Clark, you know that other thread you're in where MrStakhanovite is saying, not in so many words, that Mormon apologists are full of crap? It's a general consensus that in a narrative, you should show, not tell, and I for one appreciate your showing, not telling.
For example, your
tone policing. I mean, yeah, I do buy it that you're so thin skinned, you're really put out about my snarkiness. But in the context of your handwaving away some observations about your religion that you're not able to refute, it looks a lot more like you're trying to distract from an issue that you're not only not able to address, you still haven't correctly identified. Yeah, you get it that someone is saying something unfavorable about your favorite Palmyra village magician, but as I will explain below, you still aren't articulating the core problem.
Further to the full of crap thing, you're trying to style yourself as this man of letters in your online persona, but then you reflexively retreat to your Sunday school worldview that Lucifer's cackling minions are persecuting you for your righteousness.
You really think snark like that is conducive to conversations? I'm sure it makes you feel much more powerful and better about yourself. If you need that for your well being, more power to you. Given your response I confess I'm not entirely sure if you want me to respond in kind or be polite and charitable. Could you clarify that for me? I'll admit I have no psychological need for it but can do it if you need me to be snarky too. I like to help people.
Look, you can hold yourself out as the aforementioned man of letters, or you can retreat to the simplistic pat answers of an Ensign article, but you can't do both. It's as old as the written word that people use sarcasm to make a serious point. It should be unremarkable to you that people do that. I guess it's a mixed blessing that you don't seem to understand how ridiculous this statement of yours looks to an outsider.
In this instance, the point I was making is that there is a vast amount of information refuting your facile assumptions about what UFO phenomena mean to people, that information is readily available to the point that it's effectively common knowledge, and you have no apparent interest in finding out whether your assumptions are accurate before announcing them as fact.
For what it's worth, though, it's self-defeating when you ask permission--even rhetorically--to be a smart ass. It's even worse when you act like it's a threat. By all means, be snarky. I have no doubt you will be as sharp and as edgy as a pair of kindergarten scissors.
And speaking of psychological needs, if you want to know what projection looks like, it looks like talking about the good old college days when you found amusement in tricking credulous UFO believers into thinking they saw a spacecraft, but then start yammering about people other than yourself supposedly feeling like a big man by making fun of other people.
I notice that your response, such as it is, decidedly omitted my comparison between your college hijinks and the Kinderhook Plates.
Then there's this:
In all your comments I noticed you didn't provide any numbers regarding the number of adherents who gain religious meaning from UFOs. Do you have any? I thought that was what you were upset about - my skepticism that there were millions of Americans in that category.
That's a pretty bold statement, given that all my comments included the results of a couple of Google searches. On its face, what you're saying here means you went through all of the links in this searches and never saw any numbers about how many people see religious meaning in UFO phenomena.
And then, when someone points out to you that among the links in those search results, which were necessarily part of "all my comments," that surveys indicate that millions of people in the U.S. believe in UFOs, you offer the following mischaracterization:
It's goal moving to note that the number of people who believe in aliens is not the same as the number of people who think aliens have visited earth which is not the same as the number of people who have religious experiences tied to aliens purportedly visiting earth? And it's goal moving for my skepticism that millions gain religious meaning from UFOs isn't the same as people believing in aliens?
There's definitely some goal moving here. But I'm not doing it.
And this:
The New Age is much, much broader than UFOlogy types. I don't think you can infer much about the latter from the former.
Now we come back to the narrative technique of "show, don't tell." Because you're
telling everyone that you absolutely for sure understand what the point of this thread is, but then you
show that you really don't.
See, you're conflating two different things. One is how many people believe in UFOs, which Screech correctly predicted you would try to deflect from by throwing up arbitrary distinctions between UFO believers and religious believers and so on. And that second thing is what the point of the OP and the rest of the thread is.
You can't move the goalposts,
because there are no goalposts. There is no clear, cogent distinction between people who believe in UFOs in general, people who find religious meaning in UFO phenomena, New Age spirituality, and the kind of organized religion promulgated by people like Billy Meier, L. Ron Hubbard, or Joseph Smith. There's a significant overlap in many of these---and if you don't believe me, feel free to consult "NHM and also aliens disguised as humans live on Earth" expert
Warren Aston---not least of which is because there's a similar mindset at work in accepting these beliefs.
Not only is there no meaningful distinction, and in fact a significant overlap between all of these areas of belief, you haven't even tried to offer any kind of demarcation. All you're doing is a protracted "Nuh-uh! Nuh-uh! Nuh-uh!" It's a reasonable inference that this makes you uncomfortable not only because it says your church isn't particularly special in the grand scheme of things, but because you see this as
guilt by association. Except that the issue is that this isn't guilt by association, because it's not trying to lump one thing into another category. It's that Mormonism is in the
same category.
You're implying an obvious distinction without articulating one. So, for example, you dispute that Scientology is a "UFO religion," even though Wikipedia editors have included it under the rubric of "UFO religions." That's a strange thing for a person constantly talking about his philosophy background to say, given the fluidity that the term "UFO" itself has. A UFO, by definition, is an unidentified flying object. By the actual meaning of the term, NOBODY believes in a UFO religion, because NOBODY finds religious significance in seeing an object that they can't identify. Bill Meier
identified what the things in those pictures were: not only alien spacecraft, but alien spacecraft from a specific race. And yet you're not quibbling about Billy Meier's group being called a "UFO" religion.
That's because, as you have acknowledged in this thread, in common usage the term "UFO" means space aliens and/or their vehicles. Which means someone is making an affirmative claim about identity, which means incongruously that most people don't mean "unidentified" when they say "UFO." Since the root term itself does not in practice have a rigorous, consistent definition, it's quite disingenuous for you to insist that there must be some rigorous, consistent definition of what a "UFO religion" has to be.
At this point, I will remind you of another part of my post that you chose to omit, in which Mormonism is identified as a UFO religion because Moroni's appearance to Joseph Smith has so many trappings of
a close encounter of the fifth kind.Cough.Since "UFO" in the vernacular is a synedoche for "space aliens and/or alien spacecraft," you're not really making the case as to why Scientology is categorically excluded from being a UFO religion. Or Mormonism, which I will again remind you worships an extraterrestrial entity who physically lives on another planet.
Come to think of it, I seem to remember seeing a movie somewhere that depicted Peter, James, and John coming from another planet to visit Earth.
Then, as if your non-category errors were not enough, you're asserting that I have failed my burden of proof because I haven't demonstrated how many of the millions of people who believe in "UFOs" (sic) are religious about it.
And it's goal moving for my skepticism that millions gain religious meaning from UFOs isn't the same as people believing in aliens?
No, it's not goal post moving, it's a non-accidental fallacy of equivocation. It's not accidental because in another thread, you're all about Kant and other philosopher discussing concepts that touch on questions that are broadly religious, like meaning in life, one's place in the universe, ethics, and so on. So you obviously know that "religious meaning" is not limited to organized religion. But in this thread, when it makes you uncomfortable that there's no meaningful distinction between those rubes you tricked with fake UFOs and yourself, who thinks Nephi was a real person, now "religion" has to be of the formal type, in which there is a top-down bureaucracy, demands for money, and a weekly funeral for God.
What you're doing is disingenuous because it has been pointed out in this thread that both skeptics and religious scholars frequently see UFO phenomena as
categorically religious in nature---that belief in UFOs is per se religious because of both the characteristics that make someone believe and because of the meaning they derive from that belief. And because you have elsewhere demonstrated that you have at least read works which suggest that religious questions encompass far more than organized sitting in the pews.
Or maybe you're back to your appeal to self knowledge, in which if it seems to you that the existence of alien intelligence and its putative contact with humanity doesn't perforce involve religious questions, it must seem like that to everyone else. (Note: lest you confuse my post with the methodology of a Mormon apologetic tract, the following are offered as examples, not proof texts.)
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2016121 ... ions-reacthttps://www.livescience.com/48208-relig ... -life.htmlhttps://www.space.com/13152-aliens-reli ... anity.htmlhttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... ll-survivehttps://www.jstor.org/stable/24458392?s ... b_contentshttps://link.springer.com/article/10.10 ... 017-9605-yAnd by the way, maybe the reason people think you're saying that hardly anyone gets religious meaning from UFOs and just wants to see a spaceship is because you keep explicitly saying that.
However again, to be clear, my skepticism was never about those surface parallels. I've stated that several times now. I'm not quite sure why everyone thinks I'm denying them. Now I think in depth they completely break down, but I completely understand why people who think Joseph was a con artist and fraud think the parallel is exact. My skepticism never was about that. It was explicitly about thinking most people who believe in UFOs are just interested in the spaceships and not these religious issues. It's a simple point. Thus far no one's addressed it presumably because it's a trivial point I suspect most people agree with me on. But it has nothing to do with the original point you were making. For some reason everyone wants it to be.
The reason why everyone thinks that has something to do with Gadianton's original point is THAT IS GADIANTON'S ORIGINAL POINT.
