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\nI offer this post as an interlude to my serialized reply to the CES Letter to recount some of the reactions I’ve gotten since publishing the whole thing last Friday. In retrospect, it might not have been wise to post the thing on April Fool’s Day, which, as a series of Facebook memes has reminded us, is the only day that people are actually skeptical of what they read on the Internet.<\/p>\n
That said, I’ve been very pleased by the response. Most of it has been positive, so, of course, I thought I might take a moment to respond to unduly focus on some of the negative comments I’ve received, some of which have a great deal of merit.<\/p>\n
Some, of course, but not all. An ex-Mormon group over at Reddit<\/a> got ahold of it and produced the following merit-free evaluations, which have been edited for community standards:<\/p>\n Having spent a great deal of time in politics, I am wary of diving into discussions where people are determined to despise you, but reading this ex-Mo thread was far more delightful than it should have been. I laughed out loud at most of the above responses, so either I have a thicker skin than I used to, or something is seriously wrong with me. I also think that if my piece merits this level of hardcore ex-Mormon rage, I must have done something right.<\/p>\n That said, there have been some substantive criticisms that have come out of this. I thought maybe I’d address each of those in turn.<\/p>\n Criticism #1: It’s condescending. <\/strong><\/p>\n That seems to be a reaction many are having, and I’m not quite sure what to do about it. Certainly it was not my intent to be condescending, and at the outset, I make it clear that I’m in no position to talk down to anyone. (You may not be as smart as I am, so I should tell you that “to condescend” means “to talk down to people.”)<\/p>\n In all seriousness, I repeatedly try to de-establish my credentials throughout in order to avoid appearing condescending. “I\u2019m the ward Webelos leader, which is the limited extent of my current ecclesiastical authority,” I announce on page 2. Throughout the letter, I make no pretense of having any special academic or professional authority, either. Yet it’s undeniable that some interpret my attempts at humor, which are liberally sprinkled throughout the piece, as condescending, which leads us to item #2:<\/p>\n 2. It’s too jokey\/silly\/goofy, and therefore not Christlike. <\/strong><\/p>\n One friend messaged me to say that I announced from the outset that I was going to attempt to provide a “Christlike response,” but I spend so much time cracking wise through the whole thing that it was both “wittier” and “funnier” than a Christlike response should be.<\/p>\n Which raises a question I’ve asked many a time over the years – namely, is humor Christlike?<\/p>\n I firmly believe that it is, but I have scant scriptural evidence to support my conclusion. We certainly don’t have any record of Jesus cracking jokes (“A scribe, a Pharisee, and a Samaritan walk into a bar…”) and scriptural accounts aren’t particularly funny. Indeed, the complete absence of humor from the Book of Mormon is probably why Mark Twain referred to it as “chloroform in print.”<\/p>\n Maybe the problem is that perfection isn’t funny, either. For humor to succeed, it generally requires some admission or acknowledgment of human error.<\/p>\n But that said, my favorite moments in Church, both in General Conference and on a local level, often include elements of humor. One of the reasons I miss President Hinckley so much is that he was consistently hilarious, and his sense of humor put everyone at ease. The way he applied humor was the opposite of condescension and superiority. It was a demonstration that he didn’t take himself too seriously, so we probably shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously, either.<\/p>\n That was my purpose for trying to make the tone of this thing as light as possible. Also, I think humor is less abrasive when people make themselves the butt of the joke. I tried to poke fun at myself more than anyone else, but many saw me as aiming too many barbs at Jeremy Runnells, so that leads to criticism #3:<\/p>\n 3. It’s ad hominem\/too mean to Jeremy Runnells; <\/strong>it spends too much time attacking the author of the CES Letter and not his arguments. <\/strong><\/p>\n This criticism disturbs me greatly, because I genuinely went out of my way not to attack Jeremy Runnells personally.<\/p>\n At all. Ever.<\/p>\n Whenever someone criticizes me for this, I ask them, in all sincerity, to point out a passage where I’ve gone ad hominem against Runnells, because if that happens even once in my reply, I want to take it out as soon as possible.<\/p>\n I’m pretty brutal with his arguments, and I make no apologies for that. But if you can find me a place where the person, not the argument, is the object of ridicule or attack, I would genuinely appreciate the opportunity to correct my error.<\/p>\n As of this writing, nobody has called any specific examples of ad hominem attacks in my piece to my attention. I hope that means those examples aren’t there, but maybe people are just avoiding the issue. Which brings me to number 4:<\/p>\n 4. It avoids the real issues. <\/strong><\/p>\n On the ex-Mo thread at Reddit, someone who claims to know me in real life thinks part of the problem with my reply is that I shrug off all the hard questions about the Church so that “everything indefensible becomes a joke.” Except the sheer volume of the thing suggests that this can’t possibly be true. I go on for paragraphs and pages on single sentences in order to comprehensively address every possible permutation of Runnells’ objections. Surely some of those pages and paragraphs are substantively more than just comic relief – no comedian has that much material.<\/p>\n Yet this overabundance-of-info approach has also earned me the same criticism from a different source. “When it takes 7 paragraphs to explain away every one sentence of criticism,” this other critic said to me, “it winds up giving the impression that you’re using the old ‘ramble for a really long time in order to look like you know what you’re talking about’ method of Apologetics.”<\/p>\n It seems I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. Either way, I can’t seem to change anyone’s mind. Which is the entirety of criticism #5:<\/p>\n 5. It’s not going to change anyone’s mind.<\/strong><\/p>\n That’s probably true, but I didn’t write it thinking it would. I readily admit that my reply is unlikely to persuade Jeremy Runnells to reclaim his faith, although I’d be delighted if that were the (unlikely) result. Nor did I write it for any who have already made up their minds that faith in LDS truth claims is incompatible with intellectual honesty.<\/p>\n Instead, I wrote it for those believers who read the CES Letter and feel like chumps. They still want to believe, but they think they can’t do that because there’s no other way to look at these issues than the way Jeremy Runnells has presented. I wanted to provide an example of a believer who has honestly and frankly confronted all of these issues head on with logic, intelligence, and solid information, and still come out with a testimony on the other side. Hopefully, someone who finds their testimony shattered by the CES letter can look at me and think, “well, if that Bennett bozo can read this and keep his faith, maybe I can, too.”<\/p>\n Anyway, I appreciate the reactions, positive and negative. Keep ’em coming.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\n