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The CES Letter Rebuttal, Part 1

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Part 1: Manipulations & Dishonesty in the CES Letter

by Sarah Allen

 

Editor’s Note: This post introduces a long series of rebuttals to the CES Letter. New parts will be forthcoming on this blog. You may notice this post is largely the same as the post that appeared last week.  This post is an updated version of the Reddit post specifically updated to appear on this blog. The original Reddit post was loaded inadvertently. We appreciate Sarah’s effort in preparing this excellent rebuttal.

 

On Reddit, I’m a moderator at the LDS subreddit or forum. While I had heard of the CES Letter and had read it years ago, it wasn’t until recently that I began to realize just how prolific it was. So many of the comments and questions we were seeing on our subreddit were influenced by the Letter. I knew of popular responses to it by Jim Bennett, Michael Ash, Brian Hales, Scott Gordon, and an entire section here at FAIR, and I often referred questioners to those responses. At the same time, I noticed that many of those replies only provided brief overviews of the issues or were somewhat light on cited sources. There was room for a detailed response full of citations and sources showing the readers where to research the answers for themselves. I felt impressed to try my hand at filling that space myself, and also felt that, because the CES Letter was crowdsourced and born on Reddit, a comprehensive reply should also come from Reddit. That’s where I began this series, and FAIR has kindly offered to host them here as well.

When I prayed about how best to start this series, I felt strongly that it should start by highlighting the manipulation techniques and dishonesty of the Letter itself and of the Letter’s author, Jeremy Runnells. I’ll dive into the content of the Letter next week, but this week, I wanted to lay some groundwork.

If you understand that he misrepresented his story and told one thing to the public while saying something completely different to his friends on the Exmormon subreddit, and that he specifically organized the Letter to be as manipulative and overwhelming as possible, it helps you put the Letter’s questions and accusations in the proper context. This first post is not meant to be an attack on Jeremy’s character. It’s merely meant to show that he’s not “just asking questions,” the way he’s claimed. It’s to show that the entire premise the letter, a public cry for help from a floundering member who desperately wanted to save his testimony, was false. In fact, Runnells was already mentally out of the Church, trying to devise the best way to lead away the rest of his family, and actively helping others push their own family and friends out of the Church as well. That information is important because it sets the stage for what follows and helps you gauge the truthfulness of the document itself.

I’d like to start by explaining what the CES Letter is and how it came to be, and then I’ll move into some of the manipulations found in the Letter and in the responses by the Letter’s fans.

[Read more…] about The CES Letter Rebuttal, Part 1

Come, Follow Me Week 35 – Doctrine and Covenants 93

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“Ye Were Also In The Beginning With The Father”

By Kara Dawson

D&C 93 teaches in two separate verses that “ye were also in the beginning with the Father” (v.23) and “man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be” (v.29). Joseph Smith’s teachings during his lifetime demonstrated clearly that spirits were coeternal with God. In an 1839 sermon he taught as recorded by William Clayton, “The Spirit of Man is not a created being…It existed from Eternity and will exist to eternity. Anything created cannot be eternal.” (1) In the King Follett sermon given in 1844, he noted, “God never did have the power to create the spirit of man at all.” (2) “I must come to the resurrection of the dead, the soul, the mind of man, the immortal spirit. All men say God created it in the beginning. The very idea lessens man in my estimation; I do not believe the doctrine, I know better. Hear it all ye ends of the world, for God has told me so.” (3)

Yet how do we reconcile these verses with modern-day accepted Church teachings that, “All men and women are literally the sons and daughters of God” (4), and that, “those who abide in the covenant and are exalted in the highest degree of the celestial kingdom will have spirit children in the eternities”(5). Whether spirits existed eternally or were born in some process beyond our comprehension is one of the areas in which we are waiting for further light and knowledge, and this is clearly not a topic that we need to understand for our salvation. Church members have a variety of opinions on the subject, informed by both canonized scripture, teachings of Church leaders and folk doctrine, and consensus cannot be reached given the current lack of clarity; yet, it’s an interesting subject to study and ponder. The purpose of this short article is not to lay out the arguments for each, but to summarise the main ideas in terms of questions and the sources of scholarship available for further study on the evolution of LDS thought on the subject.

The two basic possibilities are: [Read more…] about Come, Follow Me Week 35 – Doctrine and Covenants 93

96% of US physicians have done something to stay healthy. Only 57% of US adults have followed their lead.

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What is this “pro tip” that is almost universally practiced by doctors?  Receiving the COVID-19 vaccine.

In addition to being a faithful Latter-day Saint, I’m a physician. I have many doctor friends. The statistic referenced in the title (which came from this AMA survey) matches what my anecdotal experience tells me — doctors are getting vaccinated.  Among my doctor friends there is a wide range of political opinions, ranging from avowed socialists to gun-toting libertarians and everything in between.  On a host of other COVID-19 related topics, these friends have extremely diverse opinions. And yet when it comes to getting the vaccine, there is broad consensus.

This might seem like a strange topic to discuss on a Latter-day Saint apologetics blog, but given the reaction by some members of the church to the recent First Presidency statement urging vaccination, I’d like to offer some thoughts on why I believe there is near-universal vaccination among US physicians.

In this post, I’ll discuss three factors I believe contribute: (1) Understanding the science behind the vaccine; (2) anecdotal experience of physicians, and (3) awareness of public health data. In each of these three areas, physicians have a unique perspective worth taking a closer look at. [Read more…] about 96% of US physicians have done something to stay healthy. Only 57% of US adults have followed their lead.

Defending Agency

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Every church leader or parent has been confronted with the same basic argument—

“You can’t make me put my phone away! What ever happened to agency?”

“I can date before I’m 16 if I want to because I have agency!”

“You can’t tell me to wear a mask at church. I have my agency!”

“The Church’s stance on abortion is inconsistent with agency.”

“Why is the Church opposed to same sex marriage? Don’t we believe in agency?”

Partly because we place such a high doctrinal value on agency, Latter-day Saints are often poorly equipped to deal with these criticisms.

Before the world began, Lucifer “rebelled against [God], and sought to destroy the agency of man” (Moses 4:3).  Satan and his followers lost the ensuing war and were cast out, but they continue to “rage in the hearts of the children of men, and stir them up in anger against that which is good” (2 Nephi 28:20). Satan has never conceded his loss; He persists in trying to “destroy the agency of man.”

Kindling the Fire of Faith

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As anyone knows who has been camping, it takes a lot of work to kindle a fire and to keep it burning brightly, especially when confronted with the challenges of wind or rain. Likewise, it takes constant spiritual effort to kindle and maintain the fire of faith in the face of criticism and doubt. Just as blocking wind or rain alone cannot kindle a fire, it is impossible to kindle the fire of faith by responding to criticism and doubt alone. Elder M. Russell Ballard related an interesting story to demonstrate this point:

When I was a mission president, a fine elder came to me. I asked, ‘How can I help you?’

‘President,’ he said, ‘I think I’m losing my testimony.’

I asked him how that could be possible.

‘For the first time I have read some anti-Mormon literature,’ he said. ‘I have some questions, and nobody will answer them for me. I am confused, and I think I am losing my testimony.’

I asked him what his questions were, and he told me. They were the standard anti-Church issues, but I wanted a little time to gather materials so I could provide meaningful answers. So we set up an appointment ten days later, at which time I told him I would answer every one of his questions. As he started to leave, I stopped him. ‘Elder, you’ve asked me several questions here today,’ I said. ‘Now I have one for you.’

‘Yes, President?’

‘How long has it been since you’ve read from the Book of Mormon?’ I asked.

His eyes dropped. He looked at the floor for a while. Then he looked at me. ‘It’s been a long time, President,’ he confessed.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘You have given me my assignment. It’s only fair that I give you yours. I want you to promise me that you will read in the Book of Mormon for at least one hour every day between now and our next appointment.’ He agreed that he would do that.

Ten days later he returned to my office, and I was ready. I pulled out my papers to start answering his questions. But he stopped me.

‘President,’ he said, ‘that isn’t going to be necessary.’ Then he explained, ‘I know that the Book of Mormon is true. I know Joseph Smith is a prophet of God.’

‘Well, that’s great,’ I said. ‘But you’re going to get answers to your questions anyway. I worked a long time on this, so you just sit there and listen.’

And so I answered all of those questions, and then asked, ‘Elder, what have you learned from this?’ And he said, ‘Give the Lord equal time.’

(M. Russell Ballard, How to Find Safety and Peace)

[Read more…] about Kindling the Fire of Faith

Shaken Faith Syndrome: Early to the Party, But Still Relevant

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Available from the FAIR bookstore

[Cross-posted from Mike Ash’s personal blog.]

My first book attempted to assuage the faith-crisis concerns of struggling Latter-day Saints. The work continues.

The First Step

At the risk of sounding boastful, I’ve authored three books (with a fourth on the way) and hundreds of articles (both in print and on-line) in the hopes of reinforcing and safeguarding the faith of Latter-day Saints. I don’t mention these accomplishments to brag, but rather to lament. Despite hundreds of hours researching and writing thousands of pages of material, I find that through the years, over and over again, members who struggle with their faith fall trap to the same problems I addressed a dozen years ago.

Earlier this year (2020), I received an email from someone who asked if my views expressed in my book Shaken Faith Syndrome (2008 and updated in 2013) have changed since I wrote the book. My answer was that the arguments I made in that book are virtually unchanged and that the cognitive suggestions and observations I made then, are equally applicable now.

As I’ll try to address in future articles, members today stumble over the same cognitive dilemmas (often of their own making) which sets them up for problems when they encounter faith-challenging material. As a people, we haven’t matured in our intellectual approach to gospel topics (despite the fact that even the Church had made attempts to update our thinking with articles such as those included in the Gospel Topics, essays). [Read more…] about Shaken Faith Syndrome: Early to the Party, But Still Relevant

Come, Follow Me Week 14 – Easter

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I was raised by two parents who loved science. My father was a biology teacher. He was a favorite at the high school, with lots of silly and whacky exercises that helped the students remember the material. I recall one phone call from a Yale university student who called to thank my dad for his help passing his Yale biology exams. He said that he just had to think back on the play they performed in his high school class when the students acted out the various parts of cellular mitosis. My father did try his hand at teaching college classes as well, but he said it wasn’t as much fun. He claimed he would try to crack a biology joke, but the college students would respond by dutifully writing it into their notes as if it were fact.

My mother was also a teacher. She taught grade school, and then later middle school. Her favorite magazine was Scientific American. Each month, she would read the magazine from cover to cover. She would read every single article. Then she would want to discuss it. Imagine my groan and eye roll as a 13 year old when she would start reading the latest article to me and state how it would change everything. Even as she moved into her 80s, she still read it. When I visited, she would want to talk about dark matter, gene splicing, or some other current science issue. She would also read to us as kids when we went on road trips to the coast, or over to Utah. We live in California. She wouldn’t read novels. No, she would read the latest psychology book, or book on mind science.

I believe every student should study science even if they have no plans to go into it. Science teaches us to ask questions. Asking questions is good. Asking questions is important. Science also teaches us how to evaluate evidence. Understanding how to evaluate evidence is very good, and very important.

How Does Science Relate To My Faith? [Read more…] about Come, Follow Me Week 14 – Easter

FAIR Voice Podcast #31: Murder Among the Mormons with Richard Turley

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Podcast: Download (46.7MB)

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Richard E. Turley Jr. was named as the new managing director of the Public Affairs Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on April 26, 2016.

Prior to his appointment, he served for eight years as assistant Church historian and recorder. He also served for eight years as managing director of the Family and Church History Department, overseeing the Church Archives and Records Center, the Church History Library, and the Museum of Church History and Art, which collectively contain the world’s largest collection of resources for the study of Latter-day Saint history and one of the richest collections on the settlement of the western United States.

He also oversaw the Church’s worldwide family history operations, which include hundreds of documentary microfilming and digital-imaging projects in dozens of countries; the Family History Library, the largest genealogical library in the world; the Granite Mountain Records Vault, a secure preservation facility for copies of millions of records from around the globe; over 4,000 branch family history centers on six continents; and teams that generated highly acclaimed software and data products.In addition, he supervised the Church Historical Department from 1986 to 2000 and the Family History Department from 1996 to 2000. The two departments were merged in 2000.

Under his guidance in 1999, the Family History Department launched the popular FamilySearch.org Web site, an online resource that provides free access to some of the world’s largest genealogical databases. Under his direction, the department also issued compact disc products containing useful historical data, including the records of the Freedman’s Bank (a treasure trove of information for African-American genealogy); the Mormon Immigration Index; Vital Records Indexes from several European countries and Australia; the 1880 United States Census; the 1881 Canadian Census; and the 1881 British Census, which was awarded the Besterman/McColvin Award from the Library Association of Great Britain. During his tenure, the department furnished data to the National Park Service and the Ellis Island Foundation for populating the Ellis Island database.

Under his editorship in 2002, the Family and Church History Department published Selected Collections From the Archives of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2002), a collection of 74 DVDs containing nearly 500,000 color images of many of the Church’s most important early documents, including the Joseph Smith Collection and Brigham Young’s letterbooks. Critics have hailed Selected Collections as “the most important event in modern Mormon publishing,” “an achievement of such significance that no praise, no matter how effusive, seems sufficiently laudatory.”

Turley received a bachelor’s degree in English from Brigham Young University, where he was a Spencer W. Kimball Scholar. He later graduated from the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University, where he served as executive editor of the law review and was elected to the Order of the Coif. He also received the Hugh B. Brown Barrister’s Award, presented each year to the graduating student who demonstrates the highest standards of classroom performance.

He is a member of the editorial board for The Joseph Smith Papers and general editor of The Journals of George Q. Cannon series. His book Victims: The LDS Church and the Mark Hofmann Case (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992) is an oft-cited history of the famous Hofmann forgery-murder case of the 1980s. Along with Ronald W. Walker and Glen M. Leonard, he has written Massacre at Mountain Meadows, was published in 2008 by Oxford University Press.

Turley served as president of the Genealogical Society of Utah and was a member of the committee for Fort Douglas Heritage Commons, a “Save America’s Treasures” official project that served as the athlete village for the 2002 Winter Olympics and currently houses University of Utah students. He has also been a vice president of the Small Museum Administrators Committee, American Association of Museums; a member of the Utah State Historical Records Advisory Board, National Historical Publications and Records Commission; and a member of the Copyright Task Force, Society of American Archivists.

In 2004, he received the Historic Preservation Medal from the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Hanna Seariac is a MA student in Greek and Latin at Brigham Young University. She works as a research assistant on a biblical commentary and as a research assistant on early Latter-day Saint history. Her interests thematically center around sacrifice, magic, and priesthood as it pertains to ancient Judaism, early Christianity, ancient Egyptian religion, and early Restoration history.

FairMormon Questions: How should we respond when we feel men and women are unequal at church?

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FairMormon has a service where questions can be submitted and they are answered by volunteers. If you have a question, you can submit it at http://www.fairmormon.org/contact. We will occasionally publish answers here for questions that are commonly asked, or are on topics that are receiving a lot of attention. (The names used in the answer have been changed.)

QUESTION:

We were recently asked to address “Male Privilege” in the church to help a teenage girl looking for answers to questions such as:  How should we respond when we feel men and women are unequal at church? What should we do if we have a nagging feeling that perhaps our culture doesn’t live up to our doctrine? What do we do when we perceive sexism or implicit biases at church? [Read more…] about FairMormon Questions: How should we respond when we feel men and women are unequal at church?

FairMormon Conference Podcast #61 – Mark Ashurst-McGee, “Joseph Smith’s ‘New Translation’ of the Bible, His Use of Adam Clarke’s Bible Commentary, and the Question of Plagiarism”

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This podcast series features past FairMormon Conference presentations. This presentation is from our 2020 conference, held in August. If you would like to watch the video of this and all the other presentations from our 2020 conference, you can still purchase the video streaming.

Mark Ashurst-McGee, Joseph Smith’s “New Translation” of the Bible, His Use of Adam Clarke’s Bible Commentary, and the Question of Plagiarism

Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity is available from the FairMormon Bookstore.

Mark Ashurst-McGee is a senior historian in the Church History Department and the senior research and review editor for the Joseph Smith Papers, where he also serves as a specialist in document analysis and documentary editing methodology. He holds a PhD in history from Arizona State University and has trained at the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents. He has coedited several volumes of The Joseph Smith Papers and is also coeditor of Foundational Texts of Mormonism: Examining Major Early Sources (Oxford University Press, 2018). He is also the author of several articles on Joseph Smith and early Latter-day Saint history published in scholarly journals and popular venues.