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I have read in this forum some criticism to Mormonthink. I do not understand if it depends on what is written or who writes it. is there, in your opinion, a website truly objective, about the Church Doctrine and History, that you would you recommend? I have seen many, but I do not know which can be trusted. I’m not looking for apologetic sites or anti-Mormon sites. Something in the middle, clear and full of information. Am I asking too much?
I really like By Common Consent, overall, for the scholarship and balance. I also love Keepapitchinin’ – Ardis Parshall’s historical site about the early-mid 1900’s. She is a researcher by profession, and her stuff is fascinating.
The Strangites had a very good website, but only for pre-BY stuff – otherwise it was tendentious about post-JS and leadership contests. Interesting though.
And I know it’s going to sound odd but FARMS. I’m not talking about *all* of FARMS (which can be tendentious/obscurantist), but now and then there are some interesting things on there. Lit crit of the BoM especially. I was very interested in an essay about how Polynesians and Maori interpreted the BoM in a tribal manner – very left field essay, and very original.
Ralph wrote:I have read in this forum some criticism to Mormonthink. I do not understand if it depends on what is written or who writes it.
is there, in your opinion, a website truly objective, about the Church Doctrine and History, that you would you recommend? I have seen many, but I do not know which can be trusted. I’m not looking for apologetic sites or anti-Mormon sites. Something in the middle, clear and full of information. Am I asking too much?
If you want a site that is not anti or apologetic, you can’t beat lds.org. Mormonthink is pure anti. Sites like FairMormon are defending against the anti attack, so that would be considered apologetic. Maxwellinstitute.org is good scholarly stuff that avoids defending now.What many people don’t understand is the questions about doctrine and history that are pushed on us by the critics are virtually all red herrings and straw men. They are distractions from what is truly important about history and doctrine. That is why the church hasn’t focused on such things and why members wonder why they were never taught this stuff. Satan wants us to strain at gnats, so we can swallow his camels. If you want to learn about the doctrine and history that the critics want us to focus on, the apologetic sites are much more objective than the anti sites. The reason this is true is that most of the apologists have a spiritual witness that Joseph is a prophet and that Jesus lives and is God. They are not afraid of finding something that challenges their belief, because they know. This allows them to explore ideas much more openly and objectively without fear. At FairMormon.org, for example, I sense a calm scholarly willingness to consider opposing viewpoints there. Another good example of this is a site that is just getting going, MormonChallenges.org.
Good question Ralph, Of course all writing is going to have its bias, historians today know very well that there is no such thing as truly objective or unbiased history. I recommend reading about each subject you are interested in from a wide variety of authors, that way you get exposure to many different details and perspectives. I see websites as more of an “intro” to topics and books as the full course – and not just one. If you want to know the full story of Mountain Meadows for example I would suggest Juanita Brooks classic, the more recent Turley, Leonard and Walker book, then you can place the few additional details and bias of Bagley into perspective.
If you don’t want to invest that much time into topics keep the same idea as you search out articles online. Dialogue has a great archive online, and they publish from a variety of authors. There is also some access to BYU papers etc. I like to get FAIR’s perspective also.
So in other words I guess the short answer is no, I don’t know of any single place that makes it easy.
Quote:What many people don’t understand is the questions about doctrine and history that are pushed on us by the critics are virtually all red herrings and straw men.
No, they aren’t. I can disagree with interpretations of just about anything, but the questions themselves usually are not red herrings and straw men – and many who struggle with them are sincere, good, faithful, active, loving, intelligent, dedicated members of the LDS Church.
Speaking as an admin here, we simply do NOT dismiss arguments or questions and tell people they wouldn’t have concerns or questions if they simply were more righteous, understood the Gospel better, prayed more or harder, etc. That sort of answer isn’t in harmony with our mission and won’t be tolerated – just like its opposite extreme (all questions and arguments against the Church are legit and prove that people ought to leave) won’t be tolerated. Neither of those positions is how we roll here. Please understand and respect that part of our mission.
Old-Timer wrote:Quote:What many people don’t understand is the questions about doctrine and history that are pushed on us by the critics are virtually all red herrings and straw men.
No, they aren’t. I can disagree with interpretations of just about anything, but the questions themselves usually are not red herrings and straw men – and many who struggle with them are sincere, good, faithful, active, loving, intelligent, dedicated members.
Thank you Ray. Thank you for caring about us and acknowledging the pain and struggle we have trying to find both truth and peace.Dialogue journal. It’s a bit academic and not listed by topic, but it’s a very well researched/reviewed journal. It gets a range of contributors and many “walk the middle-way.” https://www.dialoguejournal.com/archive/ Someone recently shared a BCC article about it:
http://bycommonconsent.com/2014/03/30/the-dialogue-diet/ They also do podcasts if you’re into that sort of thing:
Thank you all. If I understand correctly, when you say anti, it does not necessarily mean false. Anti can be synonymous of manipulated, partial or out of context information. Probably the best anti information are disguised as impartial, but they carry the reader toward a specific interpretation or feeling.
However, from what I’ve seen, sometimes true information may be written in an anti website, and false information may be part of a pro-lds site.
How do you suggest, you must rely on multiple sources to get an idea less partial.
It’s a jungle!!
“Anti” means “opposed to” and nothing more for the sake of this site. We don’t link to sites that are established to drive / draw people away from the LDS church – that are “opposed to” the LDS Church. There are lots of wonderful things about the Church, and there are quite a few negative things – particularly about the dominant culture and even more particularly in the Inter-mountain West. A site that pounds the negative without acknowledging the positive – or that twists the positives into negatives – or that simply is intended to damage faith and make people leave the Church – anything like that does not get linked here.
Conversely, we generally don’t link to traditional apologetic sites very much – usually doing so only to link specific articles or posts that fit our mission. It’s not that they are completely bad sites, for the most part, but they often are slanted the opposite direction and simply don’t serve the type of person who tends to participate here. We won’t delete links to the main pages of those sites, since they are attempting to help people stay LDS – but they just don’t match what most people here need.
Thank you Ray. I’m learning to know you by reading your posts and I really appreciate your frankness and clarity of thought. From a TBM point of View, “anti” is any web site or book that is not correlated. The word is not used correctly, and is misused all the time. You can quote directly from BY, and it can be “anti”. Using “anti” is in itself a strawman when it is used like that. Sheldon, even for the most orthodox members, something that is “anti” has an element of attack to it. There are LOTS of things that aren’t “correlated” that almost no member of the Church (maybe even no member at all) would call “anti”. [ Admin Note]: The previous comment that was referenced in this one was deleted by the person who wrote it. That person said he didn’t want it left in the thread, so the part of this comment that quoted it was deleted, as well. The rest of this comment is excellent, even without the quote, so it was left intact.
When you are used to positive and only positive feed on a subject important to you it becomes jarring to hear the slightest bit that isn’t consistent with that attitude. In high school I knew a girl that was so used to the same with American history that when a Native American shared his history in class that didn’t correlate with the history books she attacked him verbally for quite awhile, then later after it had settled in she swore off dating any white men the next year.
It’s really quite normal when if what your used to is very consistent and super happy go lucky or super negative presented over a long period. It’s a well known and well studied consequence for teaching or patenting on that manor,
In my case, I never questioned history nor had any interest in it until one day doing my genealogy I came I to contact with distant family members that had kept old journals and newspapers of our ancestors. Giving me them, then all of a sudden I had access to very high prominent members of church journals who happened to be some if my ancestors. It didn’t match what I was taught, by a long shot. It was then that I had any questions at all about history(church, national or otherwise). The image of old pioneers and church leaders that I tried to live up to came crashing down. The consequence not of exploring, but of the way I was being taught.
In reality none can live up to the standards we read in our correlated books, not even close.
The lesson I learned was don’t let anyone push you into a highly unrealistic standard of yourself. It’s a recipe waiting for disaster. Never let anyone hold you up to such a highly deformed Caricature of what a real human is capable of. And don’t hold yourself up to that either. It creates a false sense of tiers of humans and that you are low and others are high. That created tiers of “worth”. Something that has never worked out well for any of gods children with that view.
Wikipedia. There’s a main page and many offshoots. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LDS_Church http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints
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