Today on Radio Free Mormon RFM and Bill Reel dissect the talk Stand Forever, given on the 22nd of January 2019 by Elder Lawrence Corbridge, a member of the Seventy of the LDS Church. Several Major Points come out
– Elder Corbridge seems to have had a level of faith crisis himself while on assignment from the Leadership to dig into “antagonistic material” regarding the Church.
-His gloom while claimed not to be Cognitive Dissonance (Belief Bias) and instead to be the absence of the Holy Ghost is irrational and illogical.
– The LDS Flow Chart regardless of your experience leads to the Church being true. If you get an answer that the Church is true, then the Church is true. If you get an answer that the Church isn’t true, you’ve been deceived and the Church is true. If you get no answer, you are to rely on the words of others who know the Church is true because the Church is true. If you decide the problematic issues (Secondary Questions) impose the Church isn’t true, then shift your focus to the the Primary Questions which you already decided point to the Church is true, because the Church is true. All Roads lead to the Church is true. The Church has given you no viable formula to arrive at the Church is false.
– Elder Corbridge argues that the Divine method (Spiritual Feelings) trumps the Scientific Method, the Analytical Method, and the Academic Method (actual science) in spite of the Divine Method being historically demonstrably less effective at arriving at truth. Even Prophets when allowing the Divine Method to trump the Other three have been led to great error decades on end.
– The reason the Divine Method is held up as superior and trumps the other three because the other three if allowed to be given their weight all lead the honest seeker of truth out of the Church. Meanwhile the Divine method is the only method the Church can use to manipulate the person who wants the Church to be true to believe it is true.
– And they finish speaking to how much of his own faith crisis Elder Corbridge has exposed within his talk.
RESOURCES:
https://www.lds.org/church/leader/lawrence-e-corbridge?lang=eng
https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/lawrence-corbridge_stand-for-ever/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_bias
http://mormonprimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/MormonPrimer7.pdf
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Corbridge’s talk must really strike a chord of “the Spirit” with so many of our family members sharing this talk with us? I went ahead and listened to the inspiring talk last week, but girded up with the armor of truth, you tend to see right through it right off the bat. Will we allow this talk’s blue-print contradictions, double standards, projection, bullying, abuse, manipulation and lies to be seen and weighed as the real Jesus asked? “These are the real truths, which by the way don’t apply to Us Pharisees.”
This talk did not measure up to the real Jesus, but is exactly what he warned of, lots. A perfectly Pharisaical cookie-cutter talk. And it did measure up to the perfect GenCon hypnotic droning we have all been brought up to identify as “the voice of Prophets speaking the words of God.”
That reminds me that I liked some of what Denver Snuffer wrote, until I heard him talk, in perfect Mormon form. I think that droning is programmed in to automatically trigger in us a recognition of LDS GenCon-style droning as “being the Spirit of God speaking to our hearts?”
One step forward two steps back… Why isn’t the growing heap of crap diminishing?
Corbridge equates the “stone cut from the mountain”/kingdom of God with the church. He should consult with Renlund who, having read all of the Joseph Smith papers (which includes minutes of the meetings of the Council of 50), will inform him that Joseph Smith distinguished between the “kingdom” that would revolutionize the world and the church–they were not the same thing for Joseph Smith and other early Mormons. I’m not sure when the Kingdom and the Church got conflated, but no one should pretend that what Corbridge says was true for JS. Corbridge himself is either being intentionally deceitful or (as is more likely) doesn’t really know the history and is therefore betraying his own ignorance. (all of this written before RFM addressed it in the poscast, but I’ll post anyway.)
If we are being deceived by the internet. Why can’t we record their words?
Did RFM really just say that the Divine Method is the only one that can be manipulated to arrive at a pre-drawn conclusion? Come on guys. All 4 methods are used that way, every minute of every day.
Yes, they are. Every day. True. But anyone skilled in use of the scientific, analytical or academic methods can dismantle an argument made using the same or similar strategies because they are falsifiable. They retain some fealty to truth. The divine method is cultism, demagoguery, group think. It can’t necessarily be reproduced by another person, so it is not true.
My favorite moment of the episode was Bill saying that one can scientifically prove that “The Divine Method” is the least reliable.
I pictured in my head the orthodox church member who would just circularly argue that the “The Divine Method” can be self-verifying … that Bill’s scientific proof of alleged unreliability of “The Divine Method” would be trumped by “The Divine Method” proof that “The Divine Method” is reliable. LOL
I’m not sure citing the scientific method to disparate “The Divine Method” would move the needle for most orthodox members. But I loved Bill’s assertion nonetheless.
When I received my own endowment in 1980 I felt a strong impression that the ritual was not of god. That feeling gnawed at me for the next 2+ decades until I left. The key is that temple experience was what created such a powerful drive to understand that ritual which when I did was so destructive to Mormonism. Now I understand that was simply cognitive dissonance.
Hey Bill and RFM.
I had a thought while listening to this podcast when you guys were discussing Corbridge’s argument that you can’t prove the church is truth by slogging through every last single issue with it.
You can’t prove it is true with negative evidence.
I thought you guys did a great job discussing this.
But the thought I had was this. You may not be able to prove the church is true by disproving each and every claim against it. But you only need to have one of the claims against it be true to prove that the church is NOT true.
Kind of like on anachronism can prove a history book is a fraud.
One of the criticisms of the church being true is evidence that the church is NOT true.
But clearly Corbridge already knows it is true, so his mind doesn’t work that way.
But for the honest in heart, who only want to follow and know what is true, both it is true and it is false are valid answers to the question.
Keep up the good work.