I read the 500 page Doctoral Dissertation written by Daymon Smith, mentioned in a thread by Nick Humphrey yesterday.

http://bycommonconsent.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/daymon-smith-dissertation.pdf

It was long, and hard to get through, but helped answer a question I had about how the LDS church manages to indoctrinate so well. How was I indoctrinated, and inoculated against hearing the truth, so well that I didn't even notice it?

It pretty much boils down to the correlation dept. ramrodded by Harold B. Lee in the sixties. In my nieve state as a TBMish member, I couldn't see anything wrong with correlation, didn't it make sense to make sure that everything was conforming with the truth?

What it really does is stamp out unproved views, even if the view used to be "the truth". Those prophet lesson manuals were made to try to make current church views seem like the old LDS views.

Daymon Smith points out that it's real job is "To generate historically contrived, but presently acceptable, seemingly historically rooted manuals. History could thus be made familiarized, and change erased."

Correlation makes a committee to make a particular prophets manual, gives them direction on what concepts or chapter headings to find quotes for, then edits it. What it really does, is take modern LDS theology, finds quotes that could perhaps even be taken out of context, and makes it seem like that particular prophet agreed.

Then if the source of the quote was either too easy to find and then be able to see the real intent, or if it was from a currently unapproved source like the Journal Of Discourses, they'd look for a Deseret News story from back in the day that mentions it, and reference the Deseret News. It would be easier for people to find a Journal Of Discourses entry, than to find a Deseret News article from the 1800's. A pretty underhanded way to make it hard to find out what the prophet was really saying.

So the point of those manuals was to make it so that in today's members minds, the church has always taught the same thing, and it just seamlessly marches along. They make it seem as though all the prophets operated under the correlation department, even though they didn't.

Then they hire researchers to survey people after a particular manual is used, to see if it met the objectives of the correlation department, or if it missed the mark. It is carefully, scientifically engineered deception, but people read the lessons as though it is a matter of fact presentation of church history and fact.

It's a beautiful plan. Every Sunday for a decade I was being purposely deceived and given a sanitized, deceptive, changed history of what the past prophets taught. It was spoon fed to me in such a way that I didn't notice. It just felt like all the prophets agreed with what I was seeing in the modern church. They had quotes proving it!

Another thing that reading that Dissertation showed me was how a strong armed guy in the big 12 can bully their way into what they want. Pres McKay wanted caution with how much power to give the correlation department, and Lee bulldozed it through anyway.

Lee was smart enough to think that there was a need to indoctrinate people, and that it could be best done in a very systematic manner church wide. It works brilliantly, and most don't even notice that it's happening. Lee was brilliant in that regard. It works on millions.

I thought there was nothing more to learn about lds, inc. But here is yet another deception. Added to yesterdays thread about how things are done at the top level of the church (or corporation) I have to wonder how many lies they yet harbor.

In my ward they read a statement by someone (First Presidency? I'm not sure) that said we were to turn in all past lesson manuals, whether they be priesthood, Sunday school, or Relief Society manuals. They were not to be retained for talks or lessons, as we all used to do. (You know--say, you had a talk coming up. You might dig into one of your old priesthood or Sunday school manuals to find something that hadn't been said in a while.) My spider sense tingled, and my brain said, "WTH?"

This, they said, was in preparation for a whole new set of manuals that both priesthood and RS were to use simultaneously. The first to appear was about Brigham Young, who was portrayed as a kindly and benign monogamist. The manual was obviously wrong on so many levels.

I didn't turn in my old manuals, but years later DW came across them. She's an easy target for anything a church authority--local or GA--says, so she threw them all out.

It really precipitated doubts in my mind, and eventually I quit believing and later resigned. Good job, guys!

I thought the new manuals were just fine. Not thought provoking or anything, but just fine.

I had no idea how deceptive it all was till I had to give a lesson out of it that mentioned the Kirtland Bank failure. I knew by then from reading No Man Knows My History that the lesson was so deceptive. It pissed me off to be expected to teach such deception, and I put too much truth into the lesson and got fired for it.

At that point I knew the manual was deceptive, I just didn't know there was a much larger systematic manner of trying to deceive us with all of those manuals. Systematic to the point of polling people from many different wards to see if the desired effect took hold in their responses.

Feeling the pressure to lie while teaching a lesson was the end for me.

That was one of the many things that made me google "Mormon History" and led me to this website.

That's exactly why you are instructed to teach solely from the manual

In the 1970's to the mid 1980's the manual was just basically a lesson outline. Members could and often did bring their own books to teach the lesson out of. In many cases the manual was never used at all.

I always wondered why the leadership asked the members to turn in the books/manuals rather than just throw them away? Is it because mormons can't be trusted to take on such a difficult chore?

They'd like to account for as many as possible I would think.

cludgie Wrote:
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> In my ward they read a statement by someone (First
> Presidency? I'm not sure) that said we were to
> turn in all past lesson manuals, whether they be
> priesthood, Sunday school, or Relief Society
> manuals. They were not to be retained for talks or
> lessons, as we all used to do.

it would be awesome to get a copy of that memo! what year was this? how totally crazy obvious that is that they are trying to control information among the members...



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/04/2010 04:50AM by Nick Humphrey.

...Just when I think nothing TSCC does can surprise me, I'm wrong.

He gives an excellent overview of the whole development of the Adam-God doctrine (beginning p.256).

Once again, I learn something totally new about correlation.

i wonder who the Jon Moyer guy is, mentioned in the dissertation?
"And I wish to thank Jon Moyer, a true friend and scholar
whose understanding of Mormonism is without comparison."



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/04/2010 04:54AM by Nick Humphrey.

With the advent of the internet, nothing is ever really lost. Turning in and burning the older statements will not erase them from the World Wide Web. The internet is the enemy of deception, one of those many things that preserves unuseful truth. The LDS Church must therefore find some way to 'correlate' the internet by getting its membership to use LDS approved filters or by convincing the sheep that the internet is nothing but a collection of pornography designed to lure them away from God's correlated truth of the moment.

Otremer Wrote:
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> The LDS Church must therefore find some
> way to 'correlate' the internet by getting its
> membership to use LDS approved filters or by
> convincing the sheep that the internet is nothing
> but a collection of pornography designed to lure
> them away from God's correlated truth of the
> moment.

this is seriously probably their next genius move, i'm not kidding, a church-made internet whitelist filter... you can download the program (windows and mac only) on lds.org.
although it would be a great push-over-the-edge for actually thinking members who still, somehow, remain in the church...

or a blacklist filter containing stuff like:
exmormon.org
irr.org
salamandersociety.com
etc

this would not surprise me =)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/04/2010 08:51AM by Nick Humphrey.

Sorry to tell you but it's already a reality

The Motrix Wrote:
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> Sorry to tell you but it's already a reality

do you have a url or some more information about it?

It gets even worse. At the beginning of this year, The teachings of the prophets format was abandoned. The new manual for PH & RS is an updated version of the old peach-colored Pirnciples of the Gospel manual, the one that new members used to get, and is still used in Gospel Essentials class. Now, members of the church who have been in the church for 30 years have the same manual as investigators or new converts. I quit going to the third hour after that happened, and it was only a short while after that I stopped going altogether.

This program really needs an edit function. Principles, not pirnciples.

Misfit Wrote:
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> Now, members of the church who
> have been in the church for 30 years have the same
> manual as investigators or new converts.

the more watered down they make it the less interesting it gets. i also got really bored and church during "the end" and was always just hoping to be able to correct something ridiculous some other member would say...

Another thing in that dissertation that was interesting was how good the lay people felt who were volunteered to help with the manual.

He posted parts of email communication between committee members and correlation. I'm not going to go back and find the quotes, but it was the typical feelings of gratitude, led by the spirit, feeling the spirit, doing this great work, etc. etc. etc.

The system is so perfected that the cult can get people to come in and screw their fellow members over with a manual that is very deceptive, designed to make people think that prophets were saying something that they weren't saying, that things were a certain way, when they weren't that way, and feel "the spirit" so strongly while doing it.

"The spirit" is nothing more than the feeling one gets when pleasing the cult members in power above you. Because that's what feeling the spirit really is, people can easily feel the spirit from being deceptive and screwing people.

They were devoid of anything useful.
I found it very hard to teach from them. They had no teachings, no outline, just a bunch of quotes to discuss and questions to discuss at the end of each chapter.

More dissatisfying was that we were counselled not to stray from the content of the book, which left people like us High Priests with nothing to talk about except in very primary generalized terms when we knew a whole lot more than was permitted for discussion.

Yes, you are right. It is designed to make it appear as if nothing has changed, but the church has ALWAYS done this. The main thing that keeps it afloat is that people are covenanted not to make waves or to remember things that are not expedient, and things are expected to just die away as if they never existed.

Because by these things we can know for ourselves that the Prophets, Seers and Rebvelators have no idea what they are talking about and can be tossed into the dustbin of history in order to keep the church looking like it is true.

This is why we know that the church is false.

My mom always said Harold B. Lee ruined the church and she believed God made his term as prophet short because he had abused his authority. My mom was saying this in the 1970's. I wish my parents would have just got up and left but too many family ties in the church and it would have effected my dad's business.

Rubicon Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> would have just got up and left but too many
> family ties in the church and it would have
> effected my dad's business.

that's a terrible bind to get into! =(

Rubicon Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> My mom always said Harold B. Lee ruined the church
> and she believed God made his term as prophet
> short because he had abused his authority. My mom
> was saying this in the 1970's. I wish my parents
> would have just got up and left but too many
> family ties in the church and it would have
> effected my dad's business.

I was too young to remember Lee as anything but a short-term leader. After reading the dissertation, I'm surprised at how he was pushy enough to get his way, even if the prophet didn't agree.

Now I know that the LDS church is just a business. A business who's customers pay large sums of money with out getting any goods in return. We all know that in business, pushy type A types who have some political savvy can bully their way into getting what they want. At first I just keep getting surprised that it works in the church too.

It should stop being a surprise.

also mentioned the "importance" of not marrying outside your race?