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nerdygaymormon · 7 years ago

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The Payne Papers, aka Prologue

In Spring 1977, in a Beginning Psychology class at BYU, Dr. Reed Payne gave an anti-gay lecture. Cloy Jenkins, a gay man, was in attendance and unhappy at what was said.

Because of the anti-homosexual climate in the church and on campus, Cloy felt that he couldn’t speak up and counter the statements made on the subject, so he decided to write a reply.

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Howard Salisbury was a gay Ricks College professor that Cloy met while still a teenager and someone Cloy consulted with on the response.

I don’t know how Cloy Reed was put in touch with gay BYU professor Lee Williams, but this professor also contributed to the paper, and more importantly, he reviewed it with "skillful criticism” and was the main editor of the 52 page work. Lee Williams’ brother also contributed, Jeff Williams was a gay Ricks College professor.

The response countered Dr. Payne’s assertion that homosexuality is a pathological condition and explained what it’s like to be gay and Mormon. They argued that homosexuality cannot be cured. Instead it is a state of being and not a chosen pattern of behavior. Those who claim to be cured might have experienced a modification in their sexual behavior but not in their orientation.

They called this “The Payne Papers” and printed up some copies (without their names on it, they remained anonymous) and shared with family and friends, who also shared it with others.

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What happened next is incredible.

Later that summer, Ken Kline, a gay activist in Salt Lake City, was given a copy of the papers. He decided to publish them as an anonymous pamphlet and asked BYU student Donald Attridge to do a pencil sketch of the BYU campus for the cover artwork.

Ken knew a gay man who worked in the church office building’s mail room. Through him, the pamphlet was distributed into the mail of all General Authorities. Copies of the pamphlet were mailed to local TV and radio stations. The pamphlet also was distributed to most of the faculty at BYU and Ricks College (probably with the aid of “The Payne Papers” authors from those campuses). Having a pamphlet with a cover of BYU and distributed to all these faculty and GA’s made it seem it was a BYU publication and had been church approved. Needless to say, LDS leaders were upset.

Ken Kline also owned The Open Door, which was Salt Lake’s gay newpaper. The paper began the serialization (printing part of them each week) of The Payne Papers, which meant the arguments were out there for all to read.

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I won’t go into all the ways the LDS Church sought to counter the arguments made in “The Payne Papers,” but after several weak attempts, Elder Boyd K. Packer refuted the basic premise of the Payne Papers in a 1978 address at BYU, telling the 12-stake fireside that homosexuality is a curable problem. His remarks were then published as the pamphlet To The One.

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Affirmation: Gay and Lesbian Mormons acquired the rights to “The Payne Papers” and republished it under the new title “Prologue.”

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This was a serious attempt to strip away the ignorance and prejudice that resulted in the pain, suffering and tragic deaths of many gay Mormon youth. It was the first major pushback against the narrative that Spencer Kimball had been giving for decades on the subject of homosexuality and it really shook a lot of leaders.

Here’s a link if you’d like to read it in its entirety, and below I put some quotes from the pamphlet.

Cloy Jenkins still lives, he resides in Maui with his partner.

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“No one knows what causes homosexuality. However, we do know one thing that does not cause homosexuality and that is free choice. Until the cause or causes are known it is grossly inappropriate to moralize about it.”

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“One does not choose to be homosexual. The concept of choice, implicit in your lecture, is the beginning of a fundamental misunderstanding of homosexuality. Not once in all of my investigation have I known anyone who seriously said he chose to be homosexual. Most homosexuals have at some time chosen not to be homosexual, some repeatedly, only to discover that in spite of their determination, they remained homosexual.”

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“Rather than choice, the growing child comes to a realization of who he is sexually. Self-awareness should not be mistaken for conscious choice. For a psychologist, this distinction, which you appear to be confused about, should be embarrassingly elemental.”

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“I know of many homosexuals who have married and have children. In not one single case has it changed their homosexuality. This kind of “appetitional” sexual reconditioning therapy is not only simplistic but immoral since it toys with the deep affections and emotional well-being of another person. Marriage is the rug under which the Brethren encourage many men to sweep their homosexuality.”

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“Recommending to the homosexual that he abstain from the sexual expression of who he is has far-reaching consequences. It cuts him off from the only real possibility open to him to experience love. The more frightening fact is that it unquestionably condemns him to a life of loneliness which cannot and is not ministered to by any facet of the Church or society. No amount of temple going, priesthood meetings, home teaching, or special interest activity will ease the loneliness. This can only be realized through a mature loving intimacy.”

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“One of the more singularly striking facts is that in the entire Book of Mormon and the other modern scriptures there is not one single reference to homosexuality. These scriptures contain the “fullness of the Gospel” and all the essential commandments for the Saints, and yet the subject of homosexuality is conspicuously absent. To my knowledge, Joseph Smith never mentioned the subject. From The Teachings of Joseph Smith: “When we lie down, we contemplate how we may rise in the morning; and it is pleasing for friends to lie down together, locked in the arms of love, to sleep and awake in each other’s embrace and renew their conversation.”(p. 295)”

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“Statistical studies show that an extremely low percentage of homosexuals engage in child molesting. Far and away the greatest occurrence of child molesting is by heterosexuals on young girls, not by homosexuals on young boys. Like heterosexuals, homosexuals typically prefer a partner close to their own age and in a relationship that is mutually expressive of the affection for and interest in the other person. One of the main reasons for outlawing homosexuality in the past has been this child molesting concern as reflected in the emotional campaign now under way to “Save Our Children” (from homosexuality). By the same logic, should not heterosexuality be outlawed since heterosexual child molesting occurs much more frequently?”

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“Excommunication, of course, cuts off and punishes individuals who violate the code of sexual conduct of the Church, but it has never cured one single case of homosexuality. The Church knows only that the member must comply with the program or be judged and punished.”

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“Excommunication is actually an easy way out for the Church...For the Church, it makes it easier to deny the stark reality of the member’s experience. The Church no longer has to be troubled with a life that will not conform to the program and perplexing emotions that are counter to what is “supposed to be”. In a very crucial way, excommunication is an official denial of existence...I have watched the Church take action against a number of homosexuals, and nothing but damage and destruction has come of the action. You would know as a psychologist, that if you persist loud enough in telling a person that he is bad, it will begin to have serious negative effects on him, especially if he comes to believe you.The Church does feel justified in its position about the immorality of homosexuality. But it also has an obligation to help, not destroy its members, even those who violate its standards.”

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“Should bishops and branch presidents be asking questions in those interviews if they are unprepared to responsibly deal with the answers? Should we be prying into the private lives of our youths to the extent of their learning of homosexuality and masturbation in their interviews with the bishop?”

#lgbt history month #lgbtq+ mormons #LGBTQ+ LDS #this tea is HOT #queerstake

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drunkexmormonsexplain-blog · 6 years ago

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So my dad posted an infuriating article on facebook...

Here's the link: https://www.thechurchnews.com/leaders-and-ministry/2019-01-22/what-to-do-with-your-questions-according-to-1-general-authority-whos-an-expert-on-anti-church-materials-48843

After reading this absolute garbage, I was so infuriated that in the height of pettiness I decided to write a 3 page rebuttal essay. Then I realized that as much as I want to stir shit with the Mormons, I don't actually want my dad to disown me. So I'm gonna post it here instead of on my dad's facebook. It's extremely rough and overwritten, but since I have no plans to revise it I'm just gonna let it into the wild. There are a few paragraphs where the wording is too poor to convince real diehards, but it should be convincing enough for my fellow exmos at least! LONG POST AHEAD

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Valerie Johnson’s piece, “What to do with your questions”, covers LDS leader Elder Corbridge’s visit to a BYU campus and outlines his response to concerns many members of the church have about unsavory parts of its history and current practices. It’s an effective piece of LDS propaganda: a piece of media that obscures or inflates the truth in order to advance the beliefs of an organization. As we’ll see below, not only does the piece fail to address the valid concerns of many latter-day saints, but it also uses familiar techniques to undermine the importance of those concerns in the first place. The following outlines both the inaccuracies in Corbridge’s arguments and the subtle ways in which the article discourages LDS readers from thinking critically about the issues at hand.

Let’s start with the first question in the article. “The kingdom of God is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as described in the book of Daniel as standing forever. The question is, will you and I stand?” Corbridge/Johnson asks. While claims about the longevity of “God’s kingdom” are unprovable, it’s evident to any non-church-funded source that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, at least, is dwindling. Church sources commonly claim that membership numbers are increasing, because they count all individuals who have been baptized but not ex-communicated. On the other hand, counting only active, financially-contributing members reveals that membership is declining sharply. Teens and adults who were raised in the church are leaving at a higher rate than ever. A large portion of the membership inflation reported by the church consists of individuals converted by missionaries as adults, who are counted as members until death although they often stop attending within a year.

From there, Johnson moves on to claim that attacks on the church are broad, including church doctrine that conflicts with “shifting attitudes of today”. This is a common phrase in LDS writing, used to encourage but not specifically state the idea that church doctrine, unlike the rest of the world’s social values, is permanent and unchanging. This is untrue, as many church teachings have changed with time, often shifting to become more in line with North American social norms. A famous and relatively recent example, alluded to in Johnson’s article, is the fact that black men were not allowed to receive the priesthood until 1978. Though there have been many apologetic explanations for this overdue change in doctrine, it’s hard to ignore the fact that its introduction coincided with a government warning that the church would only be able to keep its tax-free status if it got rid of its racist policies. With this and other examples, it’s clear that the church does have a historical precedent to alter teachings in order to keep up with society’s “shifting attitudes.” However, the way it’s phrased in the article contributes to the subconscious idea among many church members that society is at fault for becoming more progressive, not the church for its inability to keep up.

Changing church policy, a history of immoral doctrine, and dwindling membership statistics are only a few of the concerns plaguing modern Mormons. Corbridge and Johnson attempt to address this huge umbrella of issues with a simple response: “Answer the primary questions.” According to Corbridge, these fundamental questions about the church include: “Is there a God who is our Father? Is Jesus Christ the Son of God and the Savior of the World? Is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints the kingdom of God on the earth? Was Joseph Smith a prophet?”

The first three questions refer to the existence God, which is unprovable, and the role of Jesus Christ, a distant historical figure whose true actions in life are hard to discern. In contrast, the last question refers to Joseph Smith, a man who lived in America in the 1800s, whose life is well documented and researched. Was he, as Corbridge asks, a prophet? Researching his life, the answer is clear: hopefully not.

There’s a well of damning evidence on Joseph Smith available with some quick research. He scammed people with his treasure-hunting business, was often jailed for his crimes, and even killed others during his escape attempts. Although the church tried to cover it up for years, he is most well known for his polygamy: by the time he died in 1844, he was married to at least 27 women. The youngest of these, Helen Mar Kimball, was 14 years old. Joseph Smith was 37, which makes him a pedophile on all counts – even in 1843, when they were married, the average marriage age for women was between 20 and 22. If such a man was chosen as a prophet of God, we should question what type of God would choose him, and what type of church would follow his teachings. The church itself has not addressed these concerns, sweeping them under the rug as “lies and deception”, despite multiple sources proving their accuracy. Predictably, Johnson and Corbridge do not mention anything else about Joseph Smith in the article.

Corbridge then moves on to what he calls the “secondary questions,” which Johnson broadly generalizes as “questions about Church history, polygamy, black people and women and the priesthood, how the Book of Mormon was translated, DNA and the Book of Mormon, gay marriage, different accounts of the First Vision and so on,” not going into specifics on any of these topics. Corbridge follows this up with the most bizarre claim in the entire article: “If you answer the primary questions, the secondary questions get answered too or they pale in significance and you can deal with things you understand and things you don’t understand, things you agree with and things you don’t agree with without jumping ship.”

There’s a lot to get into with this statement. Firstly, the article attempts to trivialize many valid concerns about the church. For example, “Gay marriage” is used as a buzzword to cover an array of questions about the church and the LGBT+ community such as why same-sex couples aren’t allowed to be married in the church, if it’s possible for LGB members to be happy even though they’re forced to be celibate, if trans and gender non-conforming individuals are allowed to present their true identity and be fully accepted into the congregation, why children of LGB parents aren’t allowed to be baptized into the church without cutting contact with their family, and so on. These topics are trivialized by presenting them so broadly and following them up with the statement that they “pale in importance” to the primary questions. This is not the case for the LGBT+ individuals in question, or other individuals whose happiness is directly affected by any of the issues mentioned.

Secondly, the idea that some of these secondary questions are also answered by the primary questions is a bold and frankly false statement. Knowing the “correct” answers to the primary questions does nothing to answer the far more nuanced subjects of the secondary questions. A devout Mormon who firmly believes in God and knows that Joseph Smith is a prophet can still easily have questions about why God wouldn’t allow women to hold the priesthood, or how the Book of Mormon can be a historically accurate account of pre-colonial America when DNA evidence proves otherwise. It’s clear that most of these questions fall into Corbridge’s “pale in importance” category, which minimizes the real struggles that even faithful members can experience in the church.

The last part of this statement is the most telling to Corbridge’s, and more broadly the church’s response to criticism and questioning members. He says that it’s important members deal with these controversial subjects, with “things you understand and things you don’t understand, things you agree with and things you don’t agree with, without jumping ship.” According to Corbridge, Mormons should stay active in the church if they believe in the “primary questions”, even if they have doubts about the “secondary questions.” Historically, many religious groups have been formed by those who share the same primary beliefs as another sect – belief in God and Jesus Christ, for example – but differ on how the church should be run or the details about God’s doctrine. There is even history within the Mormon faith of separate factions who have split off from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints based on their different answers to the “secondary questions”, even though they share belief in God, Jesus Christ, and Joseph Smith with the mainstream branch of LDS faith. It doesn’t make sense for LDS members who disagree with or don’t understand controversial church doctrine to remain members, even if they believe in God, Jesus Christ, or Joseph Smith, as they can seek out other denominations that are more in line with their personal beliefs. Remaining in the church is not beneficial to their spiritual well-being or happiness. Non-believing or disillusioned members can create disharmony within the church, so it isn’t good for the health and harmony of a congregation for leaders like Corbridge to encourage those members to stay. What it is good for, though, is the church’s finances, since LDS members who want to access all the benefits of Mormonism must pay 10% of their income to the church. Therefore, it’s unsurprising that the purpose of this article is to suggest doubting members ignore their concerns and stay active, tithe-paying members.

Johnson’s section on the methods of learning is familiar to anyone experienced with religious anti-science rhetoric. Though it references the scientific method and “analytical learning” (research), those mentions are meaningless as Corbridge states “the divine method of learning ultimately trumps everything else by tapping into the powers of heaven.” This is echoed often in fundamentalist religious writing, and means that whenever scientific evidence, academic research, or social values clash with religious beliefs, believers are to ignore the facts and trust “God”, or the teachings of their church. It’s a way to shut down logical arguments from doubters or non-believers without having to think critically about church doctrine and has been discussed at length in other writing.

A somewhat amusing and unique addition to this article is the concept of “academic learning” as separate from scientific or analytical. The idea that simply reading a text can provide the reader with truth without the “analytical” step of fact-checking and resource gathering is false. After all, anyone can write a piece (such as Johnson’s) and fill it with lies. Without multiple opinions and validations, a text on its own has no truth value.

The final two sections of “What to do with your questions” move away from laughable pseudo-academic claims and give us insight into the far more insidious psychological methods the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other religious groups use to keep their members in order. The first section is entitled “The Presence or Absence of the Holy Ghost.” Generally, most LDS members and leaders assume the “presence of the Holy Ghost” to mean a happy, warm, and comfortable feeling. This type of feeling commonly occurs in familiar, safe settings such as churches and homes. Corbridge goes on to state that “the gloom I experienced as I listened to the dark choir of voices raised against the Prophet Joseph Smith and the Restoration of the Church of Jesus Christ… is the absence of the Spirit of God.” In other words, if members who read about controversial church history and practices feel bad or uncomfortable while doing so, it must mean these claims are false.

The truth is that anyone who learns about information that radically disrupts their current worldview will be uncomfortable. In the case of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, leaders have so effectively hidden parts of its history from its members and lied about doing so that the discovery of things like Joseph Smith’s history of polygamy and multiple accounts of the First Vision can be shocking and upsetting. Issues dealing with the happiness of LGBT+, women, and black members of the church make many members feel guilty and sad, as they feel empathy for those who have been wronged by the church’s present or past teachings. By equating the natural and understandable feelings of sadness, guilt, and discomfort with the absence of the spirit and therefore falsehood, Corbridge convinces questioning members that they should bury those feelings and ignore their questions. This is not an acceptable way to address controversial church topics, nor is it healthy to encourage members to suppress their emotions.

The final section of the article, “Elimination”, is the final nail in the coffin telling LDS members to keep their doubts private and unanswered. Corbridge reiterates that he and God can’t answer all the member’s doubts – obvious, since he and Johnson have done nothing to address any concerns in this article – and that those who truly answer the “primary questions” will not even need answers to their further questions. This effectively combines the church’s policy of repression and communal guilt: if you are bothered by unsavory aspects of the church’s doctrine, you probably don’t believe in God or Joseph Smith. LDS doctrine already encourages a heavy amount of personal guilt for members who don’t feel they are perfectly living up to the church’s expectations, but if they voice their concerns, they now face the shame of their peers. Nobody in a faith setting wants to be known as the unfaithful member, and Corbridge’s statement is clear: if you want to be respected by your religious peers, keep those questions in.

-North

#mod north #exmormon #exmo #antimormon

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a-wondrous-thing · 7 years ago

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Ayyye so what IS the relationship between Cristians and Mormons? I thought they were completely different religions? (I’m not religious at all so I’m clueless on the topic)

hey-o friend-o, thanks for asking (i’m really glad people actually care about this stuff)!

So, first thing, while “Mormons” is a commonly used term for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the full name of the church is preferred by members/the church, and I’ll go ahead and use the acronym LDS for the rest of this.

(disclaimer: not a professional on the topic. i’m not even a religious studies major)

sO here’s the hot non-tea or coffee beverage

as a general rule (get to that in a sec), Christians are people who believe in Christ and His teachings. Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant churches are considered Christian, as well as many other subsets, offshoots, and such. If they believe in Christ, they’re generally considered Christian. There are many types of religion in the world - Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Sikhism, Judaism and Jainism (plus some others), as well as Christianity. Christianity is separate from Judaism and Islam (which are separate from each other as well), despite sharing certain ties to Biblical events.

Following this, the LDS church (which has...the name...Church of Jesus Christ right in the title...) is Christian.

But there’s this thing called gatekeeping that’s a bit of a ... fun topic.

Basically, certain churches make their own definition of what a Christian church consists of and say “Hey, you’re not Christian because we said X.”

Meanwhile....LDS members are here like...we believe in the Bible. And Christ. And His teachings... and yet other Christian churches gatekeep and say “nope. you don’t fit this specific criteria that we say you have to fit to be Christian”

And we (members) just kinda go...sure Jan. And keep living our Christian lives.

(I really don’t mean this to be contentious in any way, i’m just simplifying it down to what i see as the basic argument, and remember, not an expert)

There are lots of reasons other churches say the LDS church and its teachings aren’t Christian, here’s some:

we don’t accept the changes of post New Testament Christianity

we aren’t connected to a Roman Catholic/Eastern Orthodox/Protestant base

we have an expanded canon and believe in continuous revelation

First, we follow the teachings of like...the actual original Church that Christ established when He was serving his mortal ministry. But other churches follow the stuff that came about after He left His church in the hands of His apostles and people started to change the truths (doctrine) He and His apostles taught. So... yeah, that’s another whole topic, but basically the Greeks took Christianity and said this is how it is and that’s how you get most of modern Christianity.

The LDS church was established in 1830, and is independent of any other churches, (though there are a lot of similarities in belief, o course), and we believe that the Priesthood authority, (which was previously taken from the earth) was restored to Joseph Smith, a modern day prophet. We’re not an offshoot of any other church’s line of Priesthood Authority.

And with that last one... yeah! We believe that there is a prophet on the earth today (President Russel M. Nelson), and that he receives revelation from God for the church. We also believe that everyone can receive personal revelation from God. We have canon outside of the Bible - The Book of Mormon being one, as well as the Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price.

(If anyone wants to hear about the Book of Mormon or any other books, lemmie know cuz that’s also a really good topic and dear to my heart)

So, I guess form your own opinions, but I, as well as the church, affirm that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a Christian church, built on the teachings, ministry, life of, and belief in Jesus Christ.

I love the gospel, and love my Savior, Jesus Christ. I believe in the Book of Mormon, as well as the Bible (as far as it is translated correctly), and I can testify of its truthfulness.

Thank you for asking this question, if anyone has others about my beliefs/ the church’s beliefs, feel free to ask! I also love learning about religion of all kinds, feel free to share as well, if you feel so inclined!

Also, I researched this topic, so here’s the link to a less condensed, more accurately stated article from the actual church

Are Mormons Christian?

I’d also recommend visiting Mormon.org for other information on the church!

<3 you anon, have a wonderful day :D

#answered #anon #lds #lds church #book of mormon #golllllly don't let me go on rants #but seriously i'm so passionate about stuff #i love talking about this stuff #and learning about it #religion #mormon #i'm probably inaccurate with somethin on this feel free to correct me #Anonymous

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gaymarriedandmormon · 7 years ago

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When you grow up in Utah, the name Bennion in ubiquitous. You probably have met a Bennion somewhere in school or at work or at church. The name Bennion to me brings to mind the Bennion Center at the Union building on the University of Utah campus. But while the name became familiar, I never knew the significance of the namesake.

As I have had the chance to read more literature in LDS literature, history, and doctrine, the name Lowell Bennion kept coming up, and it seems he was probably someone worth getting to know. The first encounter I remember was in Gregory Prince's David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism when he is mentioned for being slightly outside of mainstream Mormonism: And Paul H. Dunn, of the First Council of Seventy, spoke of McKay’s attitude toward those who were outside the mainstream— not in action, but in thought. After spending a decade as a teacher in the Institutes of Religion, Dunn was called by McKay to be a General Authority at the unusually young age of thirty-nine:

Here I am a young buck coming into the system, and the circulation is, “Let’s excommunicate the Sterling McMurrins of the Church, and weed out the liberals.” That got thrown around a lot. Even poor Lowell Bennion got thrown into some of that. If it hadn’t been for President McKay, we’d have had a fiasco on Lowell Bennion. There’s one of the sweetest, great Christians of the world. I would be totally surprised if all of heaven isn’t a Lowell Bennion philosophy. There isn’t a kinder, more gentle Christian in the world. And yet there were those in the system who tried to weed him out, because he kept the President McKay kind of vision open…

. The George Boyds and the Lowell Bennions kept people in the Church whom nobody else could have. Philosophically, they could go with you on the trip through your frustration in thinking, and bring you back. Not many people could do that. I worked with George for many years down at the University of Southern California. I watched him save kids that nobody else could. And yet there was that element in the Church that tried to get him bumped, because he didn’t teach what they taught. I’ve found in the Church, and this is what gave me great comfort with President McKay, that there is room for all of them, not just a few, not just those here or there, but the whole spectrum. President McKay would say, and two or three times I heard him say privately, and once or twice publicly in meetings where I sat, that “if you would have to take action on that kind of a person thinking that way, you’d better take action on me, too.” ...

#tumblrstake #book review #moral humility

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mindfulldsliving · 5 months ago

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Repentance, Mercy, and Forgiveness: Insights from Doctrine and Covenants Section 1

Doctrine and Covenants Section 1 is a direct call from the Lord to reflect, repent, and live righteously. As the preface to modern revelation, it reminds us that repentance is central to God’s work, offering mercy to those who seek forgiveness and strive to follow Him. This timeless message presses each of us to examine our lives and align ourselves with His everlasting covenant. Understanding…

#Aligning life with God&039;s will #Applying General Conference talks to daily life #Brigham Young on practical faith #Church guidance on repentance and commandments #Covenant path in Latter-day Saints #Daily scripture study tips #Daily steps to live a covenant-centered life #Doctrine and Covenants Section 1 #Faithful living in the latter days #How Latter-day Saints apply Doctrine and Covenants teachings #How to repent and seek forgiveness according to LDS teachings #Importance of repentance in Christianity #LDS General Authorities on repentance #LDS principles for modern righteous living #LDS scripture study guidance #Obedience to God&039;s commandments #Overcoming challenges with faith and covenants #Renewing sacred covenants in the LDS Church #Repentance and forgiveness in the LDS Church #Role of the Doctrine and Covenants in righteous living #Role of the Holy Ghost in covenant keeping #Spiritual growth through covenants #Teachings of Russell M. Nelson on repentance #Transformative power of Jesus Christ&039;s Atonement #Understanding Doctrine and Covenants Section 1: Key lessons

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republicstandard · 6 years ago

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IN LAMMY’S WORLD ONLY GAY AND ABORTION ACTIVISTS CAN BE WHITE SAVIORS

Once upon a time, in the days of Rule Britannia, white saviors went to Asia and Africa and saved women and children. Today, in the era of Cool Britannia, white saviors conspire to control our former colonies with the gospel of gay sex and abortion. Progressive white saviors seek to destroy, not save—to kill unborn babies and prevent procreation.

British colonial rulers in India banned female infanticide in 1870, after Jonathan Duncan, resident in Benares, drew attention to the bizarre Hindu custom. Instead of converting Hindus to Christianity, in 1791 Duncan founded the Sanskrit College for the study of Hindu Law and Philosophy.

After British colonial administrators prohibited child sacrifice at the Ganga Sagar festival, 19 Christian missionaries petitioned Lord Bentinck, Governor-General of India, to ban suttee—the custom forcing Hindu widows to immolate themselves on their husband’s funeral pyre.

When lecturing at Liverpool Hope University, I would ask my students what they thought of such acts performed by the British in India. Chillingly, the snowflakes were silent. Even the feminists in my class would squirm when I asked them about the rights of Hindu widows. The idea of “white savior” Lord Bentinck banning this indigenous practice through the Bengal Sati Regulation Act (1829) was colonial, racist and white supremacist.

When Prof Allan Bloom’s posed the same question to his students at Harvard, he got a similar response. “They either remain silent or reply that the British should never have been there in the first place,” he writes in The Closing of the American Mind.

I’m sure this is how the Rt Hon David Lammy, Labour MP for Tottenham, would respond. Lammy has had enough of “white saviors.” I mean, just look at all the harm they’ve done! As a Hindu Brahmin, my mother wouldn’t be alive today if Bentinck hadn’t banned suttee. I’d have to mutter a few Sanskrit shlokas and give her the heave-ho onto my dad’s barbecue.

But white people have no business monkeying around for Comic Relief in Uganda, Lammy would say to Stacey Dooley. This white Barbie doll should check her white privilege and upload pictures on Instagram of her holding only obese white children with snot running down their noses. It’s racist for her to get the optics wrong. In Lammy’s tribal world, you’re defined by the color of your skin, not by the content of your character.

“The world does not need any more white saviors. As I’ve said before, this just perpetuates tired and unhelpful stereotypes,” Lammy lamely tweeted. “It’s a kind of missionary idea, and it’s deeply problematic because what it does is it keeps the continent of Africa poor, it keeps people in their place,” explains the race hustler.

Lammy is the Al Sharpton of British politics. Twinned with Dianne Abbott, their race-baiting keeps them in the spotlight. In 2013, while debating gay marriage in Parliament, Lammy compared Christian MPs opposed to same-sex marriage to parliamentarians who defended the slave trade 200 years ago.

Lammy suffers from “racial paranoia,” which author Dinesh D’Souza defines as a “reflexive tendency to blame racism for every failure.” He pursues “the white whale of racism with Ahab-like determination.” As if he’s reading a Rorschach inkblot test, Lammy imagines colonialism and racism in the rather cute picture of eminent documentary filmmaker Stacey Dooley holding a Ugandan child.

As someone with a privileged education—The King’s School, School of Oriental and African Studies and Harvard Law School—Lammy needs to ask a few more questions about “white saviors” over the centuries. Why did the Judeo-Christian West produce these saviors? The answer lies in theology and technology.

Ancient civilizations were fiercely tribal: a person of one race would not cross ethnic boundaries to help someone of another race. The theology of the Hebrew Bible shattered this tribalism. Israel would be “a light to the nations.” From Israel came Jesus, who claimed to be the Messiah—not to a tribe, but to the world.

Israel produced a brown-skinned Saviour. Hey! Lammy, did you know Jesus was not white? Jesus was “most likely dark brown and sun-tanned,” says Princeton biblical scholar James Charlesworth. This Saviour began an obscure movement on the margins of the Roman Empire that dislodged classical paganism and became the dominant faith of the West.

Breaking with Marxist assumptions (lower classes are more religious than the rich), sociologist Rodney Stark argues that people with a degree of privilege and sophistication were attracted to the Jesus movement. In Roman society, mercy and pity were considered pathological emotions. But Jesus’ followers behaved mercifully because they had received mercy from God. Tribalism was smashed as privileged people crossed forbidden boundaries of class, color, race, and nation to share the gospel of their brown Saviour and to help those in the most life-threatening exigencies—especially during epidemics and plagues.

Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan climaxes in the question: “Who is my neighbor?” My neighbor is someone who is not like me and is not part of my tribe! However skeptically one views the charitable work done by Stacey Dooley and Comic Relief or other charities providing relief to the Third World, they’re doing it because the idea of serving someone who is not like me, is part of our Western DNA. “Charity” derived from the Latin Caritas is a Christian innovation.

Christianity gave birth to science and technology. Without a theology committed to reason, the world today would be where non-European societies were in 1800 with many astrologers and alchemists, but no scientists, Stark comments. “Modernity arose only in Christian societies. Not in Asia. Not in Islam. Not in a ‘secular’ society—there having been none. And all the modernization that has since occurred outside Christendom was imported from the West, often brought by colonizers and missionaries,” he adds.

Our theology motivated “white saviors” to go to Asia and Africa; our technology gave us prosperity. Because we were technologically more advanced, we had something to offer to those who were technologically less advanced.

Postmodern progressives like Lammy are profoundly ashamed of our missionary heritage. They conflate Christian mission with racism, imperialism, colonialism and white supremacy. What they are proud of is the new mission civilisatrice where “white saviors” now seek to enlighten Asia and Africa (and immigrants of color to Britain) with the gospel of pansexual liberation.

Lammy should look at the picture in Monday’s Guardian—Andrew Moffat, head of Parkfield Community School in Birmingham is reading a book to five brown/black children. “White savior” Moffat is indoctrinating colored Muslim children with LGBT+ propaganda. Their families are outraged. Such sexual grooming goes against their culture and religion, but progressives don’t regard this as cultural or ideological imperialism!

In a previous column, I pointed out how Anglican LGBT activist Jayne Ozanne has set up her own foundation with ten white saviors to civilize sexual savages. “The new foundation has been set up to help educate and advocate on LGBTI and gender rights around the world, particularly within religious organizations that are opposed to non-heterosexual relationships,” said Ozanne’s website.

The government’s Wilton Park report urges engagement with the Global South to challenge the “heteropatriarchy of Christianity brought by western missionaries” and teach queer theology, feminist theology and a theology of inclusion in seminaries to promote homosexuality, transgenderism, and intersexuality.

In 2017, our so-called Conservative government announced it would spend over £1.1billion on overseas abortions. According to a 2015 Pew Report, 92 percent Ghanaians, 88 percent Ugandans and 82 percent Kenyans say they find abortion unacceptable. In Asia, the figures are as high as 93 percent for the Philippines, 89 percent for Indonesia and 85 percent for Pakistan.

“I don’t think that any Western country has a right to pay for abortions in an African country, especially when the majority of people don’t want abortion… that then becomes a form of ideological colonization,” Obianuju Ekeocha, founder of Culture of Life Africa told the BBC World Service (who were banging the global abortion drum).

The next time Lammy rails against “white saviors” and “poverty porn,” I’m sending him a copy of Keith Richburg’s Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa. Richburg, a black man, is correspondent for the leftwing Washington Post. He is “a descendant of slaves brought from Africa” and especially sensitive to the cynical and manipulative use of the race card by politicians like David Lammy.

“I’m tired of all the ignorance and hypocrisy and the double standards I hear and read about Africa, much of it from people who’ve never been there, let alone spent three years walking around amid corpses,” he writes. It’s not colonialism, or racism, or the white man; the real root of Africa’s problems, he stresses, lies in the boundless corruption of its leaders.

“Thank God that I am an American,” and “thank God my ancestor survived the voyage” which brought him to the United States as a slave, concludes Richburg.

from Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine https://ift.tt/2NKZHI3 via IFTTT

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cherrycurry-blog · 7 years ago

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Philosophy Of Schooling, Learning And Teaching

Perennialism means that one should teach the things that one deems being of everlasting importance to any or all people everywhere. Nothing beats the profound satisfaction of seeing your personal freshly-cut lawn following a hard day's lawn mowing -- you sipping your cold drink, taking within essentialism book the glorious scent of cut grass. Nothing beats the profound satisfaction of seeing your own freshly-cut lawn after having a hard day's lawn mowing -- you sipping your cold drink, taking within the glorious scent of cut grass. Teachers might provide a magazine towards the students or request the students to select books of their choice and make use of these to write book reports. Sometimes maybe a long time zoom in, zoom out on still images and. With the continuing development of technology, folks have started creating and renting the photo booths. foodpoisonjournal. I hope I sets a good example for my students with my positive attitude. Although they had good intentions generating valiant efforts, without the bestowal of the appropriate authority, these folks were not able to restore Christ's Church. Although the term "Mormon" is not offensive to members of the Church, they are asked to refer for the Church by its proper name, too as refer to themselves as Latter-day Saints, or LDS. Once youve fine-tuned a bit, youre likely to know just everything you need for carefree RV camping. In regards to price, it is dictated from the quantity of hours for that rental, type of pictures, and several other essentials which one wants. Anyone that understands true marketing knows that branding is EVERYTHING. With the increasing startups rate, they all are targeting single platforms that can provide flexible solutions to stay ahead within the business.

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I think that children learn differently and it is the teacher's responsibility to support to these needs. By encouraging creativity within the classroom, a teacher is making certain the student gets the ability to evaluate a problem and think for herself, and is also not swayed by orthodox and conventional rules. He claims that traditional views reflect a conflicting perspective from the other perspectives. Other teachers were distracted rather than mentally there in the classroom using the students. It does focus slightly on the issues teenagers face when growing up and coming to terms with themselves which makes areas of the tale simple to relate to. Iron John revolves around a wild man along with a prince. The hat has to be squashable - easy to pack into tight spaces inside your luggage. The introduction should effectively introduce the book being referred to. Lastly, tourists may visit the 47-storey Beetham Tower which is recognized because the tallest building belonging to the capital of scotland- Manchester in England. Bly's book advocated a return of the stronger, more masculine man (in the traditional sense), but person who also respected modern-day feminist values. This is the place Iron John gained true recognition.

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free-mormons-blog · 8 years ago

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Historicity of the Bible -- Old Testament and Related Studies -- HUGH NIBLEY 1986

Historicity of the Bible

The problem of the historicity of the Bible is exactly the same today as it has been since the days of the first apologists. One reads the Bible and decides for himself what is history in it and what is allegory, and what is myth, and what is legend, and what is interpolation.

There are two main schools of thought on the subject. There are the fundamentalists, who believe that everything put forth in the Bible as history actually happened as they find it stated; and there are the liberals, who about the year 1925 (according to the study of Eduard König)1 reached the general consensus that the historical value of the Bible is nil. The LDS people have always stood between these two extremes.

Thirty years ago there was such a solid consensus of learned opinion about the real nature of the Bible and the ancient Hebrew and Christian religions in both camps, both fundamentalist and liberal, that a student needed only to consult any handbook to put him in harmony with the “scholars” on all major issues. That is no longer the case: today all is doubt and confusion.

The principal cause of this confusion has been what one scholar calls “the breakthrough of the eschatological interpretation,” which he compares to a strategic military break-through that throws a whole army into panic and disorder.

Before we describe the breakthrough, it is important to know what eschatology is. The eschatological viewpoint is that which sees and judges everything in terms of a great eternal plan. Whether we like it or not, we belong to the eternities; we cannot escape the universe. All our thoughts and deeds must be viewed against an infinite background and against no other. Eschatos means “ultimate” and refers to that which lies beyond all local and limited goals and interests. Limited objectives are commendable in their way, but only as contributing to something eternal. Extreme as this doctrine may seem, the only alternative, as the philosophers of old repeatedly observed, is a trip to nowhere, a few seconds of pleasure in an hour of pain, and after that only “the depth of emptiness.” But the eschatological view of life is more than a philosophy; it is a specific religious tradition, teaching that there actually was a great plan agreed upon at the foundation of the world, and that all that has transpired on earth since the beginning or shall take place hereafter is to be understood as showing forth the operation or attempted frustration of that plan. (An interesting corollary to that is that all things are party to this plan, so that when man sins he puts himself at cross-purposes with all nature, which becomes his enemy and crosses and checks him with all kinds of diseases and allergies. These are simply forms of frustration that the rabbis believe resulted from the fact that we are trying to go one way while the universe insists on going another way. We do not belong anymore.) Everything is in terms of this plan.

This “eschatological breakthrough” was the realization, climaxing a generation of cumulative study and discovery, that the eschatological view of man’s life on earth, though highly distasteful to the doctors and teachers of conventional Christianity and Judaism, was nonetheless the very heart of the original Christian faith and was firmly held by important groups of Jews in ancient times. Accordingly, “since the breakthrough of the eschatological interpretations of the concept of the Kingdom of God in the preaching of Jesus, the question of the content and meaning of Jesus’ message has never been satisfactorily settled.” Conventional and long-established views of the nature of the Christian religion, whether liberal or fundamentalist, are so completely out of line with the new discoveries that there is now afoot an extremely widespread movement to put the whole Christian faith on a new “existentialist” footing that will ignore history altogether. An eminent Christian scholar, S. G. F. Brandon, commenting on this movement, observes, “It is eloquent witness to the increasing embarrassment felt by Christian thinkers about the assumed historicity of their faith. Such a suggestion of embarrassment in this connection may possibly cause surprise and provoke an instant denial that such a situation exists in any significant academic circle. However, the historical character of Christianity, which was once proclaimed apologetically as the greatest argument for the validity of that faith, has gradually been found to be a source of great perplexity if not of weakness.”2 Until now, according to this authority, Christian scholars have willingly accepted “the claim that, if Christianity derives its authority from certain events which took place at a specific place and time, then that claim must be investigated by the most austere standards of historical judgment. For many decades under the aegis of the liberal tradition of scholarship, this task was undertaken with fervent conviction, and great was the knowledge amassed by such methods of research about Primitive Christianity. But in time this process of investigation into Christian origins has gradually revealed itself to be a journey ever deeper into a morass of conjecture about the imponderables which lie behind or beyond the extant literary documents.” 3

Note there that what is found wanting is not the Bible, but man’s interpretations of it, the root of the trouble being that they simply do not have enough evidence to go one way or the other.

If this is true today, it was even truer thirty, forty, or fifty years ago—but the scholars did not know. On both sides they felt convinced that they had the final answer. (The Swede, Olaf Linton, wrote a very good dissertation on that.)4 They could both speak with perfect confidence because of what I call the gas law of learning, namely, that any amount of information no matter how small will fill any intellectual void no matter how large. A simple and natural misunderstanding lies at the root of almost any biblical study you can find from around 1900: that was the belief that since the New Testament is, after all, the whole of our evidence on such things as the life of Christ and the Apostolic Church, it must necessarily tell the whole story. This theory that we know all there is to know is a very flattering one, but during the last twenty years it has been subject to a series of fatal blows.

In the business of scholarship, evidence is far more flexible than opinion. The prevailing view of the past is controlled not by evidence but by opinion. The scholars, like the fundamentalists, have believed what they wanted to believe. The liberals have in the past been more willing than their rivals to change their opinions in the face of overwhelming evidence. But now things have come to an impasse with them; they are in open revolt against history. The findings of the last two decades have been of supreme significance, but they have not confirmed the preconceptions of the liberals, who now propose simply to ignore them. The existentialism of Bultmann, Barth, and the Roman Catholic Marcel as a champion of Thomistic theology, is, says Brandon, “a truly vehement repudiation” of history.5 They say we must reject all historical study of Christianity as “negating its present relevance by demonstrating its relevance to the environment in which it took its origin.”6 What is relevant to life and conditions of one age cannot possibly be relevant to another (the Book of Mormon clearly and fully disproves this thesis, which is based on Spengler’s Unwiederkehrlichkeit); if a thing happens once it can never happen again. Here we have as the very essence of the apocalyptic pattern of history the doctrine that things happen in cycles and recur. Both Harnack and Schweitzer laid great emphasis on the claim that virtually nothing is or can be known about a historical Jesus. This freed them to work out a kind of a Jesus that pleased them. “We are thankful,” wrote Schweitzer, “that we have handed down to us only gospels, not biographies of Jesus.”7 When new discoveries come out, they receive, to say the least, a very cold reception. If the real Jesus walked in on them, they would invite him to leave. They have the Jesus they want, and they do not want more. The scholars made their own Jesus: Kierkegaard and Dilthey decided that if we must take history we can at least make it into a thing expressive of our own experience; this led to the existentialism of today, in which the individual rejects as myth anything he does not feel inclined to accept. It is the negation of the open mind. Bultmann writes: “It is impossible to make use of electric light and radio, and, in case of illness, to claim the help of modern medical and clinical methods and at the same time believe in the New Testament’s spirits and miracles.”8 On the other hand, I have heard General Authorities cite the electric light and radio as proof of the possibility of miracles. Bultmann’s statement is simply untrue, but it is very significant as demonstrating how scholars control evidence instead of being controlled by it. The case of the radio can be taken as equally convincing evidence for or against miracles, depending on how one wants to take it. Bultmann sees in it only evidence against miracles—it apparently never occurs to him that it might provide an argument for the other side. He believes what he wants to, and frankly admits it when he tells us, if history does not suit our theory of religion, to throw out the history.

In all this, it is not the weakness of the scriptures but the willfulness of men that is exposed. It has taken a hundred years of guessing and counterguessing to convince the learned that they were not solving the problem of “the content and the meaning of Jesus’ message”; the discovery, instead of teaching them humility, has turned them bitterly against the scriptures, whose historical claims Bultmann and his school now attack with “truly vehement repudiation.” The eminent Jewish scholar Torczyner tells us how the old established ideas about the uniform nature of the Bible have had to be given up: “This uniform picture of Biblical criticism has finally been forced to shatter, after the first faint suspicions of certain individuals had gradually grown up to the stature of the communis opinio. Scientific investigation has disclosed the richness and variety of the Biblical literature . . . revealing as it does both life and individuality, contradiction and differentness.”9 Torczyner’s own reaction to this recognition of a fact familiar to all Latter-day Saints since the founding of the Church has been to turn him violently against the Bible as history, declaring it to be a “total misconception—or even falsification—of the real state of things.”

“It is a heavy loss,” writes another Hebrew scholar, “that the old historical works no longer survive intact and independent, but only as worked-over materials inserted into the structure of a late compilation and buried under the rubble of many re-editings. The only hope lies in textual analysis, but in the end even that can give us no more than a lot of fragments, whose connection with each other is largely damaged or totally destroyed.” Over one hundred years ago, the Prophet Joseph Smith shocked the world by announcing that the very first verse of the Bible has been altered and corrupted by “some old Jew without any authority.” If he offended the fundamentalists as much as the liberals, the new discoveries have been equally damaging to both.

Out of this hopeless inadequacy of man’s knowledge has grown what now goes by the name of “the Modern Predicament,” which is “that man seems to be faced with an unbridgeable gulf between . . . knowledge and faith. . . . Religion was born in a world different from ours—a tiny, comfortable world. . . . That ancient world has been nibbled away by science and the question arises whether against a new and scientific background religion in any form will find it possible to survive.”10 It was just that “tiny, comfortable world” of conventional Christianity that was so mortally offended by the coming forth of latter-day prophecy; the mighty revelations of the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price were an unpardonable affront to the established barriers of time, place, and custom. The Christian world is now for the first time learning how wrong it was, and the experience is not a pleasant one. In all the journals, Catholic and Protestant, a cry of distress goes up: “What is left to us,” they ask, “if the things we have always been taught are not so?”

It is hard to believe that men would search for “a religion without faith,” yet that is the title of a book designed to guide modern religious thinking. The author begins with a quotation from David Strauss: “The religious area of the human soul is like the region of the Redskins in America, which is becoming inexorably smaller from year to year.” This leads to the question “What remains for the man who does not believe? What can we salvage of religion and its benign influence for the confirmed agnostic who is convinced that we can know nothing of another world?” Incidentally, since we cannot prove a negative, being convinced of one is a pure act of faith. In other words, how can we enjoy the fruits of faith without any faith at all? “Modern humanity,” says a contemporary theologian with a nod of approval, “is for the most part of the same opinion as Pliny, . . . that belief in a rebirth or life after death is simply a sop for children.” Since Pliny was an ancient dilettante and not a modern scientist, we cannot lay this state of mind to the charge of science; in their ways of disbelief the clergy have led the field. This can be seen in Marneck’s final definition of a “religion without faith,” for in the end he recommends “to the non-believing person access to religious feelings through the substitution (Auslösung) of religious feelings by like feelings of a non-religious nature.” These “non-religious” feelings which are accessible to the complete “non-believer” are found in social good-works, aesthetic experience, brotherly love, the psychological search for the deeper self, and the Ethical Gospel. But these are the very things that for many years have made up the substance of religion as taught in liberal theological seminaries everywhere: truly a “religion without faith.” “Never before,” says a leading Egyptologist, viewing our times against a sweeping background of world history, “was the human race . . . farther from the divine than it is today. It has in this respect sunk to the lowest abyss.”

It is not only in the field of religions but in all ancient studies that preconceived ideas are being uprooted on all sides. The religious take it harder than others because they are committed to a “party line”—usually so deeply committed that a major readjustment produces disillusionment and even disaffection. Yet the discoveries that have proven so upsetting should have been received not with hostility but joy, for if they have a way of shattering the forms in which the labors of scholarship have molded the past, they bring a new substance and reality to things that the learned of another age had never thought possible. The same discoveries that to their dismay are rebuking the favorite theories of the doctors are at the same time vindicating that Bible world that they had consigned to the realm of myth. Years ago the celebrated Niebuhr observed that ancient history is always treated “as if it had never really happened”—it is a thesis, a demonstration, an intellectual exercise, but not a real account of real people. “Ingrained in our subconscious,” says a recent study of ancient Egypt, “is a disbelief in the actual existence of those times and persons, which haunts us through the schools and in the theaters and libraries and impregnates the whole concept of ‘Antiquity.'” In a word, artificiality is to this day the very substance of ancient history.

From this mood of precious academic make-believe, the learned are now rudely aroused to face another world entirely. We live in a time of the reexamination and reevaluation of all ancient documents now extant. They are being completely gone over from beginning to end. They are not as we thought they were at all. This may seem a late date to ask, for example, “What is the Book of Mormon?” It should seem far stranger to ask, “What is the Iliad?” “What is the Apocrypha?” “What is the Book of the Dead?” or “What is the Bible?” Yet those questions are being more seriously considered today than at any other time. Up until the present, scholars have thought they had a pretty good idea of what the historical, literary, philosophical, or religious writings of the past were all about. Not so today! The whole question of ancient records is now undergoing a thorough reinvestigation.

How this state of things has come about may best be illustrated by considering the case of the famous Eduard Meyer. In 1884 the first volume of his great History of the Ancient World (Geschichte des Altertums) appeared, presenting to the world “for the first time a history of the Ancient East in a scientifically satisfying form, a work which at the time produced a veritable sensation.” Before many years, however, the author was hard at work revising the whole thing, for the history of the ancient world must be constantly rewritten. By considering a few of the things that happened between Meyer’s two editions of his own work, one may gain some idea of the tempo of discovery in our times. As Walter Otto summarizes the developments:

The History of the Ancient East had taken on a totally different aspect. . . . Times and areas which formerly had been almost or completely unknown were brought to light; we have become acquainted with completely new languages and learned to use them as sources; peoples known formerly only by name now stand before us as concrete realities; the Indo-germanic element, which serious scholarship had long concluded was of no significance for the Ancient East, . . . now shows more clearly every day as an important historical element even in the more ancient periods; empires, such as the Mitanni and especially the Hittite, of whose history and structure not long ago only a few scattered details were known, have recently emerged as worthy rivals of the great traditional empires of the east, who actually recognized the Hittites as their equal.11

In the two decades since those words were written, things have gone faster than ever. To mention only a few of the developments, there is afoot today a general reevaluation of the oldest Egyptian texts and a far-reaching reinterpretation of the very essentials of Egyptian religion; the origin and background of Sumero Babylonian civilization is being reconsidered completely in the light of excavations made along the periphery of that area and of epic texts whose real significance has just begun to dawn on the experts; the unearthing of the oldest known villages gives us a new and unexpected picture of a civilization that “seems to have come into being with relative (even revolutionary) suddenness,” instead of with that evolutionary gradualness with which all such things were once supposed to have happened; the involvement of the Hebrew Patriarchs, especially Abraham, with our own Indo-European relatives has called for a wholly new picture of Old Testament times and peoples; the application of new methods of dating has cut down the conventional time scale, especially for the earlier periods (for example, as at Jericho) abruptly and drastically; the discovery of a new date for Hammurabi has called for a thoroughgoing revamping of ancient chronology; “the Hurrians have emerged from total obscurity and have come to occupy a stellar role. . . . A new planet has appeared on the historical horizon and an area that was formerly dark has been flooded with a new and strange light.” Within the last five years with the discovery of a single inscription a whole world of Greek myth and legend has been transmuted into the category of flesh-and-blood reality; within the same short period the decipherment of the Minoan Script B has with a single sweep rubbed out two hundred years of laborious speculation and acid controversy on major aspects of the Homeric problem, and shown us the Greeks writing good Greek a thousand years before anyone had credited them with literacy; at the same time the mystery of Etruscan has been solved, and the true nature of the mysterious Runic writing of our Norse ancestors explained; today nearly all scholars accept the original identity of the Hamitic, Semitic, and Indo-European languages—a thing that the less informed and more opinionated gentlemen of a few years ago laughed to scorn as a fundamentalist pipe-dream.

In all this fever and ferment of discovery and reevaluation, no documents have been more conspicuously involved than those relating to Israel’s past and that of the earliest Christian church. Since World War II the greatest discoveries ever made in these fields have come to light. In the great days of “scientific” scholarship, when the only safe and respectable position for any man of stature to take was to give a flat “no” to any suggestion that the Bible might contain real history, not the least sensational of Eduard Meyer’s many ingenious pronouncements was the startling declaration that the Old Testament was not only history but very good history—by far the most accurate, reliable, and complete history ever produced by an ancient people, with the possible exception of the Greeks, who came much, much later. Time and research have strikingly vindicated this claim.

Eduard König treats the subject in a study that deserves to be summarized here.12 He tells how all the scholars brushed aside the account in Genesis 23 of Abraham’s dealings with the Hittites as a fabrication or a mistake—until the Amarna discoveries proved that the Bible was right and they were wrong. The account of Judah’s sealring in Genesis 38:18 was treated as a clumsy anachronism until about 1913, when the use of seals in early Palestine was proven by excavation. The favorite creed that the early history of Israel rested entirely on oral tradition was blasted by discoveries proving widespread literacy in the earliest days of Israel. The universal belief that Israel had no interest in real history is disproven by the care with which memorial stones, trees, and so on were designated, and by the fullness and detail of early accounts. It was taken for granted that the early histories of Israel did not reflect the ancient times they purported to describe, but depicted actually the much later periods in which they were written; yet archaeological, ethnological, and philological findings in and around Israel show that these texts do not depict the Aramaic times but give an authentic picture of a much earlier world. Naturally it was assumed that the early historians of Israel knew nothing about the correct use of sources and evidence; yet they are careful to cite their sources (often now lost), have keen eyes for historical changes, and often include comments and sidelights from various related sources. The prevailing conviction that Israelite history was a “harmonizing and rationalizing” piece of free composition is disproven by the very scholars who make the charge when they claim they are able to detect a great variety of styles and levels of composition—in other words, that the texts have not been harmonized. The very common claim that the history of Israel was all painted over and prettied up so as to quite conceal the original, runs contrary to the many unsavory and uncomplimentary things said about Israel and her founders throughout these writings; the weaknesses of Israel’s heroes are not concealed, as such things are in other ancient histories, and the actions of the nation are certainly not “bathed in a golden light,” as the scholars claimed.

It is hard now to realize that as recently as 1908 Eduard Meyer could announce to the Berlin academy: “Twenty-five years ago there existed not a single historical document” to confirm the early history of Israel as given in the Bible. It was quite suddenly in the late 1800s that such documents began to appear, and then it was like the coming of our spring floods, with the great collections of stuff—no mere trickle—pouring out year after year in a breathtaking sequence that appears not yet to have reached its crest.

The present decade has seen epoch-making departures in the direction of new and daring comparative studies. Enough documentary material is now available to justify bold attempts at generalization that would have been out of the question less than a generation ago. As late as 1930 a leading Egyptologist, T. E. Peet, while marveling at the amazing parallels between them, could stoutly affirm that the literatures of the Egyptians, Babylonians, Hebrews, and Greeks were each the result of separate and independent evolutions, and even as he was writing the Ras Shamra, records were being unearthed to establish beyond a doubt the interdependence of these “independent” cultures. The ancient world is now all one. It was a favorite thesis of Eduard Meyer that Greece and Israel produced parallel historical literature in complete ignorance of each other. What would he say today to serious studies of such themes as “Homeric Epics in the Ancient East” or “Linguistic Relationships between the Ancient Orient and the British Isles”? These are no mere crackpot aberrations.

The greatest linguist of our day (Hrozny) could write not long ago: “Accepted today beyond all possible doubt is the close affinity of the Hamitic with the Semitic races and languages . . . and of the Indoeuropean with them!”13 and go on to explain this phenomenon in terms exactly corresponding to those of the Tower of Babel story. Yet such a thesis is far less radical than those that now emphasize the extreme suddenness of the emergence of languages, whole linguistic families appearing full-fledged and completely made within a decade! The vast range of these comparative studies, most of which, of course, are still highly conjectural, we cannot examine here. We bring them up only to show what is going on and to make it clear that the picture of man’s life and thought and action in the past is by no means the one we were taught to accept in our childhood.

It is especially important to note that the easy, lazy, flattering evolutionary bias that once solved all questions of the past from an armchair, by a simple rule of thumb, simply won’t work any longer. This can be illustrated by the effect of the Ugaritic texts of Ras Shamra, texts that showed Professor Peet to be wrong in attributing the growth of Hebrew literature to an evolutionary process, leading the great orientalist A. H. Sayce to confess that his own conception of the primitive beginnings of the record was a mistaken one: “There is no longer any difficulty,” he wrote, “in believing that there were abundant literary documents for compiling the earlier books of the Old Testament. . . . Consequently there is no longer any need of our believing as I formerly did that cuneiform tablets lie behind the text of the earlier Biblical books. . . . In the Mosaic period the Oriental world was as well stocked with books and what we would call public libraries as it was in the Greek epoch.”14 Using the same texts, Dr. Gordon has concluded that the fundamental criteria of the higher critics in their reconstruction of a hypothetical evolution of the Old Testament text are not binding: “It is against the background of Ugaritic that we must evaluate the multiplicity of God’s name. . . . Elohim and Yahwe need not imply dual authorship in a chapter of the Bible any more than Baal and Hadd do in a Ugaritic myth.”15 No less questionable than the names of God as a key to the structure of the Bible are variations in style, heretofore believed to indicate with perfect certainty changes of authorship within the various books: “The rediscovery of the lost literature of the Bible world shows us that most biblical books could be accepted in Israel as single compositions. . . . The magnificent structure of the Old Testament higher criticism is not to be brushed aside; but its individual results can no longer be accepted unless they square with the Hebrew text as we can now understand it in the light of parallel literatures from the pagan forerunners and contemporaries of the Hebrews, in Bible lands.”16

Haldar, studying priestly and prophetic institutions, reaches a similar conclusion regarding accepted principles of the higher criticism: “It follows that the evolutionary view of the Old Testament prophets cannot be accepted; instead . . . heavy stress must be laid on continuity.”17 “The greatly increased knowledge of the world surrounding Israel in the ancient Orient” shows, according to Mowinckel, “that the ‘sources’ of the Old Testament at any rate might be much more ancient than those held by the prevailing evolutionary view of literary criticism.” 18

The major shift in orientation in Bible study from the old literary to what Mowinckel calls the “traditio-historical method” has been the result of a growing necessity of seeing the Bible in a much broader setting than it has heretofore been placed in. As Gordon said, the results of Bible criticism “can no longer be accepted unless they square with the rediscovered ‘lost literatures of the Bible World.'” The Bible World is no longer the world made by the Bible, but the much wider world in which the Bible finds itself along with other books, sacred and profane. Today, we are told, “the Old Testament horizon must be expanded and its history interpreted against this larger background. Here, indeed, we must learn to hold converse with the whole universe.” “The Bible strikes root into every ancient Near Eastern culture,” writes Albright, “and it cannot be historically understood until we see its relationship to its sources in true perspective.”19 The same may be said of any other ancient text: all fields of study seem to be converging at present on the single theme of the oneness of the ancient world. The interrelationships between ancient writings are being drawn closer all the time; they are already so close, in fact, that Haering can now proclaim that all ancient literature, sacred and profane, Jew and Gentile, may be regarded and must be read as a single great book!

A century and a quarter ago, a young man shocked and angered the world by bringing out a large book that he set up beside the Bible not as a commentary or a key to the scriptures, but as original scripture—the revealed word of God to men of old—and as genuine history. The book itself declares that it is an authentic product of the Near East; it gives a full and circumstantial account of its own origin; it declares that it is but one of many, many such books that have been produced in the course of history and may be hidden in sundry places at this day; it places itself in about the middle of a long list of sacred writings, beginning with the patriarchs and continuing down to the end of human history; it cites now-lost prophetic writings of prime importance, giving the names of their authors; it traces its own cultural roots in all directions, emphasizing the immense breadth and complexity of such connections in the world; it belongs to the same class of literature as the Bible, but along with a sharper and clearer statement of biblical teachings contains a formidable mass of historical material unknown to biblical writers but well within the range of modern comparative study, since it insists on deriving its whole cultural tradition, even in details, directly from a specific time and place in the Old World.

The Book of Mormon is God’s challenge to the world. It was given to the world not as a sign to convert it but as a testimony to convict it. In every dispensation the world must be left without excuse. It is given without reservation or qualification as a true history and the word of God: “A record of a fallen people, and the fulness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles and to the Jews also.” The bold claims of this book were meant to invite comment and question. If the Book of Mormon is to be the guiding star for a world that has lost its bearing, “proving to the world that the Holy Scriptures are true” (D&C 20:11), it must stand firm and unmoved without any external support. The Bible has been systematically dismantled by men who in the end did not want to believe it. For a hundred years they have been whittling away at it with dogged determination, and now they are all out to “demythologize” and “deeschatologize” it for good. But the Book of Mormon cannot be so dismantled, even by those most determined to reject it. It is a single monolithic block, given to the world at one time and place. Unlike the Bible, it cannot lead “into a morass of imponderables” due to the obscurity of its sources, for it is not the product of centuries or generations of editing and transmission. Unlike the Bible, it cannot be partly true, for the Book of Mormon itself closes the door on such a proposition.

Throughout the Middle Ages wild reports circulated through Europe and Asia from time to time that a letter had fallen from heaven. These reports caused an immense sensation among Christians everywhere, and though they always turned out to be false, the world never ceased hoping that someday a letter or some other tangible thing from heaven would fall into the eager hands of a yearning Christendom. We may smile and ask, “Is anything as crass and tangible as a letter from heaven to be taken seriously by right-thinking people? Must one hear voices and see visions or otherwise have experiences unfamiliar to everyday experience? Are such things necessary?” Whether one likes it or not, Christianity is a very literal-minded religion. The recent attempt to “demythologize” it, that is, to treat as expendable everything in it that smacks of the miraculous, supernatural, or literal has met with a surprisingly vigorous storm of protest from ministers everywhere who, when confronted with a flat “either-or” have been forced to admit that Christianity with the miraculous, the apocalyptic, and the tangible elements removed would not be Christian at all.

In the Book of Mormon, the world finally has, so to speak, its “letter from heaven.” Those other epistles were easily tested and found wanting; though sometimes written and presented with considerable skill, they could not fool for long even the unscientific and uncritical ages in which they came forth. There is no reason why the Book of Mormon should not be subjected to every possible test, textual, literary, and historical, for it pleads no special immunity of any kind. It says in 2 Nephi: “Ye have closed your eyes, and ye have rejected the prophets. . . . the Lord God shall bring forth unto you the words of a book, and they shall be the words of them which have slumbered. . . . The learned shall not read them, for they have rejected them, and I am able to do mine own work. . . . For behold, I am God; and I am a God of miracles; and I will show unto the world that I am the same yesterday, today, and forever; and I work not among the children of men save it be according to their faith. . . . For the wisdom of their wise and learned shall perish, . . . the terrible one is brought to naught, and the scorner is consumed. . . . they also that erred in spirit shall come to understanding, and they that murmured shall learn doctrine.” (2 Nephi 27:5—6, 20, 23, 26, 31, 35.)

In the Book of Mormon the very questions about the Bible that now oppress the liberal and fundamentalist alike, to the imminent overthrow of their fondest beliefs, are fully and clearly treated; no other book gives such a perfect and exhaustive explanation of the eschatological problem; here we learn how the Christian and Jewish traditions fit into the world picture, and how God’s voice has been from the very beginning to all men everywhere; here alone one may find a full setting forth of the exact nature of scripture, and of the vast range and variety of revelation; here you will find anticipated and answered every logical objection that the intelligence or vanity of men even in this sophisticated age has been able to devise against the preaching of the word; and here one may find a description of our own age so vivid and so accurate that none can fail to recognize it—all these things and much more by way of “proving to the world that the holy scriptures are true.” (D&C 20:11.)

So you see that when Joseph Smith brought forth the Book of Mormon, he shocked and angered the world. You remember that within a week the announcements started coming out in the papers: “the Book of Mormon—Blasphemy,” and so on. He shocked and angered the world by setting up beside the Bible another book as original scripture.

I think we may see it come to pass that the Book of Mormon will prove to the world that the scriptures are true. There are things in the Bible that are historical and things that are not. The guide to follow is the Book of Mormon.

NOTES

* “Historicity of the Bible” is the edited transcript of an address given to the Seminary and Institute faculty at Brigham Young University on June 19, 1956.

1. König, Eduard, “Ist die jetzt herrschende Einschätzung der hebräischen Geschichtsquellen berechtigt?” Historische Zeitschrift 132 (1925): 289—302.

2. Brandon, Samuel George Frederick, “The Historical Element in Primitive Christianity,” Numen 2 (1955): 156.

3. Brandon, p. 157.

4. Linton, Olaf, Das Problem der Urkirche in der neueren Forschung (Uppsala: Almquist und Wiksell, 1932), n.p.

5. Brandon, p. 157.

6. Bultmann, Rudolf, “History and Eschatology in the New Testament,” New Testament Studies 1 (1954): n.p.

7. Schweitzer, Albert, Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1913), p. 2.

8. Bultmann.

9. Torczyner, Harry, “Das Literarische Problem der Bibel,” Zeitschrift der deutschen Morgenländischen Geschichte 85 (1913): 287—88.

10. Paton, Herbert James, The Modern Predicament (New York: Macmillan, 1955), p. 374.

11. Otto, Walter F., “Zur Universalgeschichte des Altertums,” Historische Zeitschrift 146 (1932): 205.

12. König, pp. 289—302.

13. Hrozny, Bedrick, Ancient History of Western Asia, India and Crete (Prague: Artia, 1940), p. 52.

14. Sayce, Archibald Henry, Monument Facts and Higher Critical Fancies (London: Religious Tract Society, 1910), n.p.

15. Gordon, Cyrus, Ugaritic Literature (Rome: Pontifical Institute of the Bible, 1949), n.p.

16. Gordon.

17. Haldar, Alfred Ossian, Association of Cult Prophets among the Ancient Semites (Uppsala: Almquist und Wiksell), p. 199.

18. Mowinckel, Sigmund, Religion und Kultus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1953), n.p.

19. Albright, William Foxwell, Archaeology and the Religion of Israel (Baltimore; Johns Hopkins Press, 1946), n.p.

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republicstandard · 7 years ago

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Pakistan PM Imran Khan Pushes Blasphemy Laws on the West

Using blasphemy laws to stifle free speech just isn’t cricket, Imran Khan.

A leftist playboy on a Muslim prayer mat is now Prime Minister of Pakistan – look no further for a portrait in incongruity. The world-class cricketer and Pakistan’s most successful captain playing the quintessentially gentlemanly sport is now a poster boy for Pakistan’s barbaric laws of blasphemy – search no further for a striking study in cognitive dissonance.

Oxford-educated Imran Khan, dressed in a mink coat and Mao cap, is equally fluent in the double-speak of radical Islam to his in-house audience and moderate Islam as a mode of public relations discourse. Since his time at Oxford University, Khan also learned to speak the progressive tongue of the social justice warrior tribes.

Khan’s carefully cultivated and calibrated image of incongruity is directed at reinforcing and expanding Islamic hegemony over the West. In the last few days, while the Western politicians were fast asleep like Rip van Winkle and the media were dancing like witches around John McCain’s coffin, Khan nuked free speech in Europe and at the United Nations. And nobody said a mumblin’ word.

In June, Geert Wilders, Dutch Member of Parliament, invited artists to submit cartoons of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. He offered a prize of £7,700 ($10,000) for the winner. The competition was due to be held in November. Wilders received over 200 entries.

Pakistan, the powder keg of Asia, erupted with outrage. Tehreek-e-Labbaik, the main political party organizing the protests, called for jihad against the West. Its leader, Khadim Rizvi, had earlier said he would order a nuclear strike against the Netherlands (if he came to power in the elections) were the cartoon contest to go ahead.

The elections went ahead. Imran Khan was elected prime minister. The useful idiots walking European corridors of power all thought that Imran Khan was “our man” because he was a Western-educated “moderate Muslim” who was three times divorced and married to a sex bomb like Jemima Goldsmith.

Instead, Khan turned the volume of Islamic fundamentalism to a full fortissimo and resoundingly affirmed that he’d defend Pakistan’s blasphemy laws to the hilt if his party won the elections. Last week, Pakistan’s senate passed a resolution condemning the competition and Khan turned his firepower on the West vowing to take the matter to the UN General Assembly later this month.

Khan is asking Islamic countries to create laws against blasphemy similar to those against Holocaust denial in European countries. He said:

“Our government will raise the matter in the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and ask the Muslim countries to come up with a collective policy that could then be brought up at international forums.”

Another Pakistani cricketer, Khalid Latif, has joined Khan’s chorus of “death to free speech” and “death to the West”. Latif, who was banned from cricket for five years for his role in match fixing during Pakistan Super League 2017, has placed a three million rupees bounty on the head of Geert Wilders.

To top it all, Pakistani pop star Rabi Pirzada, who dresses like a Westerner in modern clothing and pretends to be a “moderate Muslim” has used her verified Twitter account to call for cartoonists who draw the Prophet Mohammed to be “hanged immediately”. This prima donna in Pakistan’s opera buffa claims that drawing Islam’s founder is “the worst act of terrorism”.

Pirzada’s tweets are a compendium of contradictions. She parrots the mantra of “Islam is peace” and tweets, “We never did never will do such a barbaric act ever (sic). In islam (sic) we are not allowed to kill innocent people, women or children”.

No i don't love holocaust. Islam doesn't teaches us this.we are not https://t.co/CArg6eyqVq is looking at us muslims. We never did never will do such a barbaric act ever. In islam we are not allowed to kill innocent people, women or children.That's not us. Stop sharing such posts

— Rabi Pirzada (@Rabipirzada) August 30, 2018

But it’s fine to bump off Wilders because he isn’t innocent. “But that doesn't mean we can let any dog bark on our Prophet…” is how Pirzada justifies killing blasphemers.

Geert Wilders canceled the cartoon contest “to avoid the risk of victims of Islamic violence”. While Wilders has stuck out his neck for free speech and continues to do so, what is staggering beyond belief is the pusillanimous acquiescence of the West to the fatwas of religious fanatics in a backward nation stuck in seventh century Arabia.

Instead of the civilized West civilizing Pakistan, backward and barbaric Pakistani hotheads led by a turncoat Prime Minister are de-civilizing the freedom-loving Western world. Islam sentences apostates to death. But apostates are Muslims, to begin with. With blasphemy, Islam sentences even non-Muslims to death, thus declaring its rule over everyone who is not a Muslim.

This is an outrage against the most basic tenets of liberty and justice and free speech. By not standing up to Imran Khan and his bloodthirsty hate mongers and by acquiescing to Islam’s blasphemy laws, we in the West are submitting to the religion of Islam and to the rulings of its four schools—all of which prescribe the death penalty for blasphemy.

If only we could look in the mirror, we will see an even more striking study in incongruity—our cowardly, spineless selves. By and large, we in Western Europe have rejected religion—i.e. Christianity, the religion of our heritage and culture. Paradoxically, we have capitulated to the authority of another religion “Islam”—which does not mean “peace” but “submission”.

Khan’s strategy is perilously clear for all who have eyes to see. And it just isn’t cricket, it just isn’t fair, it’s just isn’t sportsmanlike. Our response is pathetically obvious for Pakistan and the rest of the Islamic world to see.

Silent submission.

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republicstandard · 7 years ago

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New Frontiers of Social Justice

“The enemy of subversive thought is not suppression, but publication: truth has no need to fear the light of day; fallacies wither under it. The unpopular views of today are the commonplaces of tomorrow, and in any case the wise man wants to hear both sides of every question.”-Sir Stanley Unwin

Not long ago, while visiting a friend, I was in a city where one of the major hospitals runs these ads placed on the side of public transportation saying something to the effect of, “We care for all patients” against a rainbow flag backdrop. This is textbook virtue-signaling. Does the Hippocratic Oath not state that you must care for all patients to the best of your ability anyway? What does the implied “inclusiveness” of gender have to do with it? I suppose there’s some wiggle room; after all, you’re also not meant to perform abortions, but like the Constitution, the Hippocratic Oath is a “living document” I guess. The torturing of language has become so commonplace at this point that people are becoming immune to it, but we need to be very careful not to cede any linguistic territory to the Left. This is one of their key strategies, and if it sounds like I’m talking about a war, well…just look at the kind of language they use: “ally,” “combat,” “agent,” “coalition,” “collusion,” etc.

MSNBC host Joy Reid thinks rural Americans are a “core threat” to democracy. I’m not sure how much of that is posturing, but according to University of Wyoming professors Keonghee Tao Han and Jacqueline Leonard in the article “Why Diversity Matters in Rural America,” published by the Urban Review, “women faculty of color” in particular need to bring the joys of diversity to the last vestiges of America not touched by it through the Trojan Horse of the academy, where not only more faculty (especially women) of color must be employed, but a whole “support team” of people of color must be hired and trained in order to combat “racism” and “bigotry.” The authors summarize their work as follows:

Using critical race theory as an analytical framework to examine White privilege and institutional racism, two teacher educators, in a rural predominantly White university tell counterstories about teaching for social justice in literacy and mathematics education courses… We, women faculty of color, challenge Whiteness and institutional racism with the hopes of: (1) promoting social justice teaching in order to globally prepare (pre-and-in-service) teachers and educational leaders to motivate and empower ALL students to learn; (2) dismantling racism to promote better wellbeing for women faculty of color; and (3) moving educational communities at large closer toward equitable education, which is a fundamental civil right.

This article is a perfect snapshot of where the minds of academia and the “intellectual elites” of this country are. It’s all there: the feminist critique, the inherent racism of (white, rural) homogeneity, the Marxist twist in the form of “equitable education,” the appeals to open borders and globalism, and finally, the self-contained world of academia that continues to perpetuate “knowledge” based on subjective experience and a perversion of formerly respected disciplines. This self-justifying twaddle exists in a “safe space” un-encroached upon by logic, reason, or reality. It’s so easy to write this dross; I could pump this stuff out at a staggering clip. It’s comically easy. Virtually none of it requires any research, and what little there is is either taken out of context, willfully misrepresented, or refers to the similarly-constructed and equally intellectually bankrupt “work” of race and gender “theorists.” Good ideas are good ideas, I don’t care where they come from. There aren’t any here, but there is plenty of Frankfurt School post-modernism and its attendant corollaries such as post-colonialism and gender theory to make up for the lack of original thought. The few definite claims made in this article, after the requisite hemming and hawing about “problematizing” this-and-that, are patently absurd and most are downright harmful.

No terms in the article are precisely defined, the basic framework operates from, as Peter Boghossian has helpfully illustrated, “manufactured epistemology,” and the conflation of a university in rural America with rural America is very disingenuous as they are not even remotely the same thing. And there are questions, so many unanswered questions: What does “challenging whiteness” entail outside of simply existing as a minority in Wyoming and a slew of “raising awareness”-style vagaries? What are some concrete examples of institutional racism? Why do the students need to be “globally prepared”? Why is Han, an “Asian-American,” considered to be a “woman of color” when Northeast Asians otherwise fail to register on the oppression hierarchy? Additionally, I fail to see the pertinence of privilege and racism to literacy and mathematics education, or what the connection is between racism and womanhood, or what, indeed, is meant by “equitable education.”

After reading it in its entirety, and having had to translate it from “academia-ese,” I can confirm that the proposal is, effectively, to use the academy to ferry more diversity into the few remaining pockets of America that are “suffering” from homogeneity, areas that would not otherwise be “enriched” without the academy (or the Section 8 voucher program that has destroyed places like Ferguson, Missouri, by displacing whites with a more “urban” demographic). The two professors do not explain to us why diversity is a good thing—in fact, people in homogeneous areas look far more kindly on the concept of diversity than do people that actually experience diversity on a regular basis. Diversity atomizes communities and erodes trust, health, and well-being in affected areas. Like so much else that suffices for “research” in the “soft sciences” and humanities in the modern academy, this article is almost entirely self-referential and provides the reader with nothing of substance, nothing that could credibly be deemed an argument in the proper sense of the word, and little beyond the hectoring self-righteousness of two people who believe their race imbues them with some kind of inherent superiority over the stump-toothed rednecks they look down their noses at.

As one example of what I’m talking about, many of critical race theory’s earliest touch-stones include the subjective observations of authors (not researchers, not scientists) such as Zora Neal Hurston, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, post-modernists like Frantz Fanon and Edward Said (the founding father of post-colonialism), and the mixed-race W.E.B. DuBois who is, to use the One Drop Rule the Left strictly adheres to, “African-American.” The “lens” used by Han and Leonard also includes an interrogation of “whiteness,” commonly placed under the critical race theory scholastic sub-heading, Critical Whiteness Studies. As Barbara Applebaum informs us:

“Critical Whiteness Studies is a growing body of scholarship whose aim is to reveal the invisible structures that produce and reproduce white supremacy and privilege.”

Invisible structures. Got that?

Applebaum also says, “For generations, scholars of color, among them Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin (my note: not scholars), and Franz Fanon, have maintained that whiteness lies at the center of the problem of racism” (how exactly is never illuminated with specifics). I wonder if, as “scholars of color,” writing, by the way, during a radically different period in terms of race relations—ie, Jim Crow and the last vestiges of colonialism—they might have drawn conclusions based on their “lived experiences” that may not still be relevant today? I’ve noticed basically every “scholar” of race in contemporary society, when not “de-constructing” “implicit bias” or “invisible structures of ‘racism,’” always dwells incessantly on historical events, events oftentimes beyond any living person’s existence, before ultimately trying to conflate past injustices such as slavery with perceived contemporary injustices by using weasel phrases like “the legacy of which is still with us today,” “the likes of which still exists, albeit in a different form,” or some other imprecise cop-out. Again, no contemporary or non-subjective evidence is ever provided, save fictionalized narratives such as the Michael Brown “incident,” and no argument, other than impossibly broad phrases like “systemic racism” or “invisible structures” (I just love that one), is formulated. Without any kind of specificity, it is impossible to take this kind of “scholarship” seriously.

The basis for “systemic oppression” has now become so broad that, according to Lorraine Code, “Knowing is a political activity.” In Margaret Mead’s terms, “Ignorance excludes groups and individuals from the future by trapping them in co-generational struggles that are prolonged by inherited Western colonialism and enduring political paradigms of what the future should be rather than what can evolve if all voices contribute.” Foucault seemed to believe that there were no absolutes, and that it wasn’t merely a question of knowledge versus ignorance, but of “multiple knowledges.” More on Foucault in a bit. For Kristie Dotson:

Epistemic oppression refers to persistent epistemic exclusion that hinders one’s contribution to knowledge production. The tendency to shy away from using the term “epistemic oppression” may follow from an assumption that epistemic forms of oppression are generally reducible to social and political forms of oppression. While I agree that many exclusions that compromise one’s ability to contribute to the production of knowledge can be reducible to social and political forms of oppression, there still exists distinctly irreducible forms of epistemic oppression.

We are now literally in the realm of the intangible. First “invisible structures,” and now “epistemic oppression.” Epistemic advantage, the inverse of the force of exclusionary knowledge production, is defined by Uma Narayan as “[the oppressed] having knowledge of the practices of both their own contexts and those of their oppressors.” Knowledge production, having received its Marxist bath, becomes another frontier from which to combat “exclusionary practices.” Vanderbilt professor Jose Medina expands:

Foucaultian genealogy offers a critical approach to practices of remembering and forgetting which is crucial for resisting oppression and dominant ideologies. For this argument I focus on the concepts of counter-history and counter-memory that Foucault developed in the 1970’s. In the first section I analyze how the Foucaultian approach puts practices of remembering and forgetting in the context of power relations, focusing not only on what is remembered and forgotten, but how, by whom, and with what effects. I highlight the critical possibilities for resistance that this approach opens up, and I illustrate them with Ladelle McWhorter’s genealogy of racism in Anglo-America.

What he’s referring to is what McWhorter has to say about the most tolerant and open cultural inheritance in human history:

By foregrounding historical material that hegemonic histories and official policies have de-emphasized or dismissed, they [the genealogical researchers] have created an erudite account of scientific racism and eugenics, and in so doing they have critiqued received views and called into question some aspects of the epistemologies that support them.

Though the Left is convinced the study of genetic differences will lead to eugenic policies, which inevitably lead to genocide, they somehow support Planned Parenthood, founded by eugenicist Margaret Sanger. There’s an abortion clinic in practically every inner-city neighborhood. The Left throws their entire weight behind Planned Parenthood and demands federal funding for an organization that specializes in terminating, at a disproportionate clip, the identity voting blocs so coveted by the Democratic Party. Since half of all black babies end up aborted, tell me again how black lives matter, Leftists. Where the Left does not support eugenic policies, they implement ones that are decidedly dysgenic, as the welfare state incentivizes certain partner selection that ultimately has deleterious effects on the gene pool, and the onerous taxes foisted on the middle class renders procreation a luxury. What epistemology are they talking about, the one propped up by the entire academic establishment for disciplines like theirs that are wholly illegitimate? Medina informs us:

“In the 1975-76 lectures, ‘Society Must Be Defended,’ Foucault draws a contrast between ‘the genealogy of knowledges’ and any kind of linear intellectual history such as the history of the sciences: whereas the latter is located at ‘the cognition-truth axis,’ ‘the genealogy of knowledges is located on a different axis, namely the discourse-power axis or, if you like, the discursive practice—clash of power axis.’”

I touched on this a while ago in my articles on Rome, but it warrants further discussion here. Foucault is situating this entirely new paradigm of “knowledge” completely outside of cognition and truth. It is fundamentally anti-intellectual and based on pure subjectivity. The “experiential quality” of “the oppressed” becomes the basis for “legitimate” scholarship. As the Combahee River Collective puts it:

“We have spent a great deal of energy delving into the cultural and experiential nature of our oppression out of necessity because none of these matters have ever been looked at before. No one has ever mentioned the multilayered text of black women’s lives.”

What does that mean? We can see the impact that Foucault and his ilk’s “counter-histories” have had on the educational experience of every American under the age of forty; the primary events in American history were portrayed as Columbus’s legacy of subjugation and destruction of the native peoples of the “New World,” the Civil War (which was, we are taught only about slavery), large-scale immigration via Ellis Island, and the Civil Rights Movement. The little we learn about the Founding Fathers is that they were slave-holders and their legacy is a racist, oppressive country.

For their crimes, as determined by today’s Cult-Marxists, this legacy must be completely dismantled, and this dismantling must include the United States of America itself.

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