A new Interpreter Foundation video short has once again gone up: “Martin Harris Returns.” I hope that you enjoy it. And I hope that you will share it, along with its increasingly numerous siblings.
These video shorts are taken from the Interpreter Foundation docudrama Undaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon. We want people to eventually take a look at the entire docudrama, if they haven’t already watched it; we think that it will be rewarding and well worth their time.
The past three days have been very busy. Thursday and Friday were largely filled with the 2024 FAIR Latter-day Saints conference, and by dinners with conference-attending friends. (I’ll try to report on the conference on Sunday or Monday or thereabouts, when I finally get a chance to take a breath.) Today was centered on the celebration, sponsored by BYU Studies and the Interpreter Foundation, of the completion of Royal Skousen’s Book of Mormon Critical Text Project. After the reception, which was followed by lectures by Royal Skousen and Stan Carmack, we went to the Riverside Country Club for a private dinner for members of the Skousen family as well as for friends, donors and supporters, and volunteers. Then we caught the tail-end of a party celebrating the retirement of a longtime family friend, a brigadier general, from his career of military service. He is now pursuing advanced training in biblical Greek and Hebrew and related subjects, working toward service as a chaplain. This is a very good man.
A person who wishes to remain anonymous kindly passed a pair of quotations on to me that he found “very relevant to church members encountering new information about the past.” Especially, he said, the highlighted portions.
The quotations come from the famous psychologist and psycholinguist Steven Pinker:
The other way in which I do agree with my fellow panelists that political correctness has done an enormous amount of harm in the sliver of the population that might be, I wouldn’t want to say persuadable, but certainly whose affiliation might be up for grabs, comes from the often highly literate, highly intelligent people who gravitate to the alt-right, internet savvy, media savvy, who often are radicalized in that way, who swallow the red pill, as the saying goes, the allusion from The Matrix. When they are exposed the first time to true statements that have never been voiced in college campuses or in The New York Times or in respectable media, that are almost like a bacillus to which they have no immunity, and they’re immediately infected with both the feeling of outrage that these truths are unsayable, and no defense against taking them to what we might consider to be rather repellent conclusions.
He then lists a few uncomfortable statistics and continues . . .
Now let’s say that you have never even heard anyone mention these facts. The first time you hear them, you’re apt to say, number one, the truth has been withheld from me by universities, by mainstream media, and, moreover, you will be vindicated when people who voice these truths are suppressed, shouted down, assaulted, all the more reason to believe that the Left, that the mainstream media, that universities can’t handle the truth. So, you get vindicated over and over again, but, worst of all, you’re never exposed to the ways of putting these facts into context so that they don’t lead to racism and sexism and extreme forms of Anarcho-Libertarianism. So, the politically correct Left is doing itself an enormous disservice when it renders certain topics undiscussable, especially when the facts are clearly behind them because they leave people defenseless the first time they hear them against the most extreme and indefensible conclusions possible. If they were exposed, then the rationale for putting them into proper political and moral context could also be articulated, and I don’t think you would have quite the extreme backlash.
I think that, by analogy, these comments point to the need for frank teaching on and discussion of “difficult issues” among faithful members of the Church. I’m confident that there are intellectually honest ways for believing Latter-day Saints to take such issues in their stride and to remain deeply committed to the restored Gospel. (If I didn’t think so, I myself wouldn’t be an active believer.)
With that in mind, I might add that I’m really looking forward to the continuing rollout of the new CES Letters website. I wish it had been launched ten years ago — as Mark Twain probably didn’t actually say, “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on” — but I hope that, even now, it can do much good. Too many people have been misled and injured by the original “CES Letter.” Maybe some of them can still be helped. And maybe others can be inoculated against falling victim to it in the first place.
By the way, more of Steven Pinker’s comments can be found in the very interesting 2018 Daily Wire article “Harvard Professor Steven Pinker Points Out How Political Correctness Drives The Alt-Right. The Idiot Left Responds By Using Political Correctness To Rip Him.”
Here are two more items that I’ve located for you in the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™. Warning: They are horrific and infuriating. Read them at your own (considerable) risk:
And here, one of the world’s most egregious perpetrators of theistic depravities shamelessly invites others to join in them: “Service Missionaries Needed to Teach Institute Online Through BYU–Pathway Worldwide: Temple-worthy members 26 years and older are invited to facilitate and lead online institute courses with students from all over the world”
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