Survey Shows Mormons Want The Truth
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,660224413,00.html
"Active Latter-day Saints want their church to provide a "frank and honest" presentation of church history, unvarnished by attempts to sugar-coat the past in order to make it more palatable.
That's one finding to come from a new e-mail survey done by the family and church history department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The survey targeted members who use the church's resources to do family history and sought to determine how they engage with the faith's past."
To me, this is actually very surprising. Most members of the church that I have spoken with don't want to know the truth about the church history. The leaders of the church know the true history and advise people to not read anything that isn't approved by the church. Anything that brings up the true history of the church is labeled as being "anti-Mormon" and seen as bad to the church as pornography.
"The new focus on active church members doesn't mean researchers will be excluded, but that helping non-scholar Latter-day Saints understand their history will be the department's primary mission... But he cautioned that like other archives, "there are some restrictions on privacy and intellectual property" as well as on "sacred, private and institutional materials. That's something we just won't budge on, and those things will never be made public...We need to provide the context for our members to enrich and strengthen their faith and enhance their doctrinal understanding."
He admits that LDS historians have access to information that your standard rank and file member does not. He also admits that these LDS historians are responsible for putting the church's history together in a faith-promoting way. The last sentence cracked me up, because you can hear the panic in his statement. What he really means to say is that thanks to the Internet, now your standard LDS member has access to a lot of information, particularly the truth to the early church history. Since members are finding out about facts that contradict long held positions of the church, we need to make sure we can get to the people that haven't discovered them yet so we can shape it in a way that won't lead to dis-belief in Mormonism.
I LOVE IT!
This demonstrates the power of words and how words can be shaped to deceive people. This validates my assertion in my previous post where I talk about how words are man-made and therefore we should be very skeptical of them.
Skeptical Mormon
3 comments:
Hi ,
Just noticed you had aded me to your 'You tube' video subscriptions .... so I came to check your blog out and its very interesting as I can understand exactly where you are coming from.
I have a similar dilemma but as a fairly Active investigator . I'm not anti mormon in the literal sense . I'm more Anti-misleading .I can't bring things up in church , I tried soo 'You tube' seemed a good place to vent some frustrations .
I'll spend some time in your blog , you've done some very good thinking and reflecting on things .
E J
Hi Zelph,
Thanks for linking my blog website to yours .I'll make an effort to update mine and put something interesting on there and add some links myself .
I like going to church as an Investigator. Many times I have been told to rely on my feeling and not logic about the 'truth'.
But feelings are fine if the church is what it portrays itself as , but I'm worried that it isn't.
I find the whole polygamy thing of the past weighing too heavy on my conscience . The church today is fine and the members on the whole are really nice people to know and a good influence and the young missionaries too , although they are now concerned about the head in a hat thing after I showed them and don't feel they are being honest now when talking about the Urim and Thumim with Investigators .. A dilemma for them because they believe in Honesty as taught by the church .
E J
PS 'Zelph' - This is a problem for the limited geography theory apologists . How do they explain Zelph the Lamenite warrior found miles away from the limited geography setting ?
There's always one too many problems everywhere I look .
EJ-
"How do they explain Zelph the Lamanite warrior found miles away from the limited geography setting?"
The same way they explain a lot of things- they discredit statements made by Joseph Smith. They say that he was just "speculating" and that he wasn't guided by the spirit at that time.
That is exactly the problem. This is just one example of so many times that LDS apologists try to defend the Book of Mormon by discrediting Joseph Smith and other prophets and apostles.
Another example as demonstrated in a previous post is the "2 Cumorahs theory".
Whatever the case may be, they both can't be right, so that means that one of them is wrong.
Some LDS defenders go as far to say that Joseph Smith didn't physically translate the Book of Mormon, but God gave him the principals and JS expanded on it and made a fictional story about it.
Once again, that is calling Joseph Smith a liar.
There is a saying that goes: "nobody discredits apostles and prophets like LDS apologists".
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