Containing 5,403 Articles Spanning 369 Topics
Ex-Mormon News, Stories And Recovery
Online Since January 1, 2005
|
|
PLEASE NOTE:
If you have reached this page from an outside source such as an
Internet Search or forum referral, please note that this page
(the one you just landed on)
is an archive containing articles on
"TAL BACHMAN - SECTION 7".
This website,
The Mormon Curtain
- is a website that blogs the Ex-Mormon world. You can
read
The Mormon Curtain FAQ
to understand the purpose of this website.
⇒
CLICK HERE to visit the main page of The Mormon Curtain.
|
| |
TAL BACHMAN - SECTION 7
Total Articles:
7
Tal Bachman is an internationally recognized singer-songwriter from Vancouver, Canada. Raised strictly in the Mormon church, Tal spent two years in South America performing missionary work and learning Spanish. Later, Tal resigned his membership in the LDS Corporation.
|
|
 | "The Most Persecuted Religious Group In American History"
Monday, Feb 11, 2008, at 09:45 AM
Original Author(s): Tal Bachman
Topic: TAL BACHMAN - SECTION 7 -Guid- | ↑ | What never seems to occur to us as Mormons is whether there might have been some contributing factor to Mormon persecution besides "Satan knows we're the only true religion and wants to destroy us".
It never occurs to us that the founder and leader of Mormonism might have been hounded because he jumped bail, broke laws virtually everywhere he went (including Ohio's banking laws), defaulted on loans, remorselessly demanded offerings and donations from his followers, used his position to secretly take sexual advantage of numerous women in an era when chastity was highly prized, was caught lying and changing "eternal" doctrine on the fly, bankrupted so many with his stupid banking scheme, double-crossed local politicians, publicly humiliated or slandered those who criticized him, announced that only he and his apostles had any legitimate authority to govern on earth, proclaimed that every other religious creed on earth was an "abomination" and that only he had the truth, announced his designs as a presidential candidate to bring all of North and South America under his dominion through military force if necessary, taught that monogamous marriage was a "superstition", engineered the taking over of local governments, evidently told his followers that "stealing from the Gentiles" was no crime, had himself appointed "Lieutenant General" of his own private army nearly one third the size of the US standing army of the time, and organized a secret band of vigilantes and had them swear an oath to obey him "whether right or wrong";
and it also never occurs to us that his completely deluded followers, who frequently enabled Smith's virtually sociopathic behavior and protected him whenever possible, might then also naturally have been targeted.
This was Jacksonian America, on the frontier, where "civilization" and "the economy" - the general prospects for survival - were a lot more fragile than they seem today. Attempts at abolishing private property, overthrowing democracy in favor of theocracy, completely reconfiguring social order including marriage, taking property which didn't belong to them, etc., wouldn't have seemed merely irksome, but incredibly alarming. This was a long time before the National Guard, or AFDC, or credit cards, or even full-time police forces, were around...
Indeed, what is perhaps most amazing about Americans in that era is just how tolerant they often were: the early and mid 1800s were a time of great religious innovation all throughout America. Sects and communes arose which practiced free love, nudity, communism, all sorts of esoteric things, and believed in even stranger things; and if there is any pattern at all, it is that if they didn't bother the community at large, the community didn't bother them, and they lived in peace with each other.
But presiding over a mere commune was never enough for Smith. No - he wanted to preside over - and change, disrupt, subvert - everything else, including American democratic structures and institutions themselves, at least wherever they were impediments to his own ambitions (which they almost always were). Perhaps most famously, this included the 600 year old right (originating in Magna Carta, English common law, and most recently in the US Bill of Rights) to freedom of speech and freedom of the press: Joseph Smith, like all dictators, was in favor of these rights just as long as their exercise was to his advantage. Once they weren't, and as soon as he was in a position to do so, as the virtual dictator of the city-state of Nauvoo he sought to abolish them by ordering the destruction of a printing press, the only crime of which was to have published not lies, but truths, about Smith's abuse of his position to secure sex. (Given that and his martial, imperial ambitions, one can only imagine what sorts of thingshe might have done if he'd won the presidency of the United States. He might have made the unprincipled Aaron Burr look like George Washington.)
Today, a team of state or federal prosecutors might take the time make an example of such a person; but in 1840's America, such teams didn't exist in the numbers they do today. For better or for worse, communities usually policed themselves. Sometimes they did it in violent ways - but it's not as if Joseph Smith didn't know that.
I would never say that I thought Joseph Smith deserved to be assassinated, or that his followers deserved to be driven away from their homes. But then, I would never say that a man who decided to leave his wallet on top of his car deserved to have it stolen. It's just that, if you do, it will be stolen; and if you do the sorts of things that Joseph Smith and his followers did in rural, frontier, Jacksonian America, what you'll get is just what they did get.
It is a shame - one man's lunatic delusions of grandeur and lusts led many thousands to suffer - but...if you do what they did, when and where they did it...what would happen, is just what did happen.
And they did it anyway.
If Mormon Church defenders were properly educated by their seminary and church teachers, and honest and fair, they would mention this part of the story everytime they mentioned that "Mormons are the most persecuted religious group in American history" - which is why they never will.
| | | I'll Show You My Heresy, If You Show Me Yours
Monday, Mar 10, 2008, at 09:19 AM
Original Author(s): Tal Bachman
Topic: TAL BACHMAN - SECTION 7 -Guid- | ↑ | The good news is that in contrast to earlier eras, nothing is more believable for folks nowadays than a "scientific" claim. The bad news is that "scientific" claims can be very wrong.
When I was in junior high, for example, all scientists "knew" that eggs were very bad for you, stomach ulcers came from stress, and eating before swimming made it far more likely that you would drown. "The evidence was in!". Yet scientists now are united in saying that the fear about eggs was entirely without foundation, that stomach ulcers can be cured with a routine course of antibiotics, and swimming with food in your stomach is no more dangerous than swimming without it.
These examples, and so many others, raise the question of what "scientific consensus" might be wrong about now. The problem is in answering that question. After all, to broadcast one's suspicion that almost everyone is wrong about something - including our new caste of authorities, the scientists - is to commit a kind of heresy. But people only love heretics in retrospect - once they've been vindicated. Like four hundred years after they're dead. In the moment, no one but a few fellow heretics can stand them. Human nature dictates that we view contemporary heresy - heresy against what we think we know - as the result of either ignorance (the heretic doesn't understand the truth), or evil (he understands the truth, but fights against it out of ill motives). And who likes an ignoramus or an evildoer?
Even more...who likes a wet blanket? Everyone loves consensus...it feels so good having your beliefs validated by others...So conjuring up the spectre of doubt in a long-sought paradise of pleasing group certainty...well, that would be like someone from the Joint Chiefs of Staff telling the president of the United States that his war plan sucks, wouldn't it? We can't have that. It spoils the party...chases away all the self-congratulation and feelings of rightness and validity. Everyone loves consensus, even when the supporting evidence isn't really there.
Anyway, where I'm going with this is that my experience with Mormonism has left me insuperably suspicious of much of what "everyone knows", including what "the experts" know. One thing in particular I am skeptical of is the widely-believed claim that human activity has caused the one degree increase in global temperature over the past century. And the more I think about it, and read about the whole thing, try to dig deep beneath the surface and then try to step back and view it all...the more skeptical I become of it all. I don't buy it. That is my heresy. What's yours?
P.S. For anyone interested, click http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/c... to read a recent National Post article on a possible coming ice age.
| Can Mormons believe in evolution?
The answer is: YES. They can believe that human life evolved from lower life forms in the same way that they can believe that gays should be able to marry, that it's okay to drink beer every once in a while, and that it's okay to look at pornography. Or, like Mormon "intellectuals", that Joseph Smith's stories, while not technically true, are "true in a broader, metaphorical sense". Or, like Van Hale, that the Book of Mormon isn't an actual record of things which once happened.
Strictly speaking, "Mormonism" doesn't exist; only individual versions of what people enjoy imagining is "Mormonism" exist. Hence the comment on another thread on this site by a (pitiable) man who enjoys imagining he's a devout Mormon, that Mormons can believe that humans evolved from lower life forms - notwithstanding an official First Presidency statement declaring that this is not true.
Does that matter? No, not at all. All that matters, when we are devout Mormons, or devout anythings, is the effectiveness of the mind games we can play on ourselves.
Here is the LDS First Presidency statement, republished in the Ensign in 2002, explaining church doctrine on the matter of human evolution:
Gospel Classics: The Origin of Man
It reads in part:
"It is held by some that Adam was not the first man upon this earth and that the original human being was a development from lower orders of the animal creation. These, however, are the theories of men. The word of the Lord declared that Adam was “the first man of all men” (Moses 1:34), and we are therefore in duty bound to regard him as the primal parent of our race."
The meaning of these words could not be clearer. Does it matter?
Judge for yourself by the comments which will be posted below by self-styled devout Mormons, who will still insist that belief in Mormonism doesn't exclude belief that humans today evolved from lower life forms. No doubt we'll hear all about B.H. Roberts et al...yet nothing that will come close to the authority of an official First Presidency statement on the matter.
And it won't matter at all - because logic, fact...nothing matters to the true believer, but to continue being a true believer.
| Many intelligent people continue to believe that Joseph Smith translated something called "reformed Egyptian" using decoding spectacles, only had sex with his teenaged foster daughters because an angel would have killed him if he hadn't, and that there are three, two-thousand-year-old "American Israelites" wandering around performing anonymous good deeds, like plowing fields while farmers are asleep.
How can this be?
I think the answer is that posessing intelligence is not equivalent to critical thinking, any more than posessing a vast amount of wealth is equivalent to being an astute investor.
No matter what we tell ourselves as Mormons, belief in Mormonism ultimately requires the same sort of uncritical thinking that facilitates belief in Scientology, astrology, or iridiology. It is a kind of thinking that denies that empirically-discovered facts and the rules of logic impose constraints on what we may justifiably believe. It is one which claims that the content of things like "private intuitions", "privately heard voices" (see Son of Sam, Nephi, etc.), or "metaphysical inspiration", should be granted just as much credibility as a replicable test under controlled conditions, or one corroborated by facts discovered by a multitude of disciplines.
To put it baldly: the psychological state in which it makes sense to us to credit to a voice telling us that the sun is drawing its light from a star called Kolob, rather than creating it by internal nuclear processes, is the same one in which, potentially, it makes sense to credit a voice telling us to kill. Where we deny the validity of empirical or logical checks upon our privately heard voice, or privately felt intuitions, any belief or action becomes potentially possible.
Mormons like my former self might object that "the spirit" is the check; but that is a tautology. It is "the spirit" - however we choose to define it - itself which represents a rejection of the constraints on belief. It itself is no "check"; it is itself the symptom that we have given ourselves over to magical thinking (where 2+2 can equal whatever we wish it to equal).
| | | Why The Church Should Open Its Archives (Not What You Think)
Tuesday, Apr 15, 2008, at 07:57 AM
Original Author(s): Tal Bachman
Topic: TAL BACHMAN - SECTION 7 -Guid- | ↑ | Former Mormons argue that the church should open its archives on grounds of justice. It is not just, they (we) say, that sincere members around the world should in good faith devote their lives to an organization which withholds facts relevant to its truth and authority claims. Well, yes - of course.
But there is another reason why the church should open its archives: it is in the best interests of the church, as a purely man-made organization bent on surviving and growing, to do so.
Consider, amigos:
1.) An overwhelming avalanche of evidence from disciplines as diverse as linguistics, anthropology, geography, zoology, botany, metallurgy, ethnology, and most importantly, molecular biology, has exploded virtually every single BOM claim about the indigenous peoples of America. And...what? Most Mormons don't care. Like certain MD posters, they simply find mental "outs", privately re-define key words, retroactively change 160 years worth of LDS doctrine, and voila! - no problem;
2.) Same with the Book of Breathings scrolls. Does the fact that Smith's "translation" have no relationship to the source text matter to devout Mormons? No.
3.) Same with Smith's lying about polygamy. Does what that lying say about his credibility mean anything to devout Mormons? No.
4.) Same with doctrines like evolution. LDS doctrine could not be clearer on this. It has been announced in an official First Presidency statement which declares itself to reveal "eternal truth"; it is in LDS scriptures; it is reiterated in the LDS Bible dictionary. Yet a few mind games, a bit of selective blindness and amnesia, are all that's needed for this to be no problem whatsoever for devout Mormons.
5.) The list goes on forever - Smith didn't use any plates for the translation? No problem. He stared into a stone and dictated? No problem. He was charged with fraud ("disorderly conduct")? No problem. He tried to get rid of all those "Books of Commandments" and re-wrote some of his "prophecies" in the subsequent edition ("D&C")? No problem. The sun doesn't draw its light from a star called Kolob? No problem. DNA evidence refutes Smith's claims? No problem. He deflowered a bewildered 14 year old? No problem. He changed his "first vision" story fundamentally over the years? NO PROBLEM.
The truth is that NOTHING is, or ever could be, a problem for a huge segment of believing Mormons - nor should this be surprising.
Paraphrasing Frank Kermode, for the "true believer" there can be no such thing as "disconfirming evidence", simply because his "true belief" was never based on evidence in the first place. Mormon belief, like all fanatical, false beliefs, only maintains a veneer of rational justification; underneath, it is virtually content-free. It is, in fact, merely a psychological state, distinguishable only by the particular totems it anchors itself with (the Book of Mormon itself, a man-as-true-prophet itself, etc.).
Consider - what would the flaming Mormons on here say, if Monson announced in General Conference that "the Book of Mormon should be regarded as an inspiring allegory, rather than as strictly literal history"? Would that drive the Englunds or Schryvers or BCSpaces away? Hinckley's denial of doctrinal status to eternal progression - the actual engine of all Mormon theology - didn't phase them...why would anything else? It wouldn't.
Mormon prophets can say or do anything; LDS archives could yield anything; it will not disrupt the hardened psychological state of most Mormons. Nothing, for the most part, will happen.
Therefore, Mormon leaders have little or nothing to fear from throwing open the archives to any who wish to peruse them - even the big bad anti-Mormons. But best of all for church leaders is that throwing them open would remove a huge club from the hands of church critics.
Consider one of the most devastating books to Mormonism's image of the past fifty years (and maybe ever): Jon Krakauer's "Under the Banner of Heaven". One of Krakauer's primary motivations in writing that book was his irritation at the Mormon church's obfuscation and deception about its origins. Throw open the archives and that's one less club for Krakauer, with virtually no cost in number of followers.
More obvious is that throwing them open would lessen the suspicion some members do end up feeling as they start out investigating their own church's origins.
Opening up the archives, then, would not only be the right thing to do, but would also be in the church's best interests.
| For many ex-Mormons, the name of Dan Peterson elicits contempt. Maybe this is unfair. Maybe Dan, in person, is a great guy. But Dan has created, and then nursed, a very off-putting public persona for many years. Mormon head-counters will never know how many people struggling with their faith might have returned to church if, instead of being sarcastically berated by this so-called "defender of the church" for merely raising a concern in an online forum, they were heard out, patiently, or sensitively engaged. But, that was not Dan's style, at least in public. His own need to fuel his vanity by belittling others was always far more important to him than, say, a Christian duty to lovingly regather the lost sheep. For Dan, no matter what he enjoyed telling himself, it was only ever about him, and his own desperate need to feel smart, important, and powerful, at the expense of others.
Maybe this is why, also, so many members viewed him, and his colleagues, with shock and embarrassment: there just didn't seem to be anything there reminiscent of the spirit of Christianity which Mormonism pretends to represent. Peterson may have been entirely genial in person. Online and in print, he came across as self-absorbed, vainglorious, rancorous, mean, obsessed with even trivial score-settling, and in some palpable, but kind of inexplicable way, sociopathic. If, by some chance, his recent career troubles have resulted from his superiors finally realizing how bad he has made their beloved church look for the last thirty years, all I can say is, what took them so long?
This public persona was off-putting enough for those wondering about their Mormon faith; but making it even worse was Peterson's tendency, like that of many other congenital bullies, to veer quickly, in bi-polar-like fashion, from verbal stomping (with a kind of cold, remorseless glee), on those he decided were his "enemies" (often, honest people sincerely wondering about the truth of their beliefs), to blubbering like a third grade drama queen about how someone or other was victimizing him, every time someone finally got sick of his bullying or his nonsense, and called him out. It was always a freakshow with Peterson.
Another issue, for thoughtful Mormons and former Mormons alike, was simply the sheer spectacle of a man who - for reasons it is difficult to fathom - spoke of himself as a legitimate intellectual, but who regularly constructed or published defenses of Mormonism so utterly ludicrous, that bright eighth-graders could have seen them for what they were: circular, or fundamentally dishonest (since clearly there was no desire to get to the truth, but only to "defend the paradigm"), or reliant on thought-terminating cliches or obfuscatory language, or full of deliberate distraction tricks, like any two-bit magician might employ. And often, the pieces were all of those things combined.
Of course, Peterson was not the only one to do this sort of thing. The "let's just say *anything* we need to, to keep this thing going, to all keep ourselves believing" culture is pervasive in Mormonism. You see it once a month at testimony meeting, and you certainly saw it with other high-profile apologists. But at least testimonies are pretty straightforward: "God answered my prayer, this strengthened by faith in the Gospel, the end".
Peterson and his crew, by contrast, took this sort of thing into the stratosphere. If testimony meeting was a cup of tea, your average high profile Mormon apologetic piece, starting with Nibley, was like a Timothy Leary acid trip washed down with a bottle of mescaline-laced tequila and a hit of nitrous oxide. For all the (almost sad) academic pretenses, there was clearly no depth of absurdity to which Peterson and his goon squad would not stoop in order to try to keep themselves, and others, believing in what is just...not true.
These depths included, but were by no means limited to, postmodern (radical skeptic) defenses of "one true historical truth" claims; "cannibalistic" Book of Mormon defenses which blatantly relied on *contradicting* the text in order to try to protect the integrity of the text, as with the two Cumorahs theory; false claims (also known as "lies") that Mormon doctrine never taught that the American natives descended from Lehi; claims that Nephite "horses" were actually tapirs, or that Joseph didn't *really* mean he "translated" the Breathing Permit of Hor, or that everyone should disregard every datum noted in "An Insider's View of Mormon Origins" on grounds that Grant Palmer didn't really qualify as an "insider", despite being a lifetime Mormon, 34 year CES veteran, three time LDS Institute president, and member of the Mormon History Association, or a hundred other things.
No - there was no argument too ludicrous to make, no mindgame too crazy to play, no low too low to stoop to, as long as it seemed to hold out even a tiny chance that it would enable Peterson, or his colleagues, any member reading it, to just...keep on believing. That was all that mattered in the end: keep on believing. Not whether it was true or not - just, keeping the thing going. Just because. Just because it would hurt too much to recognize it for what it is.
And...that, too, is off-putting for people who care about the truth, Mormon or not. That IS what Mormonism is *supposed* to be about, after all - The Truth. It's *not* suppposed to be about merely "defending a paradigm", like Midgley and so many of the others would say. It is *not* supposed to be about BYU profs who literally could not get hired at a community college, running around getting money from rich, but naive Mormon donors, to support them financially while they sit around in brainstorming sessions trying to come up with yet another way of spinning away the latest damning evidence that the Book of Mormon is a work of fiction, or planning more useless conferences (no matter how many conferences they had, the church still wasn't true), or sitting around combing through RFM threads looking for mentions of themselves. If the church had any sense, they would have shut these guys down long ago.
But...that is where the story of Dan Peterson, Arch-Defender of God's Only True Religion! shows a different aspect. Sure, it's the story of an off-putting, deluded fanatic and crank who alternately stomps on people, and then starts blubbering whenever someone calls him out on his nonsense. It is also the story of a deeply pitiable character who is simply incapable of the cognitive feat of seeing what we all saw a long time ago.
I don't mean seeing that Joseph Smith invented his stories, though there is that; I mean, seeing how off-putting his schtick was; and seeing that it was in the best interests of the church to shut him and FARMS down many years ago; and especially, seeing the nature of the church as an entirely man-made institution. He could not see, though we could all see, that in the moment the church perceived him as no longer useful, it would drop him in a heartbeat, unceremoniously. His thirty years of, um, "apologetic service" wouldn't matter anymore. There is no way a man as singularly incapable of detached, critical thought about Mormon truth claims as Peterson is, could ever have seen that. And now, from what I gather, it has happened.
And, he probably still can't see the nature of the church as an institution. My guess is that his hurt and resentment is directed toward a few individuals, who he now regards as "enemies" - not *the church*. That the church is an insitution which, in the end, does not care about any individual, or him, *except insofar as those individuals help it to survive and grow*, has probably entirely escaped him. He no doubt just keeps reminding himself that "the church is perfect; the people aren't".
Dan might be able to see that institutions, and especially, ideological institutions, develop a kind of will and mind of their own; and that all they care about in the end is their own survival and growth. But I doubt he would ever have been able to see that this includes the institution of the Mormon church, which, like the others, can make no legitimate claim to being anything other than completely man-made. And like those others, it unhesitatingly sacrifices any individual which impedes its ability to survive and grow. That the church might very well dump Dan Peterson with ease one day was something we even discussed on here, six or seven years ago. If Peterson had read it, he probably thought our vision was clouded by "ex-Mormon rage" or whatever. And yet, it was nothing but the truth.
Here is one excerpt from a post of mine on here, from six or seven years ago, that RFM poster 3X just sent me:
"And this is why the specter of DCP kind of being used appears in the backs of our minds...How long would he last, if the church for one nanosecond thought he wasn't useful anymore?... Would anyone at HQ think twice about leaving Dan Peterson there holding the bag, once they decide that the position he's been defending just isn't working anymore...?"
This was not exactly a remarkable insight. Virtually everyone on here knew that was true. It was completely obvious. The point is that, Dan Peterson couldn't see it, and that is pitiable indeed.
| | | So John Dehlin Returns And "Fully Submits" To Church Leaders Despite Claiming To Not Have Any Idea Whether Mormonism Is True?
Thursday, Jan 31, 2013, at 08:06 AM
Original Author(s): Tal Bachman
Topic: TAL BACHMAN - SECTION 7 -Guid- | ↑ | I wonder if, for his next trick, he'll enter into a gay marriage, despite "not having any idea whether he's gay or not".
In any case, maybe John and the LDS church are a good match: neither of them seem to care about the truth, and both seem to think that "appearing nice and gentle" is the highest attribute that any human could ever aspire to, at all times.
Just my two (offensive) cents,
| |
|
How to navigate:- Click the subject below to go directly to the article.
- Click the red arrow on the article to return to the top.
- Right-Click and copythe "-Guid-" (the Link Location URL) for a direct link to the page and article.
Archived Blogs:
| |
Articles posted here are © by their respective owners when designated.
Website © 2005-2013
Compiled With: Caligra 1.121
HOSTED BY
 |
| |
AvoBase is a light-weight robust point of sale software tool.
If you sell Avon, Stampin-Up, Scentsy, Mary-Kay? AvoBase is for you.
AvoBase can sell from any of them - and even sell from ALL of them at the same time.
And not just Avon, AvoBase can sell nearly ANYTHING.
Sell your product, track your customers and your taxes - all in one easy to use application.
Download FREE today at AvoBase.com.
|
|
|
