Boston College graduate student, returned missionary Sarah Shumway is having a "knowledge crisis"

Let me explain.

Recently this Millennial blogger who sells herself as a Mormon Millennial intellectual with faith, lied about Mormon operations and doctrines. Rejecting the do's and dont's of Mormonism and selling Mormonism as a faith of finding your own personal Christ and falling in love with Him. For it is Christ that knows our heart and will receive us into his glory, or something like that. (Mormon Apostle Bruce R. McConkie bitch slapped BYU Professor Glen L. Pace for such teachings, watch out he's now in spirit form and can track you down too!)

She also lied about Mormonism being a faith where you are encouraged to ask questions. Apparently her intellectual pursuits did not find the dozens of her disfellowshiped and excommunicated real intellectual sisters upon which the anti-homosexual, feminist, and intellectual hammer of Mormon patriarchy slammed down, the September Six must be known to Mormon intellectuals. How an intellectual could innocently not know these truths makes her a deceiver, through ignorance or intent.

Sarah Shumway you are a lot of things, but you are not an intellectual.

http://fromdctobc.blogspot.com/2013/07/how-i-confront-doubt-responding-to-some.html

Please read her analysis of the NY Times front page article on Hans Mattson's doubt on Mormonism. Hans Mattson deserves far more respect than Sarah Shumway gave him in her blog and as an answer to how I labelled this post.

Sarah Shumway you do not have respect due to you as an intellectual, there is no intellect in your writings just faith in the teachings of your parents, not a difficult position. You are having a "knowledge crisis" you know or should know things that conflict with your faith and you blog deceptions of your knowledge to confirm your faith. As an expert on Mormon history, doctrine, faith and society, I find your tactics repulsive and inadequate to inform anyone but the most trusting of primary children. Although your do's and don't claims would have been shot down by me even at age 9, but of course you would have told on me to my mom and dad as a little smarty pants.

Please read her blog about Hans Mattson and his "crisis of faith". I would like to hear your thoughts, but as you can tell, I'm pretty disgusted by her analysis. Maybe this is a good blogger to follow, a Millennial Mormon, a woman with degrees, and an advocate for ignoring truth while following the feelings of familiar comfort and ignoring the feelings of being shamelessly deceived.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/14/2013 12:14AM by gentlestrength.

COJCOLDS: "Well, we HAVE Jesus Christ in our name so obviously we're Christian!"

Sarah Shumway: "Well I HAVE intellectual in my blog subtitle so obviously I am one!"


IMHO:

"Families are forever"= the antipode of intellectual.

Yeah, remember we had that friend of hers come on here when we originally critiqued her blog post that was featured on realclearreligion.com. He was very defensive of her position and took issue with grammatical and spelling errors in those critiques. manderson04 or something like that?

Some technical writer for Raytheon named Matt Andersen who seems to be sweet on her with unrequited love.

I didn't see him defend any position of hers here, just complained about my spelling and grammar. I think I am sometimes too quick in my iPad typing and use edit to fix things, the thread closed down quickly before I could clean it up.

I personally dismiss spelling trolls because that is usually a sign they don't have a point to make. He stated he didn't want to address the issues, but agreed with her entirely, confirming that it was a blog of feelings and puppy dogs not intellect.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/13/2013 10:51PM by gentlestrength.

"ai" ? ;)...

Intellectual? This is just garden variety apologetics by someone impressed by their own ability to play dodge ball with facts, and nothing more. She is just parroting.

My favorite is her very "intellectual" trick of calling the unforgivably ugly and dishonest history of Mormonism the "less appealing" parts of Mormon history. I would be rolling on the floor laughing my ass off if I didn't know my own mother eats this stuff up and would say, "Well, she IS an intellectual you know. That's good enough for me."

You've got Joseph's philandering with young girls and married women, Brigham Young's bloody ways, the hoax of the Book of Abraham, and the plagiarism of the Book of Mormon--calling these the "less appealing parts," is like saying what was done to the blacks making them slaves and then third class citizens with separate fountains was just a "cultural faux pas" and not the grave injustice that it was.

The cult's history is a heaping mass of dishonesty, fraud, greed, and bigotry. And the church of the present day is only the laundered version of the same, but there isn't enough Clorox in the world to get those stains out.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/13/2013 10:50PM by blueorchid.

The first thing my step son did when his father and I left the church was to e-mail us the site of Mormon intellectuals all talking about how wonderful and true the church is.

He made the comment that he thought we had a lot in common with them. I'm not sure if he was trying to flatter, or insult us.

I couldn't find one single point that I had in common with any of them. My thoughts were that it was a crying shame that such smart people could be so incredibly misled.

Most of them had me wondering if they really believed their own words. They were so unconvincing it was laughable.

I don't consider myself particularly intelligent, and certainly would never dream of labeling myself an intellectual. In spite of that,my impression was that the intellectuals all seemed to be walking around with a huge blank spot in their thinking when it came to mormonism.

That's just my impression. Since reading that site, I have zero respect for any of the so called mormon intellectuals. They forgot to read the Dick and Jane books of Mormonism.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/14/2013 02:09AM by Mia.

Dodgeball with the facts.

The first struggle has to be getting facts to be acknowledged, I still see Mormons and Mormonism struggle with what are facts. Revelation/Translation--very different, not interchangeable words.

The second struggle is getting Mormons to honor facts and Truth as superior to faith. They seem proud to have faith in conflict to facts, that this is a more honorable position. It is not.

The third struggle is getting a Mormon to recognize that an institution that requires integrity of them while deceiving in the teachings of its' doctrines and history has chosen an immoral position.

Choose what is right let the consequence follow. The choice is deception, the consequence deceived members. Weak as advocates and seekers of Truth. Useless beyond the cult community as advocates and intellectuals for Truth.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/14/2013 04:50PM by gentlestrength.

"They seem proud to have faith in conflict to facts, that this is a more honorable position. It is not."

I love that you said this. I have come across this way more often than I can believe--TBMs arrogantly proud that everything they "know" flies in the face of fact and reason, as if it proves their faith, which really only proves their ability to foolishly obey no matter how ridiculous the command.

"With all due respect", 5,000 Sarah Shumway blogs does not equal one major NYT article. Full time missionaries on the web will not turn the tide in favor of a church that claims it is "the one true church", based "the most correct book ever written" that was "translated" by a con man and philanderer with his head in his hat using a peep stone.
BoA, Kirtland swindle, BY racism, mormon endowments = masonic endowments, Mountain Meadows, City Creek Center, no financials, mitocondrial DNA testing, the complete absense of any archeological evidence. That's a lot of intellectualization, don't you think?

Wow! She said: "I don't believe that it is the Church's responsibility to hold our hand and teach us our history. We need to be proactive and study it carefully, as well as prayerfully."

The church has no responsibility to teach its members? What the hell else is the church for then if not to teach its members about its doctrine, and is not the history of the church a core facet of its doctrine (or perhaps more accurate, much of the doctrine is a product of that history)? And, why the hell do they have Sunday School lessons about church history then? And why are the books used for RS and PH based on the teachings of earlier prophets? If the church has no responsibility to teach its history why is it ever mentioned in church at all?

That just blows my mind that she could say its not the church's responsibility. So I guess, since the church has no responsibility to teach members its history,then, in her mind, they have every right to hide things, whitewash and flat out lie about that history. Wow. Glad I don't have to do that kind of mental gymnastics anymore.

How does one learn about a restored gospel if the so called restored church doesn't teach its members how that restoration came about?

There are other churches that may get away without talking about their history. The Mormon church is not one of them though.

Their claim to restoration and being the one and only true church on the face of the earth puts them in a place where they must explain just exactly how that all came about. Lying is not something a church making these claims should be doing. They will get caught. They did get caught.

Sorry Sarah, but the Mormon church owes me an explanation for why they lied to 7 generations in my family. That's a lot of lying they've been getting paid to do.

The problem, as I see it, is that people like Sarah Shumway understand just enough of what we're going through but can't see through to the other side. The answers they are given are good enough for them, so why can't those answers be good enough for the rest of us? The thing about church history is that it isn't just a story of a peepstone in a hat. That thing, honestly, is the least of my worries. It's that when you put it all together, the BoM, the polygamy, the priesthood, the multiple versions of the First Vision, the temple, all of it feels very manipulative and contrived to me. It is not any one individual thing that killed my testimony, it is the entirety of the evidence against it. It is the fact that all my life I have been beating my head against the wall, unable to put all the pieces together and understand why so many things felt wrong to me, until one day when I said "what if it isn't true?" and suddenly the pieces began to fall into place. When I stopped trying to make excuses and come up with reasons to believe, things finally began to make sense.

Thank you, Sarah, for your condescending attitude toward people who lose faith when they learn how Joseph Smith and the subsequent prophets came to develop the religion. That sort of attitude really moves things in the right direction.

I met Sarah a few times when I briefly attended a DC singles ward (before I left the church completely). She did not strike me as an intellectual. Just a common TBM single adult...not a great conversationalist unless it was a topic church related. Boring.

One of the back stories discerned from her blog seems to be that she is frustrated socially with her dating pool.

Think how her choosing faith over knowledge limits her options at finding her best mate possible. Assuming she has sexual orientations that are not in conflict with her Church's doctrines and that all she needs from male candidates is a temple worthy, RM, Eagle Scout that can provide like daddy or better.

If she is unable to attract from that pool of LDS, she will continue to age and limit not only her pool in the LDS church, but her options universally.

This is how her faith can and might destroy her faith because she is denying any knowledge that conflicts with her faith choices.

This is not a personal matter to me, but I have no sympathy for an individual that does not mature into a life of knowledge and humors faith as opposed to an adult that matures into a position of knowledge that humors faith. There are other maturation paths available as well, but getting a Mormon to mature into any form of knowledge acceptance is the most ambitious goal to set for them that has any chance of being achieved. We all know many Mormons who just want to be Mormon though and will never consider knowledge a valuable foundation for anyone's life. This is the member of the herd that will stampede over a 5 years old to bear her testimony about visiting teaching.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/14/2013 03:19PM by gentlestrength.

http://fromdctobc.blogspot.com/2013/06/how-can-singles-ward-on-sunday-be-more.html

This blog discusses Sarah and her thoughts in Mormon single wards.

When you interacted with Sarah in the DC YSA was she able to make you feel like the most important person in the room as she suggests?

This has been quite the blogger, a hopeless TBM speaking Mormon cog-dis and denial in Social Media. I don't think this is what the prophets envisions when the Mormon god told them to use Social Media to convert people to Mormonism.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/19/2013 04:56AM by gentlestrength.

She really doesn't say anything useful. I have faith and you should too.

you mean, Sarah SHAMway?

Sarah sham_WOW?

Faith is like an onion. It makes you cry and it has layers, things also get more transparent when you break through the initial layers.

I know I spent a lot of time thinking that I had sufficient answers to my questions. In fact that was part of an answer to a prayer when I first came across this type of information on my mission. I felt a response that if I just held on a little longer to my beliefs that I would find sufficient answers and I did, I thought. I didn't realize how shallow my view was. Sarah's skimming the surface of shallow waters because she's found a way to violate her integrity to a tolerable degree. That allowable violation can get bigger with time especially if the important things are set on the shelf. It will however break the surface of the water with enough tension and she'll figure it out or decide to consciously live the lie once her life is inviolably invested in the Church.

lol @ Sham-wow...I like that visual better

I am glad I am not alone. I see this style of communication as dismissive. My expertise and instinct is to not allow Mormonism and Mormons to frame the conversation, they will do so in such a matter as to have some presence of reason.

For example it is reasonable to Sarah Shumway to deny knowledge or concede that she will never be able to reconcile her faith with truth, because she prefers her faith in the One True Church of Mormonism above anything else. So to her the task becomes, I want to feel good about Mormonism regardless of knowledge, so be more like me, and Mormonism will work better for you. No thank you Sarah, my principles include intellectual integrity. I will not hold faith in a falsehood and I will not take morality lessons from 80 year-olds that deceive about foundational doctrines and principles.

The insistence of ignoring facts in order to have a faith choice or assignment is beyond tolerable and most definitely not intellectual. If intellect and faith are in conflict and the choice is to ignore intellect to preserve faith, the crisis is an "integrity crisis". Like most all people that are formerly Mormons, the manipulation to make Mormonism an honest faith was not possible for an honest individual. Some like Sarah Shumway can bend her integrity to consider herself both intelligent and faithful. I cannot see any evidence in her writings that she has been successful in addressing her crisis of knowledge. Her faith in Mormonism is entirely unchallenged due to a lack of curiosity on why her religion would deceive about issues that require integrity.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 08/15/2013 02:27AM by gentlestrength.

"We are nothing without our history."
- Spencer Kimball

(Too lazy to find the reference)

For an "intellectual" frustrated with the eligible mormon male dating pool, BC is a bit of a weird choice for graduate school. Jesuits? And is she an "intellectual" because she is a female getting a Master's degree in lieu of popping out children?