← Back to context

Comment by nocoolnametom

3 years ago

That "massively deep philosophy/corpus" doesn't help things, though. With nearly 200 years of a leadership that teaches that whatever is spoken by God's servants (the highest church leadership) is to be equated as similar to the word of God (with a normal human distribution of those leaders who approach this view with a cautious humility through those who speak their musings with confidence) there's a HUGE of collection of some pretty odd beliefs. Since the church leadership almost never repudiates these past statements, preferring to have them quietly fade from the collective memory and consciousness of the membership over time, chances are that there's still some few members who are aware of these weird beliefs and can back them up with some sort of statement by a modern LDS prophet or apostle. This makes any "actual truth value" of an odd teaching or belief really difficult to gauge, and chances are there's some actual statement behind many of that unreliable information.

That's speaking of teachings and doctrine, of course. When it comes to history that's less like trying to nail Jell-o to the wall and it's much easier to find sources for more accurate history, and I agree that it's a bit sad how little accuracy in history seems to be respected by some believing and formerly-believing members.

Actually I completely agree with you. There are indeed plenty of things where it's murky and hard to piece together the truth (particularly since Joseph and the early church were so secretive about some teachings like polygamy).

The type of thing I had in mind are things that aren't ambiguous but rather are pretty clear. Things like "the actual edicts ... aren't really supposed to be published or talked about" regarding caffeine/word of wisdom. I certainly don't claim to know everything, but I have spent an insane amount of time reading/researching Mormon history and I've never heard that before. Stuff like that seems to pop up constantly for some reason when I talk about things with ex-mormons.