The CES Letter

[Northwestcoug]

Not so fast!

If only Mormon Women Bare would have reached out to Chyna...

[imanihonjin]

Good luck un-seeing that! It still haunts me.

Burned into my retinas.

[imanihonjin]

Chyna was a Mo?

[falafel]

Chyna was a Mo?

Post-porn, but apparently she was.

[Moliere]

Definitely agree here as well. The straining that we do to associate anything to divine intervention is ludicrous.

For instance, during the flooding last week many people called the fact that the temple never got flooded (despite it being right in the flooded area) as a miracle. I'm sure I'll here many testimonies about it on Sunday. What is funny is that no other businesses (Kroger, Bike Barn, etc.) in that area got flooded because they all were engineered to be a certain height above the flood plain. Granted some businesses a little ways away got flooded, but they were all buildings built more than 2 decades ago.

We see what we want to see so we can reaffirm what we already believe.

Case in point, here's an article making the rounds today. Looks like it was written on the 24th but I didn't see it until tonight

http://blog.chron.com/mormonvoice/20...houston-flood/

[Lost Student]

Not so fast!

Can't unsee hairy armpits.

[falafel]

Definitely agree here as well. The straining that we do to associate anything to divine intervention is ludicrous.

For instance, during the flooding last week many people called the fact that the temple never got flooded (despite it being right in the flooded area) as a miracle. I'm sure I'll here many testimonies about it on Sunday. What is funny is that no other businesses (Kroger, Bike Barn, etc.) in that area got flooded because they all were engineered to be a certain height above the flood plain. Granted some businesses a little ways away got flooded, but they were all buildings built more than 2 decades ago.

We see what we want to see so we can reaffirm what we already believe.

To be fair, that temple was built in 1998, making it nearly as old as those buildings that got flooded. Miracles abound!

[Moliere]

To be fair, that temple was built in 1998, making it nearly as old as those buildings that got flooded. Miracles abound!

True

[Jeff Lebowski]

From a recent talk by Patrick Mason. From a letter he wrote to a friend.

The CES Letter [formally, “Letter to a CES Director,” which he cited as one of the online sources he had read] is emblematic of this all-or-nothing approach to religion. . . . The letter is nearly a perfect inverse of the version of Mormonism it is reacting to. Jeremy Runnels may have written the letter, but it was actually an inevitability—someone, sometime, somewhere was going to write that letter, because it was the obvious response to a certain style, tone, and mode of Mormonism that culminated in the highly doctrinaire, no-retreat-no-surrender positions taken by certain church leaders and members especially in the second half of the twentieth century. I would actually agree with the CES letter’s basic notion, that the Mormonism it is responding to is unsustainable. Where I disagree is that I don’t think the Mormonism it is responding to is actually the real, only, or inevitable Mormonism. Certainly, that was some people’s Mormonism, but it’s not my Mormonism, and I don’t think it’s the Mormonism that is going to endure in future decades and centuries.

One of the key tasks before us is developing a better, more sophisticated, and frankly more Christian theology of prophets and prophethood. We have treated our prophets too often as demigods. We do not believe in prophetic infallibility. This cannot be said enough, and it cannot be taken seriously enough. We give it lip service but too often do not believe it, nor consider its implications, other than the intellectually lazy conclusion that the whole thing must either be all true or a complete fraud. . . . We need to think harder about why we should…sustain prophets and apostles whom we know will occasionally be wrong about certain things. We don’t always know what those things are except in hindsight, because we were usually all wrong together. . . . We still have a lot of work to do. . . .

http://www.fairmormon.org/perspectiv...ge-convictions

[Moliere]

From a recent talk by Patrick Mason. From a letter he wrote to a friend.



http://www.fairmormon.org/perspectiv...ge-convictions

He's stealing my material

I've long criticized the letter for its black or white questions. I've always found it odd that the exmos suddenly become totally literal in terms of EVERYTHING to do with Mormonism when they need to attack the church.


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[Uncle Ted]

Yep...

As I wrap up, I will admit that I have two fears for the church that I love and am totally committed to. First, I fear for what I call the “juvenilization” of Mormonism, or the “EFY-ification” of the church, or the “Gospel According to Internet Memes.” When it’s adults in the room, let’s respect one another enough to talk like adults. Most people can handle complexity and nuance. We can stretch beyond what we learned in seminary, though we are so rarely invited to. I have a really smart colleague who once invited the missionaries into his home so he could learn more about Mormonism. When they finished their discussion, with frequent references to their accompanying flipchart, he thought to himself, “That’s it?” Indeed, I fear that in too many contexts we’re feeding our members and investigators a low-nutrition religious diet that leaves them not only with the unsatisfied feeling of “That’s it?” but also leaves them poorly fortified against challenges to their faith. I see signs that we’re starting to do better on this score, but frankly only in patchwork fashion.

My second fear is for the fundamentalist takeover of Mormonism. I’m not referring to fundamentalism in terms of polygamy—I’m pretty confident we’re totally past that phase of our history. Instead, this is a reference to what I think is the rather remote possibility of a process similar to what happened in the Southern Baptist Convention in the early 1990s, when theological fundamentalists took over the churches, seminaries, and governing bodies of the denomination and either pushed out liberals and moderates or made their lives in the church so miserable that they left on their own, thus leaving only the fundamentalists to control the whole denomination. There are occasional signs that moderates and liberals are simply not wanted in the contemporary LDS Church. We have already lost too many who feel, incorrectly in my estimation, that the church is simply a shill for the Republican Party and Family Research Council. But for the most part I’m optimistic that the center will hold, and that Zion will transcend the ongoing culture wars.

I am not so optimistic.

[Jeff Lebowski]

Yep...

I am not so optimistic.

Buck up, man!

[Uncle Ted]

He's stealing my material

I've long criticized the letter for its black or white questions. I've always found it odd that the exmos suddenly become totally literal in terms of EVERYTHING to do with Mormonism when they need to attack the church.

Yeah, I wonder where they got that from...

One of the ironies we haven’t fully appreciated in our discussions of doubt is that to some degree our church culture is responsible for many people’s reactions to troubling information. Whether consciously or not, they are simply applying what they learned in well-intentioned but ultimately damaging Primary and youth lessons, such as when the teacher offers the class a bowl of ice cream, then dumps a small amount of dirt on it and asks if anyone wants it now. Of course they say no, and the teacher points out that this is what just a little bit of sin does—it ruins everything. So those who see a little bit of dirt in church history are acting in ways that seem entirely commensurate with what they have been taught their whole lives—God cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance, so we turn away from sin and touch not the unclean thing. Unable to manage the cognitive dissonance, these people’s relationship to the church becomes tenuous, and often breaks. Many feel that they cannot participate with integrity in church meetings where certain details are either neglected, covered up, or denied. In short, they have become switched off. Some of these people not only leave the church, but also abandon Christianity and even theism, since God, Jesus, and Mormonism had always come as a package deal in their minds.

Don't they know that the word "translate", as JSJr used it, means to stick your face into a hat to look at a brownish rock?

[MartyFunkhouser]

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[Brian]

Buck up, man!

One word, dude. Bednar.