[ExI] and speaking of exponential singularities...

[Kelly Anderson]

On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 12:25 AM, Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
> On 7/19/2011 12:54 AM, Kelly Anderson wrote:
>
>> they
>> are victims of a terribly pernicious mind virus. It's very hard to
>> shake. Took me 45 years to get the dang bug out of my head.
>
> Well, congratulations for escaping--but how is it possible to adhere for so
> long to a set of claims that are not only self-evidently ridiculous, but are
> shown in public records to be lies and fakes?

When you are in the mind set, it is by no means self-evidently
ridiculous. There is a sense that there are rabid anti-Mormons out
there trying to attack the "true religion"... and indeed, there are
some nut jobs out there working for other religions with no other
purpose in life than to attack Mormons. Ran into some of these nut
jobs in California once. They made Mormons look downright normal. I
know of no such public records even now. To what specifically are you
referring?

> For example, the erroneous
> translations from ancient languages that matched those available for copying
> at the time but have subsequently been shown to be incorrect and badly
> misleading?

I assume here, you must be talking about the drawings in the Pearl of
Great Price? The apologists indicated that this wasn't the thing that
he actually translated, but that those papyri were lost in the Chicago
fire. There is something to this story, as there was a Chicago fire,
and it did destroy papyri that were once in the hands of Joseph
Smith... The explanation of what the burial skull caps (that's what
the pictures really are) meant were known by me to be rather silly for
many years, but it hardly made a difference. Mormonism is based on
"revealed feelings"... and the key to breaking out of the spell (for
me) was to wonder long and hard about why God would choose to
communicate through such pure emotion. Why feelings? In the end, that
didn't make sense to me. Emotions are so easily fooled. It took nearly
a year for me to deprogram myself, and I probably still have the
vestiges of "facts" that may not be actual facts.

> The plagiarism of such texts? The fact (as I cited earlier) of
> what happened when Smith's early "translations" were stolen, and his
> inability to replicate the "translation"? Not to mention his prior criminal
> scams.

The evidence for some of this stuff is rather slim. Given the rabid
hatred for Mormonism (it is a highly successful competitive meme to
Protestant Christianity, after all) it is rather easy to believe that
a lot of this is simply manufactured evidence.

> Were you forbidden to read such information (as the dupes of $cientology
> are, I understand, and Catholics in the day of the Index)? If so, how come
> this didn't strike you as rather... revealing and suspicious... by the time
> you were an adult?

There was a feeling that reading this stuff wasn't worth the time...
but I remember no specific prohibition. There were prohibitions
against associating with certain groups of anti-Mormons... but that
didn't seem so unreasonable. Why would you want to associate with the
"enemy" anyway?

When both sides are making up "facts" to suit their purposes, who can
say that one set of arguments is superior to the other?

-Kelly