On the Dumbness of Mopologist Ethics

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_Gadianton
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On the Dumbness of Mopologist Ethics

Post by _Gadianton »

It's not that the Mopologists are dumb or lack education, but it would seem in their desire to conquer their enemies, who today are secularists and atheists, all reason goes out the window to create a world where anything short of 'God' leaves us with nothing, while, insert God, and we have everything. All hard answers are answered and every tear is wiped away. I'm not sure who actually maintains the cartoonish positions that they do, perhaps a few fundamentalist Christians or at best, C. S. Lewis on his worst day, but in fact, given their positions end up being a maze of contradictions, it would be unlikely to find a reputable source for them. And worse, reconciling Mormonism with any kind of traditional theology, let alone maintaining the obviousness of theology over a-theology on the grounds of the obviousness of Mormonism as a representative example of traditional theology, is the greatest laugh of all.

Another instant classic in Mopologist misfires, from Sic et Non:

From Sic et Non

Gemli: When people proclaim that they know the unknowable, and know it in extraordinary detail, they're either clueless or lying. I was being generous

DCP: When people proclaim that something is unknowable because they don't know it, they're being presumptuous.

Gemli: If God made us, it seems presumptuous to claim that anyone could know the mind of God, just as ants can't know the mind of the kid with a magnifying glass who's torching them ... This is what's wrong with ordinary mortals claiming to know what God wants and what must be done to obey His wishes.

DCP: Unless God tells them.

Gemli: It's said that a creating a perfect circle is nearly impossible. But your answer comes pretty close.

DCP: Actually, it doesn't at all. You simply don't understand what we're talking about. Aquinas would have been helpful to you here, as well. But you aren't interested.


Wait...what? Nothing any Mopologists has ever said that I can recall would lead me to think about Aquinas. Certainly, nothing that Mormonism teaches would urge a person to think about Aquinas, unless it is to insult traditional theology and exalt Joseph Smith as the restorer of simple truths.

Ironically, Aqunias's position is much closer to Gemli's than DCPs. Perhaps Gemli's formative years as a Catholic instilled him with a better sense of what the world outside of Utah County thinks of God than what the apologists can teach.

According to Aquinas,the will does not incline necessarily to these goods, either. For in this life we cannot see God in all his goodness, and thus the connection between God, virtue, final happiness will always appear opaque


It's far more complex for Aquinas than God simply appearing in a grove of trees and "telling us" this or that in plain English, given the great gulf of understanding that separates people from God like ants from people.

Here's some more to think about regarding Aquinas:

https://cct.biola.edu/thomas-aquinas-hu ... afterlife/

And Aquinas thought the idea of bodily entity like a human being ceasing to exist, and then coming back into existence at a future point in time involved some sort of logical contradiction along these lines. Here’s why.

Recall my comparing human souls to a blueprint explaining how to structure a bunch of physical stuff human-wise. In a sense, each of us has the same blueprint. We are each structured human-wise, and not tree-wise or squirrel-wise. But each of us is also a unique individual. What makes me the unique individual I am, on Aquinas’s view, is the particular physical stuff that gets structured human-wise in each of our cases when we are born. It’s starting out with the particular physical bits that I did that makes me me.


Consider first the view that Grampa “lives on” after his death as a disembodied soul in heaven. There are notorious philosophical difficulties involved with the claim that human persons are actually non-physical souls. For example, how are such non-physical souls supposed to interact with physical bodies? Even supposing such difficulties could be resolved, though (and readers interested in learning how to do so should read Alexander Pruss’s blog post on the subject! Available here, there remains this question: why is the Christian tradition so insistent on the importance of a bodily resurrection? If human persons aren’t really bodies at all, but rather non-physical souls capable of existing perfectly well in heaven without bodies, then why would getting our bodies back be such a big deal? Having a body, after all, is often pretty inconvenient. Why would disembodied human persons, enjoying beatitude in God’s presence, need to return to embodied life? Aquinas has an obvious answer to this question. Disembodied souls aren’t human persons. They’re merely former parts of human persons who used to be alive, and who by God’s power will return to life on the last day.


Now add to all of that, intelligence, which is either the material the spirit is composed of or a "you within a you within a you", and the common-sense notions of people having NDE's and going to heaven that the Mopologists are obsessed with look rather silly. To understand Mopologist wisdom is to first understand Aquinas. Please!
Lou Midgley 08/20/2020: "...meat wad," and "cockroach" are pithy descriptions of human beings used by gemli? They were not fashioned by Professor Peterson.

LM 11/23/2018: one can explain away the soul of human beings...as...a Meat Unit, to use Professor Peterson's clever derogatory description of gemli's ideology.
_Mormonicious
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Re: On the Dumbness of Mopologist Ethics

Post by _Mormonicious »

Oxymormon, right?

Stupid damned Mormons

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Revelation 2:17 . . give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it. Thank Google GOD for her son eBay, you can now have life eternal with laser engraving. . oh, and a seer stone and save 10% of your life's earning as a bonus. See you in Mormon man god Heaven Bitches!!. Bring on the Virgins
_Philo Sofee
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Re: On the Dumbness of Mopologist Ethics

Post by _Philo Sofee »

Excellent points Gad! Ya know......I am having serious doubts Peterson is all that smart on so many things. What he does is drops names.... important names of theology, politics, poetry, and history. But he never gives exact quotes, analysis, or what he thinks is meant by passages from these writers. NEVER. It is as if he knows it all and wants everyone to IMAGINE he does, but he never has to demonstrate or defend a position of his own understanding of anyone or anything. Is Peterson actually a con artist intellectual? I see no evidence anymore to persuade me otherwise. And every time he DOES elaborate and quote and use authors, he has misunderstood, and an actual expert in whatever person Peterson is using shows up and absolutely thrashes him on such gross silliness of understanding! True he has wit. But does that translate into actual knowledge? No. Other Mormons are hypnotized into thinking it does however. I used to be there. But these last several years have shown an entirely new, bright light upon Peterson and his antics (tactics?) and I am entirely satisfies he is truly faking it.
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_Doctor Scratch
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Re: On the Dumbness of Mopologist Ethics

Post by _Doctor Scratch »

The Mopologists have never been interested in actual knowledge; instead, they are interested in the affectations and pretenses of knowledge. Just recently, DCP was marveling over Will Schryver's ability to speak a second language. How magnificent! How smartly this reflects on the educational attainment and intellectual gravitas of this former Mopologist from southern Utah!

Actually, no: it just shows how provincially American (or Utahn? Or Mormon?) that DCP, Midgley, et al. actually are. I hate to break it to them, but there is a sizable chunk of the global population that's fluent in more than one language, and many of these people are dirt-poor. Heck, go to any immigrant enclave in the U.S. and you will find all kinds of people--people operating below the poverty line and with minimal formal schooling: far less that Peterson, Midgley, and their crew, anyhow--who can fluently speak more than one language. DCP doesn't seem to know or understand this, and instead wants to paint Schryver's linguistic knowledge as if it's some kind of marker of their social status: "Ooooh! Look how urbane we are!" Yeah, well: you had folks/the Church paying for you to learn a language and to go off and practice it "on the house" for two years, plus pretty much guaranteed university education. Anyone who masters more than one language deserves credit for the achievement. Commentary like that seems like it's intended to establish Peterson's privilege and connections (which, on a certain level, I suppose it does), but you just have to wonder why on earth he feels the need to do so.
"[I]f, while hoping that everybody else will be honest and so forth, I can personally prosper through unethical and immoral acts without being detected and without risk, why should I not?." --Daniel Peterson, 6/4/14
_Philo Sofee
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Re: On the Dumbness of Mopologist Ethics

Post by _Philo Sofee »

Commentary like that seems like it's intended to establish Peterson's privilege and connections (which, on a certain level, I suppose it does), but you just have to wonder why on earth he feels the need to do so.

Because deep down in Peterson's soul he has accepted (and hates it) the canard that he can never do enough to be truly worthy of Elohimhood. He is desperately trying to impress Heavenly Father (like Nibley said he was trying to do, to, of all people, Lou Midgley in a taped audience attended interview!), as if that is what Heavenly Father will only accept from his kids. In Mormonism you can never do enough, you are always behind, and even for the Grace of Jesus Christ, you still fall short and are not worthy. And there is nothing you can do to erase the guilt, the fear, that you aren't good enough and you aren't going to make it. Peterson is trying to prove to himself and Heavenly Father that he's man enough to make it on his own anyway, regardless of the obstacles (God's little tests for him to make him prove he is serious) God puts in his way to test his worthiness. One can never measure up in Mormonism. The guilt and fear are the carrot on the stick for Mormons, not the love of Christ and God.

The cure to this horrible disease of the mind and spirit? To wake up and realize that you already are it, and the very life you are living right now everyday is God's life, and it is perfectly fine as it is... right now. That is the great secret Mormonism desperately does not want you to find out. It wants to control you because it also operates on fear.

Once one realizes one is the light, one is the love, one is already the God, the Self, the Atman, the Brahman of reality, all problems dissolve, all guilt is assauged and disappears, and pure wonder, delight, love, and play opens up to this joyous creation. One does not have to become anything when you are already everything. It's why Mormonism fails. It's ego-driven and that is all it knows how to install into its members. There is no goal actually, to attain to though. We are already here where we belong and living exactly as we can and God is perfectly happy with it, since it's him anyway. The separate ego is the illusion of which Mormonism is completely ignorant of, and which is the underlying factor to their guilt, fear, and hatred of life and joy and this earth.
Dr CamNC4Me
"Dr. Peterson and his Callithumpian cabal of BYU idiots have been marginalized by their own inevitable irrelevancy defending a fraud."
_MsJack
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Re: On the Dumbness of Mopologist Ethics

Post by _MsJack »

Doctor Scratch wrote:The Mopologists have never been interested in actual knowledge; instead, they are interested in the affectations and pretenses of knowledge. Just recently, DCP was marveling over Will Schryver's ability to speak a second language. How magnificent! How smartly this reflects on the educational attainment and intellectual gravitas of this former Mopologist from southern Utah!

Almost anybody with access to the Internet can log onto Duolingo and learn a second language for free. For most languages, Duolingo can take you to an A2-B1 level of fluency in a couple of years.

And the people learning languages on Duolingo are usually juggling busy work lives. They don't get to immerse themselves in the language for two years on someone else's dime.
"It seems to me that these women were the head (κεφάλαιον) of the church which was at Philippi." ~ John Chrysostom, Homilies on Philippians 13

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_Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: On the Dumbness of Mopologist Ethics

Post by _Doctor CamNC4Me »

crap, man. I'm working on my third language using Harry Potter as my source text, I've traveled extensively, and I have a few degrees from respectable institutions. I also used my real name to post on Mr. Peterson's blog. Why in the world wouldn't they want, by their standards, a virtual ubermensch participating in their comments sections exchanging repartee as, I humbly submit, a peer?

Tsk tsk. Such a shame.

- Doc
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.

Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.
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