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Just for fun: Busy, busy Joseph Smith

2/13/2015

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Joseph Smith’s Valentines Day Schedule

If you know who created this, please tell us so we can give proper credit. Meanwhile, enjoy.

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Why we are anti “anti”

2/2/2015

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The Anti-Mormon Fallacy:
Ad Hominem in Disguise

How “Anti-Mormon” dispatches inconvenient information

To reject an idea because of who said it rather than on its merits is to commit the Ad Hominem Fallacy. An example would be to reject climate science because you happened to dislike Al Gore.

Mormons have a version all their own which we have decided to call the Anti-Mormon Fallacy.

Mormons typically reject, even avoid, all things “anti-Mormon.” It might sound reasonable if Mormons used “anti” the way most people do. They don’t.

For most people, “anti” followed by the name of a religion refers to an irrational opposition not so much to the religion as to its adherents. For instance, a person who categorically dislikes Jews, Muslims, or Christians is anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, or anti-Christian. Someone who takes on only the religion’s beliefs might be called blasphemous, irreverent, unsaved, heathen, or skeptical—but never “anti.”

Not so for Mormons. They define “anti-Mormon” so broadly as to include anyone or anything that falls short of endorsing Mormonism. Dismissing a message by positioning the messenger as unfriendly is the Ad Hominem Fallacy in full swing. It is this that we call the Anti-Mormon Fallacy. Its unfortunate effect is to relieve Mormons from having to consider the merits of a message.

Each of the following would be deemed anti-Mormon:

• A religious tract advocating fair and equitable treatment of Mormons but calling into question the church’s doctrines.

• An accurate historical account of the Mormon Church’s having barred black Africans and their descendants from its priesthood until 1978.

• An accurate tally of the church’s retail and real estate holdings.

• A list of edits to Mormon scripture.

• Pointing out a false, misleading, or inaccurate statement made by any Mormon leader.

• Disaffected Mormons who talk about their disaffection.

• Literature not directed at the church but which may pose challenges to its teachings. Some would describe as anti-Mormon Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and even Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos.

• Some Mormons apply the A-term to Rough Stone Rolling, Mormon scholar Richard Bushman’s openly apologetic, implicitly church-endorsed biography of founder Joseph Smith, because in his efforts to mitigate Smith’s warts, Bushman admits them.

• This post.

By invoking “anti-Mormon,” Mormons can handily disqualify all inconvenient information. Its mere mention strikes mistrust and dismissal. “Anti-Mormon” is tantamount to “dangerous lies from an enemy, to be avoided at the peril of your salvation.”

An explicit or implicit “anti” is one way that movements that appear prima facie questionable to the rest of us retain otherwise intelligent adherents. Not just religions resort to it. The likes of Landmark Education, Impact Training, Mary Kay Cosmetics, Tony Robbins, “alternative” medicine adherents, GMO opponents, natural and organic food movements, vaccination opponents, and others all depend for survival and growth on one form or another of suggested, and then self-policed, information control.

A best defense? We suggest one in the closing words of “It’s Not About the Sex” My Ass: “Whenever you find your emotions pulling you toward believing the opposite of what the evidence says, overrule your emotions and trust the evidence. There is no better way to spare yourself the pain of needless, unfortunate decisions.”

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From the “You Can Please Almost Everyone” Department

2/1/2015

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From

“What a clever writer
and enjoyable read”

to

“NOT FUNNY”

Not without difficulty, today we resist the
urge to publish only positive reviews

It’s true. This post will not just excerpt, but reproduce in its entirety a scathing reader review.

Do not be too impressed. Said scathing review comprises all of its two words.

Besides, it is not lost on us that sharing negative reviews lends credence to the positive ones, of which there are more than a few: Tom Flynn’s and Richard Packham’s rave reviews in, respectively, Free Inquiry and Association for Mormon Letters, and 83 total reviews on Amazon (so far), of which only nine came in with but 1 or 2 stars.

Below are the past month’s reviews, arranged from newest to oldest, which by sheer coincidence (honest!), is also from most to least positive. (If you’d rather read them on Amazon.com, click here.)

On the positive side ...

We shared memoirist Viga Boland’s entire review in our prior blog post, so we’ll provide an excerpt here. (And please take a look at Ms. Boland’s No Tears for Father, her award-winning, harrowing memoir of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of her father.)

I was drawn to this book by its outrageous title ... As someone who has herself written a memoir on a very serious subject, I just had to see how one could write "funny" about something sad ... Joanne Hanks had me turning pages in no time. Her opening chapter was riveting. She was laughing and I laughed with her ... She's also my kind of writer, one who doesn't waste the reader's time, padding the facts with unnecessary detail that doesn't move the story along. Not all of us have time, or even want to analyse characters. Some of us just like an absorbing, quick read that enlightens us to worlds and societies unlike those in which we live. This is what Joanne gives us in this book and she's done it all with humour. How very clever!

Reader Vernae Hasbargen awarded us five stars. We loved her succinct review, presented here in its entirety:

How refreshing to share this light-hearted view of Joanne's experience because it left a memorable impression.

“Funny and informative,” writes LisaWood, giving us four out of five stars:

In Mormonese this book was a "hoot". I laughed until tears started coming when reading about the Second Coming not really coming. They waited a couple of days after the predicted date, and then decided to go home and wait for a phone call if/when Jesus showed up because they had established a "phone tree". That's so Mormon. She gives an interesting insight into what the women get out of this kind of arrangement: a pride in being involved in a family with more wives than the family next door. A sort of "hurts so good" situation that ultimately starts to just plain old hurt. Funny and informative. A little more depth would have been great.

Positive or negative?
You decide ...

Reader-reviewer Viktoria opens with “Left me wanting more — not in a good way.” Fair enough. Nonetheless, Viktoria gave the book three out of five stars and praise where she felt it was due:

As someone on the outside looking in, I am strangely fascinated by any sort of cult-like mini-society, and the closest I have gotten to experiencing that sort of life, is by reading about others' first-hand experiences.

The positives about Ms. Hanks' book have been listed by numerous other reviewers: it is mostly funny, it is an easy read, it is an uncommon take on a story similar to which other authors had told before her.

However... While it certainly stands out when it comes to pure entertainment value, if you're — like I am — on the outside looking in, and crave some sort of insight into how and why someone ends up completely engulfed by a cult, and what it really is that finally makes them get away, you will get little - if any - of that from Ms. Hanks' book. To me, it seems like one day she and her husband were suddenly in a cult, fully embracing all the craziness, and later, they were suddenly out, done with not only the cult, but religion as well, altogether.

If you're looking for a fun read on the subject of polygamy and/or cults, I believe you will love this book. If you're looking to try and understand what had led Ms. Hanks to join and, later, quit the cult, you will be left without answers.

It would appear that Kathryn J Hallett
didn’t much care for our book ...

Ms. Hallett, who awarded us one star, has the distinction of having written the most succinct review we can recall:

NOT FUNNY.

Though we are not terribly good at reading between the lines, we suspect that what Ms. Hallett is trying to say is that we failed to make a fan of her.

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Just for fun: Busy, busy Joseph Smith

Joseph Smith’s Valentines Day Schedule

Why we are anti “anti”

The Anti-Mormon Fallacy:Ad Hominem in Disguise

How “Anti-Mormon” dispatches inconvenient information

From the “You Can Please Almost Everyone” Department

From “What a clever writer and enjoyable read”to “NOT FUNNY”Not without difficulty, today we resist the urge to publish only positive reviews

Archives

The Anti-Mormon Fallacy:
Ad Hominem in Disguise

From

“What a clever writer
and enjoyable read”

to

“NOT FUNNY”

Not without difficulty, today we resist the
urge to publish only positive reviews