"stacker" and his bravado:
I can make an apologetic for any religious claim.
I can deconstruct any religious claim.
"stacker" on young LDS apologists:
If you're Mormon and under 30, don't lecture people on the church, church history, apologetics or anything else.
You grew up in an entirely different religion and are ignorant to what we experienced and to the church's past in general.
Thank you for your understanding.
_____
These younger Mormon apologists are coming from a completely different environment. A different Mormonism really.
They’ve grown up shaped inside apologetics and polemics, so these reinterpretations feel normal to them.
They haven’t really experienced lived Mormonism as it was, what you might call Bruce R. McConkie Mormonism of certainty and hard claims. They haven’t lived through the church calling things anti Mormon that turned out to be real history.
Instead, they’ve inherited something thinner, more flexible, more abstract, more surface level where they can ignore deep doctrines and past teachings and prophets that teach things they don’t like. And that’s all they know.
They are trained to creatively resolve problems instead of confronting them.
Their informative years were based on “doubt your doubts” while we were raised with Hugh B Browns’ “We must be willing to give up cherished beliefs if evidence and truth require it.”
So when contradictions show up, the instinct isn’t to question the system like it was for many of us Gen Xers. Their instinct is to reframe it. That’s what they believe is the best way to find truth.
The Stick of Joseph podcast is an example. A couple guys in their 20s. If you watched that interview with John Dehlin, it’s hard to miss the combination: confidence without context and arrogance.
But it’s not just indoctrination. This social media thing has given them more incentive.
In-group platitudes and shallow statements get likes and views and praise. Their identity, platform, and status are tied to defending the system so their reasoning is motivated, not neutral. They haven’t had a chance to think for themselves. And now with social they cannot.
You can see these apologetics have changed from guys like Hugh Nibley to apologetics that just try to soften problems.
Ward Radio, Stick of Joseph, all these shows have zero depth. They’ve shifted from Hugh Nibley claims to how do we create ambiguity so anything could be allowed to be true? It’s the only way to survive modern scrutiny, by making everything unfalsifiable.
So now they’re arrogant. They think they’ve figured it out better than us old guys. Because they’re “more nuanced” and “intellectually mature” than the past generations.
They don’t get caught up in minor things like polygamy, race in the priesthood, anachronisms, Book of Abraham translations like us old idiots do. And it’s our fault we didn’t research this stuff and just believed the church when we were growing up.
Really the generations have grown up in entirely different religions and cultures. And while we may have been trained to think more black and white, the younger generation has been trained against thinking critically.
_____
I don't think this is just a generational thing though.
Like, even my dad knew about the stuff you listed growing up, and he's in his sixties now. I know plenty of people older than you who were "raised in the same church" I was.
At the same time, there are people my age who never heard about seer stones. I think it depends on people's parents and wards—and no one is a better or worse person because of their opportunities for learning.
And guess what? People can and will sincerely hold different opinions than you without being shackled by indoctrination, motivated reasoning, and social media pressures.
As a convert from evangelical Protestantism, my wife and I joined the Church in 1977. We’re now a very young 73 
. Shortly afterward, we moved from Arkansas to Utah so I could finish my undergraduate degree at BYU and receive my Air Force commission.
Over the nearly five decades since, we’ve alternated between lengthy periods of activity and inactivity, spanning almost 20 different wards. After our most recent dozen years of inactivity, we’ve been fully engaged in the work again for the past 16 months.
Having joined as an adult rather than being raised in the Church, I lack the lifelong cultural context many members have. But my repeated cycles of activity have given me a unique vantage point: a clear contrast between the Church I joined in the 1970s and the one I encounter today.
One of the most striking differences is the shift in how we speak of Church leaders. In the ’70s and ’80s, teachings and talks routinely drew from a broad chorus of past prophets, apostles, and thinkers. Today, the focus has narrowed almost exclusively to the words of the current Church president—or perhaps the immediate predecessor. We no longer seem to have public intellectuals of the caliber of Hugh Nibley or Truman Madsen, or the rich intellectual discourse they represented.
I don’t view today’s Church as a different religion. The core doctrines and covenants remain. But it does feel like a dramatically different version—one that, to my taste, has traded depth for a lighter, more streamlined approach. Frankly, I’m not a fan of the fluff.
. Shortly afterward, we moved from Arkansas to Utah so I could finish my undergraduate degree at BYU and receive my Air Force commission.
Over the nearly five decades since, we’ve alternated between lengthy periods of activity and inactivity, spanning almost 20 different wards. After our most recent dozen years of inactivity, we’ve been fully engaged in the work again for the past 16 months.
Having joined as an adult rather than being raised in the Church, I lack the lifelong cultural context many members have. But my repeated cycles of activity have given me a unique vantage point: a clear contrast between the Church I joined in the 1970s and the one I encounter today.
One of the most striking differences is the shift in how we speak of Church leaders. In the ’70s and ’80s, teachings and talks routinely drew from a broad chorus of past prophets, apostles, and thinkers. Today, the focus has narrowed almost exclusively to the words of the current Church president—or perhaps the immediate predecessor. We no longer seem to have public intellectuals of the caliber of Hugh Nibley or Truman Madsen, or the rich intellectual discourse they represented.
I don’t view today’s Church as a different religion. The core doctrines and covenants remain. But it does feel like a dramatically different version—one that, to my taste, has traded depth for a lighter, more streamlined approach. Frankly, I’m not a fan of the fluff._____
I dunno where you're drawing the cutoff but I'm and 44 this looks like nonsense from my experience. There was never a "Bruce R. McConkie Mormonism of certainty and hard claims"; there was more varied understanding of the doctrine and much broader speculation among the general membership when I grew up than there is now.
And come on, man. Camus, Sarte, Rand, Zizek, Habermas, and Hannah Arendt published in their 20s, just to name a few. Stephen Hawking wrote his doctoral thesis when he was 24. The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, Great Gatsby, Wuthering Heights, and Frankenstein were written by people in their 20s.
"Kids these days don't care about my cold hard facts" Maybe your arguments are not as convincing to others or as factual as you want them to be. I haven't seen anything particularly compelling from you, rather, I see a lot of "I am only willing to accept evidence from inside this box. Your evidence is not in it currently and the box is closed, so I win." I'm being uncharitable for the sake of brevity, but that's how I see it.
Honestly the anti-mormon arguments haven't matured or developed in decades. The only stuff that seems to stick is emotional appeals or leftist indoctrination. I'm seeing the same stuff from church antagonists that I saw 25 years ago, and it was more convincing then that it is now because the last 25 years have turned out a LOT of very interesting analysis of our doctrine and scripture.
What answers to these “old arguments” have you come up with? At least The old Mormons weren’t that dishonest in making up bat shit crazy responses To non Mormon criticisms.
Today Mormons literally throw the previous brethren under the bus on the regular. If this keeps going on like this pretty soon Joseph will just be a cool guy but hardly ever said anything prophetic, if you youngsters have anything to say about it.
Just listen to Jacob Hanson, or Hayden Carroll, and it’s super clear they run away from anything controversial said previously from the very prophets who built the Mormon church from the ground up.
They aren’t even defending church doctrine as it currently stands. Look at Jacob’s debate with God logic, nothing he said is found anywhere in current Mormon doctrine. These guys are just making shit up as they go.
It’s really easy to discard any and all the stupid things the prophets said that makes it hard to square Mormonism with any Christian theology .
Even worse, these guys do it in the most cherry picking, circular, special pleading way I have ever witnessed. It rivals the Dawah boys on the Muslim side, and that’s saying a lot, because they are absolute hacks .
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