Have you seen that on CAF? If so, how has LDS been misrepresented?
(Your chance to give the facts.
)
Kalt: 1. I didn’t mention CAF.
2. I didn’t mention Mormons.
However, since you did, how about this:
Beginning Apologetics Vol. 2
Fr. Frank Chacon and Jim Burnham
Answering Islam
Norman L. Geisler and Abdul Saleeb
Answering Jehovah’s Witnesses
Jason Evert
These are the three books for sale on the sidebar this morning. How much would you care to assure me that nothing in any of those books is inaccurate–or that, having been told that the information inside is inaccurate, that the authors/publishers immediately changed that information in the next edition?
Then I pulled this up, the next time I looked at CAF non-Catholic religions;
Inside Mormonism: What Mormons Really Believe
Isaiah Bennett
The Bible and the Qu’ran
Father Jacques Jomier
Beginning Apologetics 9: How To Answer Muslims
Jim Burnham
Now Karl Keating (founder of Catholic Answers…) writes this about Loraine Boettners’ book "
Roman Catholicism" which uses the words of former Catholic priests to tell us “what Catholics really believe.”
Karl Keating:
These are the books—written by disaffected ex-Catholics or by people who never have been Catholic but who have made their mark in the world by pushing unadorned bigotry—from which Boettner gets his juiciest information. Relying on them for the straight story on the Catholic Church is like relying on a political candidate to tell you all the good points about his opponent. . . .
Now it may well be that a man leaving one religion for another can write fairly, without bitterness, about the one he left behind. But it stands to reason that most people who suddenly think they have an urge to write about their change of beliefs just want to vent their frustrations or justify their actions. Their books should be read and used with discretion, and they should not be used at all as explanations of the beliefs of their old religion if the books betray the least hint of rancor.(from Catholicism and Fundamentalism: The Attack on “Romanism” by “Bible Christians”)
And yet his organization publishes, and pushes at us almost constantly, this work by Isaiah Bennett incorporates the very ‘stuff’ that Mr. Keating decries. Oh, he’s not any where near as bad as the website under discussion in this thread, nor does he come down to the level of CRI or CARM, but he still uses pretty standard anti-tactics.
For instance, he absolutely refuses to consider that any Mormon could have anything but the basest motives for doing anything. If Mormons welcome you to a church meeting and are friendly, it’s “love bombing,” not a sincere welcome. If a Mormon shares his faith with you, it can ONLY be because he wants to jot up brownie points towards his own godhood, not because he might genuinely believe his own faith and want to share it. (come to think of it, that statement alone should ring alarm bells…if he didn’t believe it and want to share it, why on earth would he want to ‘earn’ a godhood he doesn’t ultimately believe in? )
Anti-whatevers will address all aspects of the target faith in order to discredit it, and will manipulate whatever he has to in order to do so. Bennett does this. He writes that the divorce rate in Utah is a little higher than the national average…and neglects to mention that among active Mormons it is lower—and lower by three points than the divorce rate of Catholics in America. He had access to the correct statistics, but chose to use the ones that looked bad, even if he had to be deceptive in order to do so.
The rest of his charges regarding Utah are similarly skewed…and that skewing is what is at issue here.
As well, Bennett uses anti-Mormon rhetoric and methods that he had previously condemned and refuted himself when he was a member of the church. He completely ignored his own defenses, and attacks the church (for instance, on polygamy) in areas that he had already addressed and defended. He writes, in
Inside Mormonism, as if he had simply blanked out that part of his life and research.
He also throws out silliness in terms of criticism, such as saying that Joseph Smith’s use of the words “Adieu” and “Alpha and Omega” because they were French and Greek, neither of which languages would have been known by the ancient Americans that Joseph claimed wrote the book.
well, of course not. They didn’t know English, either…but Joseph did, and “adieu” and “alpha and omega” were, by the time of Joseph Smith, also solidly ENGLISH terms, since English is an inveterate stealer of words from other languages, especially when a concept is better expressed by a word from another language, or if we don’t happen to have one that fits.
Finally, Bennett’s insistance that we believe that God had physical sex with Mary…another charge by him that he himself refuted when he was a member of the church, arguing against the very quotes he uses in
Inside Mormonism to claim that we do.
In other words, he knows better, but he does it anyway.
And THAT is the very definition of “anti”. .
(and thanks to Barry Bickmore, for his review of the above book)
