The problem with LDS apologetics

[SloanHater]

Well, there's the struggle she went through to accept the idea:


Or, what she wrote about it later:




Yeah, I'm sure she saw it all as a formality.

I'm surprised you didn't cite her well written defense of polygamy. I'm sure you came across that when you Googled her name.

[ERCougar]

Lets see if we can get a ruling from triplet, our evidence genius, as to whether this constitutes evidence of sex.

I'll let DDD handle his own thing here. I'm going to stick with the idea that marriage to a 14 yr old girl is problematic and much more than a 'formality', whether or not there was any sex.

[ERCougar]

I'm surprised you didn't cite her well written defense of polygamy. I'm sure you came across that when you Googled her name.

Um...why would I cite that?

[TripletDaddy]

Lets see if we can get a ruling from triplet, our evidence genius, as to whether this constitutes evidence of sex.

I already said that you can't prove absence of sexual activity!

[TripletDaddy]

I've provided plenty of circumstantial evidence.

lol.

[UtahDan]

I already said that you can't prove absence of sexual activity!

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, I've been told many times.

[SloanHater]

lol.

[creekster]

I already said that you can't prove absence of sexual activity!

WHo asked you to?

[NorthwestUteFan]

Wilford Woodruff married a 15 year-old girl and a ~18 year-old on the same day. The older girl had a baby about 10 months later, but the younger one didn't have a baby until several years later when she was almost 18. There was a a bit of decorum involved, in that the men didn't want girls to get pregnant when they were too small to birth a baby.

Remember WW was living openly as a polygamist, so this may be a bit of circumstantial evidence indicating they 'held back' with the younger girls. There are likely many hundreds of similar examples where younger girls got married at 14-15 but didn't bear children until several years later, while the 17-18 year old girls commenced having children almost immediately.

As for Helen living with her parents being circumstantial evidence proving no 'relations', recall that nearly ALL of JS's plural wives lived elsewhere (with their family or spouse). The only ones who lived with JS and Emma were Fanny Alger, Lucy Walker, and two or three others, all of whom were either wards* of the Smiths or were employed as housekeepers.

D. Michael Quinn said that JS definitely 'had relations' with HMK, but Compton is neutral. One of Helen M. Kimball's friends recalled that she said, "If I knew it was anything more than a formality, I would never have consented". This is still not definitive proof of 'relations'.

As ERCougar stated above, life changed substantially for HMK following her sealing to JS because she was no longer allowed to go to dances or otherwise do normal things with normal kids.

Numerous journal statements describe JS 'staying together as man and wife' with some of these wives (but I can only find statements about the girls who were older than 16-17).

Many, many times he used the good old 'an angel with a sword is commanding me to do this' line to convince the girls to marry him. He also used the 'marry me and the eternal salvation of your entire family is made sure!' line multiple times. Both of those statements carry a great amount of phychological power. He was far out of line to use them, especially on teenage girls. In this way he was not very different from Warren Jeffs.

I am working through the 'ickiness' factor on the whole thing myself, and am trying to put as much of a positive spin on it as possible.


* Funny but true: recall that girls were not 'adults' and 'capable of handling their financial affairs' until age 18, while boys reached that state by age 12. Girls who were orphaned, even those who inherited farms and houses, essentially were not allowed to live on their own until age 18.

[NorthwestUteFan]

p.s. read In Sacred Lonliness by Compton to gain a better understanding of how the lives of these women were changed for the worse.

[FMCoug]

You seem to be offended by my Type 1 and Type 2. I didn't mean to say dumb people are type 1 and smart people are type 2. Not at all. It's purely a matter of faith.

Not offended at all. Just pointing out that we try to put people int these boxes (and I mean we ... I have been guilty of the same) and it is much more complex than that.

I do find it amusing that you refuse to address the numerous posts in this thread about the Type 1 vs. Type 2 black and white issue.

[jay santos]

Not offended at all. Just pointing out that we try to put people int these boxes (and I mean we ... I have been guilty of the same) and it is much more complex than that.

I do find it amusing that you refuse to address the numerous posts in this thread about the Type 1 vs. Type 2 black and white issue.

I tried to best I could, but obviously I didn't make the point very well.

Clearly, human beings are complex and issues like this are difficult to categorize.

If it makes you more comfortable, imagine a continuum with one side the extreme type 1 (ie scripture is all literal, prophet speaks for God, we will be judged by how closely we obey the commandments and prophet's counsel, would pull the trigger at Mountain Meadows) vs the extreme type 2 (ie no scripture is literal, the BOM is not an ancient document, Jesus Christ may or may not even be a real person, First Vision account is not accurate, church is good so don't worry about if it's "true"). And I take this even further than the typical apologist would take it, just to make the point of the continuum.

The church would like us close to type 1. Incorporating the holistic apologetic view, addressing all the critical questions, will move you from type 1 closer to the type 2 extreme. And this is a net negative for the church. Therefore, I think the church should/will not get too serious about publicizing the typical apologists views. That's all I mean to say.

[NorthwestUteFan]

Good move, Jay. There is an infinity of colors scattered between Black and White.

[jay santos]

Good move, Jay. There is an infinity of colors scattered between Black and White.

I assumed people wouldn't take me so literally, but maybe they're more Type 1 than they think. KIDDING

[Harry Tic]

A recent conversation about Daniel Peterson's rather ignominious dismissal as director of FARMS/Mormon Studies Review reminded me of this thread. It struck me that old-school apologetics of the type represented by Peterson followed a model that conformed perfectly to the structure of the old Freudian joke about the broken kettle:

1. I never borrowed your kettle.
2. I already returned your kettle unbroken.
3. The kettle was already broken when you gave it to me.

The point of course is that these claims are inconsistent and only serve to confirm collectively what they each individually deny: namely, that I returned a broken kettle to you. This kind of scattershot approach has been the modus operandi of the likes of Peterson, Midgley, and Hamblin. Lots of obfuscation, lots of changing of the subject, lots of attempts to run out the clock ("all the evidence is not in") and lots of ad hominems. I'll be curious to see what direction "official" LDS apologetics takes from here on out. In my view, we need to stop thinking of "faithful scholarship" as "faith-promoting scholarship" and begin to think of "good scholarship, carried out by people of faith." There is a substantive difference. In my view, we should be done with the former and practice the latter.