That is Boyd K. Packer to D. Michael Quinn during Quinn's employment interview for BYU, as Quinn relates it in an interview for the PBS program, "The Mormons."

Another gem:

"The truth is not uplifting. The truth destroys. And historians should tell only that part of the truth that is uplifting, and if it's religious history, that's faith-promoting."

Kinda made my eyes pop out a little. It's about 3/4 of way into the interview.

http://www.pbs.org/mormons/interviews/quinn.html

Kinda makes you wonder whether you should "just ask a Mormon" to learn about Mormonism, doesn't it?

That last quote I had not heard, I honestly want to go and throw up now. I mean I am not only be embarrassed but humiliated to think that I was once a mormon. I am not going to tell anyone anymore.

You know those "idiot" books. Someone could write one called "mormonism for idiots", but I guess that would be redundant.

Only an idiot that reads quotes like those you quote above could possibly remain believing, IMO; I mean honestly how could one possibly remain faithful to such nonsense? I mean, HOW DO THEY DO IT??? They must be the active ones that no longer believe is all I can figure. My ex is that.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 01/22/2011 08:39PM by think4u.

Talk about having your head up your assets (and when speaking of Morg corporate, there is more than a little truth to that).

Mormons saying crap like this just makes nevermos think they are kooky and irrelevant. Like who would want ever to ignore the truth? Except of course a Kool-Aid drinker.

I know what you're saying, but I'm just saying. I like kool-aid. :P But Soda is better. ;)

"I have a hard time with Mormons, because Mormons idolize a child molester"

I hadn't read this interview before. I'm just really impressed with him--he's someone to admire, unlike Boyd K. Packer.

Quotes like that are amazing. Only men like Packer insulated from the rest of the world, thinking they are the center of rightness, could say something like that.

I admire the stake president trying to help Quinn.

I have read several of Quinn's books, and highly respect him as an author. I met him once and he seems like a good man.

What I continue to find unbelievable, however, and I know he claims , is that he is actually a true believer, that SWK once gave him a blessing in his youth that he will someday be an apostle, and he still believes that day will come.

I just cannot buy it. I know that sounds judgemental, but how can he know all he knows and say things like in the interview posted here, saying he KNOWS they are all prophets, seers, and revelators, but just that they are wrong. Why would true prophets be wrong and he be right?

So, he is an excommunicated member, for seeking and publishing unflattering truth, but still believes that the GA's speak for God, but are just mistaken.

To me it makes no sense, other than from the advantage of selling books and getting the real truth out. The exmormon market is far too small to reach very many people. One as himself MUST be able to crack into the market of doubting active mormons to ever have any effect, to sell any books, and they are far more likely to read his work if they believe he still believes.

I know I may be totally wrong, but that is what I see and believe. Feel free to prove me wrong, but please do not tell me what I have already heard from others ( as well as straight from his mouth), the words " I remain a true believing mormon." Give me more than that, something I could actually consider legitimate, and believable.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/22/2011 09:03PM by think4u.

think4u Wrote:


>
> I know I may be totally wrong, but that is what
> I see and believe. Feel free to prove me wrong,
> but please do not tell me what I have already
> heard from others ( as well as straight from his
> mouth), the words " I remain a true believing
> mormon." Give me more than that, something I could
> actually consider legitimate.

I don't know Quinn, so I am guessing, but based on his comments about his spiritual experiences at an early age connected to Mormonism, I think he cannot give up his belief without feeling he is negating those early experiences that have formed a core part of his identity and purpose. I can respect that and sympathize with the position he is in.

I experienced something like this in a much less fundamental way when I had to reconcile my disbelief in Mormonism with several very meaningful spiritual events I experienced as a member. After some time I was able to find a new context for those experiences so they were no longer dependent on being a Mormon. I was able to do that because I was a convert and had had a different context for me life and because these experiences, while meaningful, were not intertwined with my sense of identity.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/22/2011 09:18PM by robertb.

his views nor his agenda.

He has a thing about history and historians. He likes neither.

There's something there. Something in his past. Something that is horrible, something nasty. But what?

Matt, I think it was Packer's experience as a bomber pilot in WWII. He sees defense of his community as paramount and more important than truth. Churchill said, "In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." Packer sees the Army of God at war with "the world" and truth is less important than loyalty. It is a survival issue as far as he is concerned. That's my guess, anyway.

The things that the religious devotees are hiding may be as serious as murder.
What we know today is that religious founders and prophets in general are murderers. From Moses via Paul, and also Peter (the couple he killed using 'God'), in early christianity - btw the 'silent treatment' by Jesus in the court reminds me of the similar silent treatment of several killers when officially confronted by the authorities...
As I remember histories of sudden serious even fatal illnesses befalling followers but of course not the Joseph Smith we know of...

That quote gets the expected rise out of other board readers, but from your posts, I suspect that you could see another reason to distrust historians. 'Doing history,' even at the professional level, runs into many of the same problems that 'doing science' does: the doers are human, with personal theories to validate; they are funded by universities, grants, or corporations which have their own agendas; there are often prescribed formats, lengths, and deadlines to get things published; etc. I suspect this touches science as well, but history especially suffers from "presentism." If "the past is a foreign country," a lot of history 'translates' it into one's own language, so to speak. In other words, 'history' is written FOR the present.

I got a broader understanding of the field from Keith Jenkins' book "Rethinking History" when I was touching on such topics as the Columbus quincentennial, Disney's Pocahontas, and divergent views of the atomic bomb in an American Culture university course here in Japan.

and you are right about me--I would be tentative because the doers are human. Like me. I have some similar reservations about science--or at least what *meanings* we might draw from science. Packer touches a nerve because his dislike of historians is so visceral; as I said to Matt, I think this is because Packer sees the church at war with "the world" and you don't give your enemy information it can use against your side. His motivations are different from mine.

I have mixed feelings about Packer: I at once get where he is coming from (I think) and at the same time I loathe his position.

Speaking of presentism--working with combat veterans brings up that problem all of the time. How to talk with someone who participated in killing without condoning or condemning their actions under difficult circumstances that I as a civilian have not experienced? The moral worlds of soldiers in combat and civilians are very different, as is how the men themselves in each of those worlds.

Thank you for the book reference. It's one I'll have to read.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 01/23/2011 12:09AM by robertb.

I don't think having the factual truth only makes for a good human life. So, I find myself feeling uneasy that I can have some sympathy for Packer. I very much value factual truth, but I think we have to have good narrative truths as well. I think what Packer is saying is he does not want factual truth destroying the Mormon narrative. A good story goes a long way for us humans. We need meaning.

I'm not equipped to discuss this nearly as articulately as I'd like, but one of the reasons I feel generally friendly toward religion is it provides a meaningful, rich narrative for so many people in spite of being short (sometimes woefully short) on factual truths. The question for me is how far off factual truth does narrative truth have to be before the narrative is destructive? How much factual truth can a narrative support without losing its numinous quality and sense of meaningful direction?



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/23/2011 12:28AM by robertb.

I find it both interesting and repellant to watch science programs on Discovery, for example, about "the universe": i.e., where mathematical data are blown up into stories about the beginning and ending of the cosmos, the sun, the earth, etc. Just listen to the narrator casting an asteroid as an enemy bomb "with our name on it," cosmic rays as "killers," the sun turning "malevolent," and so on. This popular entertainment does take its cues from 'objective' science--uncaring forces combined with the 'survival of the fittest' struggle--and renders it as a subjectively significant story. But what is the subtext? Projected fear, anger, resentment at being dominated--why else frame 'the natural' as a war?

"Facts" mean nothing if not part of a bigger picture/context, and WE come up with that picture--the facts themselves don't. Our perceptions of facts stem from our own threatened, precarious lives (and I suspect this orientation precedes the facts; in this sense it may be archetypal, maybe going back to the "original sin" of arrogant separateness from all other life: we do perceive a "fallen world" because we have fallen into ego). The big question we might ask ourselves is, do we WANT the picture of reality that we have made? Even if people protest 'no, that's why I'm crusading for change,' subconsciously I think that they do want it. So...what self-concept does this big picture narrative support, and what payoff does it give us?

On both sides of the present Packer-history question, people are using it to make a narrative where THEY are right, and that requires a system that includes OTHERS who are wrong. Where's the superior position in that?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704584804575645200523271296.html

"Writing about science poses a fundamental problem right at the outset: You have to lie.

"I don't mean lie in the sense of intentionally misleading people. I mean that because math is the language of science, scientists who want to translate their work into popular parlance have to use verbal or pictorial metaphors that are necessarily inexact."

Human Wrote:


> "I don't mean lie in the sense of intentionally
> misleading people. I mean that because math is the
> language of science, scientists who want to
> translate their work into popular parlance have to
> use verbal or pictorial metaphors that are
> necessarily inexact."

Yet, that is the trade-off in trying to convey meaning from facts. Mary Midgley, the British moral philosopher, writes a great deal about the myth-making scientists do without even realizing it. For example, the dominate narrative of evolution has been "survival of the fittest"; yet, she points, the ability it of organisms to cooperate in ecosystems is of primary importance. So, on the one hand there is a narrative privileging competition, yet at least as important is cooperation, which is only relatively recently being recognized.

The narratives we live out each has its consequences, and not all narratives are equal, in my opinion.


Here is a link to an interview with her:

http://www.sheilaheti.net/midgley.html

I like Mary Midgley. I might have linked to this, for example, when it was first written:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/aug/15/einstein-darwin-mary-midgley


And yes indeed, not all narratives are equal.

I remember a wonderful TED talk by Alain de Botton about success and failure. Somewhere in it he asks his audience to reconsider the utility of ancient tragedy. In this request he compares a piece of great literature to how a tabloid newspaper of today would describe the story. For example:

Othello -- "Love Crazed Immigrant Kills Senator's Daughter"

Madame Bovery -- "Shopaholic Adulteress Swallows Arsenic After Credit Fraud"

Oedipus the King -- "Sex with Mum was Blinding"


In a way, de Botton's point might suggest that if one prefers Madame Bovery over the headline one may be like Packer, in that one would like a more sympathetic telling of the facts than the headline would indicate. Many on this site, including myself lately, prefer the tabloid headline version of Mormonism.

Human Wrote:

>
> In a way, de Botton's point might suggest that if
> one prefers Madame Bovery over the headline one
> may be like Packer, in that one would like a more
> sympathetic telling of the facts than the headline
> would indicate. Many on this site, including
> myself lately, prefer the tabloid headline version
> of Mormonism.

We can like both. I do. My favorite professor at BYU had both the Bible and a stack of Mad Magazine on the shelf in his office. :-)

I want to read more of Mary Midgely. Her "voice" delights me. I find myself laughing. It's fun seeing her try to figure out Americans, too. She has very important things to say.

I have a quote from Alian de Botton on my Facebook profile: "We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them."

The problem with mormonism is that in order to be a faithful member who can go to the temple you must believe the narrative as if it were factual truth. To believe otherwise puts you into the catagory of member who is 'less valiant' or who is 'less faithful' and who will be regarded as a danger to the other members. Many leaders have stated that you must accept the narrative as fact, or that the whole foundation of your faith and salvation is gone.

The narrative is a wonderful tale. It uplifts and makes the whole church seem wonderful. Heck, I still get that welling up (just a little) even though I know it is not true. But the problem with that is that the church teaches that when you feel the welling up of this carefully crafted and highly polished narrative, that that is the Holy Ghost testifying to you that it is true.

To reject that testimony from the Holy Ghost is to incur the most dire circumstances.

or maybe, better put, if that is *who* you want to be at the end of the story. Assuming you feel you have something to say about it.