, delusional, then yes I think you are delusional.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/06/2024 12:33PM by schrodingerscat.

There's No kind words or way to message that to a friend; I think it was J R Clarke that said it best... (paraphrase) If the church isn't true

Something like that, jaja

If you can't trust a lying horn dog to tell you how to live your life, who can you trust?

Make that lying horn dog grifter and you have it :)

Also not a word about the Kirtland Safety Society, what it was (a financial institution, more or less, but maybe a bit of a ponzi scheme too) and why it failed. That sure got my attention as I watched the world collapse in 2008.

It was Lucy Mack Smith who produced Joseph Smith. She always wanted a prophet in the family, so after Alvin died Joseph was it.

Joseph had his followers eating out of his hand. That was an immense amount of power for a guy his age (or any age).

The church grew out of a cult of personality thanks to Brigham Young. What personality does the modern prophet have? He's like your great grandfather reading the talk someone wrote for him off a teleprompter. Rusty has some big clown shoes to fill, but the standard for that is amazingly low. It's good to be king.

Your missionaries demonstrate that some of the youth will always fall for the con. They are either brainwashed or horny. Most likely the women in their dating pool are holding out for an RM. Some guys will believe anything to get laid. Not that there's anything wrong with that, especially when that's kind of what Mormonism is about anyway.

You didn't know. Maybe they don't know. That makes them uninformed but not delusional. In a somewhat closed group they don't likely hear differing views or do independent research. Something has to happen to shake them out of the bubble.

Ignorance is no excuse 24yrs into the Information Age, especially after the church published it all on the church’s own website for everybody to see.

What if it's "willful ignorance"?  

I've even seen evidence of "willful ignorance" here on this forum!!  I know!!  hard to believe, huh?!

Are you suggesting that 24 years into the information age some people insist on maintaining counterfactual arguments despite mountains of evidence to the contrary?

That can't possibly be true. I insist.

"One man's mountains are another woman's molehills!"

              --Sister Sara, with both mules

EOD to the yogi on the mountain top: "What is the secret to happiness?"

Yogi to EOD: "Never argue with fools."

EOD: "I disagree."

Yogi: "Yes, you are right."

>Ignorance is no excuse 24yrs into the Information Age, especially after the church published it all on the church’s own website for everybody to see.

Point 1: wait, you think the [echo sound effect] "Information Age" started in the year 2000? Don't you remember the entire planet covered in AOL CDs to a depth of several inches in the early 1990s? Or the iconic Apple Super Bowl ad in 1984 that didn't even have to name or picture the product it was advertising?

Point 2: Just because the information is reasonably accessible now doesn't mean it is easy to find if you don't know to look for it.

Juanita Brooks' book on the Mountain Meadows Massacre came out in 1950. I'm a fairly bookish person, a couple of college degrees in Utah, born LDS, and ex-LDS since the middle 1970s. Even with that background, I'd never heard of the MMM until around 1990. I didn't ever ask about it because for 50 years I had no idea there was something to ask.

Bob McCue, a prolific poster here in the early 2000s and a former bishop in Calgary, and absolutely nobody's idea of a dummy, admitted that church history was a new subject to him, until an RM in his ward brought his concerns about church history to McCue. Bob thought "this'll be easy to debunk", but as he looked into it. he discovered, much to his horror, that the RM had a point.

And the reason RFM keeps a link to the church essays on controversial topics in Mormonism prominently pinned to the top of RFM page 1 is because they are relatively hard to find using google, even for people like us (that is, generally educated and used to doing internet searches). It is a bit of a chore to get those essays to pop up in a google search.


And yet you think there is no excuse for an 18 year old Mormon kid not knowing about Fanny Alger, or the removal of the penalties from the Endowment (to pick just 2 topics available over the internet)? Methinks thou art the delusional one. That's not how the world works.

If I were you, I might have said, “yes, you are right” and left it at that.

    . . .when being right is wrong. . .

Brother Of Jerry Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> >Ignorance is no excuse 24yrs into the Information
> Age, especially after the church published it all
> on the church’s own website for everybody to
> see.
> Point 1: wait, you think the "Information Age"
> started in the year 2000? Don't you remember the
> entire planet covered in AOL CDs to a depth of
> several inches in the early 1990s? Or the iconic
> Apple Super Bowl ad in 1984 that didn't even have
> to name or picture the product it was
> advertising?

I always think of it as the beginning at after the launch of Google around the beginning of this millennium, 24yrs ago.

> Point 2: Just because the information is
> reasonably accessible now doesn't mean it is easy
> to find if you don't know to look for it.

Google makes it a hell of a lot easier to do research on your phone in the middle of the night than going to the library and looking up the card catalogs.

I knew about all the salacious allegations in ‘No Man Lnows My History” which was written long before I was born into the Cult. But that was always demonized as ‘Anti-Mormon Lies straight from Satan himself.” The Cult had me terrified that I’d be struck deaf and dumb by God if I read something like that.

But now the Cult actually publishes it, it is no secret.
>
> Juanita Brooks' book on the Mountain Meadows
> Massacre came out in 1950. I'm a fairly bookish
> person, a couple of college degrees in Utah, born
> LDS, and ex-LDS since the middle 1970s. Even with
> that background, I'd never heard of the MMM until
> around 1990. I didn't ever ask about it because
> for 50 years I had no idea there was something to
> ask.
>
> Bob McCue, a prolific poster here in the early
> 2000s and a former bishop in Calgary, and
> absolutely nobody's idea of a dummy, admitted that
> church history was a new subject to him, until an
> RM in his ward brought his concerns about church
> history to McCue. Bob thought "this'll be easy to
> debunk", but as he looked into it. he discovered,
> much to his horror, that the RM had a point.
>
> And the reason RFM keeps a link to the church
> essays on controversial topics in Mormonism
> prominently pinned to the top of RFM page 1 is
> because they are relatively hard to find using
> google, even for people like us (that is,
> generally educated and used to doing internet
> searches). It is a bit of a chore to get those
> essays to pop up in a google search.
>
>
> And yet you think there is no excuse for an 18
> year old Mormon kid not knowing about Fanny Alger,
> or the removal of the penalties from the Endowment
> (to pick just 2 topics available over the
> internet)? Methinks thou art the delusional one.
> That's not how the world works.

All you did was make them dig in their heels. If they are the last to know, so what? Nobody is buying what they are selling.

Anyone who grew up in a culture is brainwashed to that culture, which is basically all of us. Sometimes it sticks, sometimes it doesn't. Do the breaks really matter?