Brigham Young & The Journal Of Discourses

[Daniel Peterson]

Let me just step in, for what it's worth, and offer a summary statement on the character of Brigham Young, which, I take it, is something of the focus of this thread.

Brigham Young was, so far as I can tell on the basis of years of reading about him, an extremely strong and even tough man. He was a brilliant organizer, and I think his strength and toughness were necessary for the task he faced on the American frontier.

In freely admitting that he was tough, I am not, however, conceding that he was cruel. I've not seen any serious evidence to establish that. Quite the contrary, in fact.

Was he rough by the standards of twenty-first-century "metrosexuality"? No question. Could he sometimes be overly tough? Probably. Was he a good man? I think he clearly was. Was he the kind of man that God could have chosen as a prophet? If you believe in the God who chose Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, Elijah, Elisha, Peter, and many others, he most certainly was.

[wes]

Let me just step in, for what it's worth, and offer a summary statement on the character of Brigham Young, which, I take it, is something of the focus of this thread.

Brigham Young was, so far as I can tell on the basis of years of reading about him, an extremely strong and even tough man. He was a brilliant organizer, and I think his strength and toughness were necessary for the task he faced on the American frontier.

In freely admitting that he was tough, I am not, however, conceding that he was cruel. I've not seen any serious evidence to establish that. Quite the contrary, in fact.

Was he rough by the standards of twenty-first-century "metrosexuality"? No question. Could he sometimes be overly tough? Probably. Was he a good man? I think he clearly was. Was he the kind of man that God could have chosen as a prophet? If you believe in the God who chose Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, Elijah, Elisha, Peter, and many others, he most certainly was.

Thanks for sharing your opinion Daniel. I understand that it is based on years of reading about him. Mine is also based on much reading about him and I have come to an entirely different conclusion. I think we will have to agree to disagree.

[ryanelwood]

Again, this is getting off topic so please feel free to start another thread if you want to discuss it further.

It is not as off topic as you are claiming. If I have read you correctly I believe you are claiming that this quote by Brigham Young demonstrates that he could not possibly be gods prophet because he is ordering people to committ acts of murder. I am trying to gauge if you are being logically consistent with yourself. That is not off topic. There is nothing more frustrating than when Christians accuse Mormonism with all sorts of problems that their own faith also has. It happens all the time. Logical consistency is important. But I believe you don't want to deal with the reality of that logical inconsistency and therefore are claiming it is off topic. I am not sure what more you want to know about Young. I already said he was a religious fanatic. I can't justify Young's statement anymore than any Christian can justify god ordering murders that surpass and go well beyond anything Young said or did. Therefore, if you want to know how a Mormon may justify such statements, I would imagine it would be in the same manner that Christians or Jews can use enough imagination to come up with some bizarre rationalization concering the genocidal god (who was Jesus according to Christians) of the Old Testament. Therefore, if you are one of those, I am not sure if you are because you did not say, then you have the answer already of how a Mormon can justify it.

[wes]

It is not as off topic as you are claiming. If I have read you correctly I believe you are claiming that this quote by Brigham Young demonstrates that he could not possibly be gods prophet because he is ordering people to committ acts of murder. I am trying to gauge if you are being logically consistent with yourself. That is not off topic. There is nothing more frustrating than when Christians accuse Mormonism with all sorts of problems that their own faith also has. It happens all the time. Logical consistency is important. But I believe you don't want to deal with the reality of that logical inconsistency and therefore are claiming it is off topic. I am not sure what more you want to know about Young. I already said he was a religious fanatic. I can't justify Young's statement anymore than any Christian can justify god ordering murders that surpass and go well beyond anything Young said or did. Therefore, if you want to know how a Mormon may justify such statements, I would imagine it would be in the same manner that Christians or Jews can use enough imagination to come up with some bizarre rationalization concering the genocidal god (who was Jesus according to Christians) of the Old Testament. Therefore, if you are one of those, I am not sure if you are because you did not say, then you have the answer already of how a Mormon can justify it.

I think you should start a thread titled "Logical Consistency" which seems to be your primary concern.

[Koneko]

I am curious as to the context in which this statement was made because it gives me reasonable doubt as to the legitimacy of Mormonism.

It may also be interesting to consider the context in which you understand his statement, in addition to the one it was made in.

I got to thinking about why we understand this statement so differently. I am coming from the direction of believing that the church is true, and evaluating the statement given that knowledge. I therefore interpret it in a way that corresponds to the gospel, which I know does not advocate violence in any way. I understand it this way because I have the context of a testimony in the truthfulness of the gospel. If BY was advocating violence, then of course that is wrong. But because of my personal understanding of the truth, I do not believe that was his intent.

Wes, I believe you are coming from the opposite side of this and trying to find(or shelf) a testimony by evaluating the most discordant parts first, hoping that if you can prove or disprove these things, then the rest of the gospel is either true or false respectively. Have you considered approaching things from the opposite direction? Ie. trying to build a testimony of the core doctrines first, understanding the most straightforward and harmonious parts before tackling the parts that cause you the most trouble? Cheers

[wes]

It may also be interesting to consider the context in which you understand his statement, in addition to the one it was made in.

I got to thinking about why we understand this statement so differently. I am coming from the direction of believing that the church is true, and evaluating the statement given that knowledge. I therefore interpret it in a way that corresponds to the gospel, which I know does not advocate violence in any way. I understand it this way because I have the context of a testimony in the truthfulness of the gospel. If BY was advocating violence, then of course that is wrong. But because of my personal understanding of the truth, I do not believe that was his intent.

Wes, I believe you are coming from the opposite side of this and trying to find(or shelf) a testimony by evaluating the most discordant parts first, hoping that if you can prove or disprove these things, then the rest of the gospel is either true or false respectively. Have you considered approaching things from the opposite direction? Ie. trying to build a testimony of the core doctrines first, understanding the most straightforward and harmonious parts before tackling the parts that cause you the most trouble? Cheers

Thanks for you suggestion Koneko, but as someone who was raised in Mormonism, I have already been down that path. My investigation has led me to discover that there was a whole heck of a lot that I was never told about in Sunday School or Sacrament Meeting.

[ryanelwood]

I think you should start a thread titled "Logical Consistency" which seems to be your primary concern.

Problem is I don't think you would post on that thread because you are resistent to answer the question which is about your own consistency. Am I misreading you that you believe Young's quote disqualifies him from being a prophet? So the topic would be what qualifies on for being a prophet, am I wrong? Therefore, if you are using this quote from Young to disqualify Young as a prophet, I am simply asking if you can justify the god, which most Christians believe was Jesus, of the old testament using your own criteria that you have stated about the Young quote which is the topic. How is my question off topic? I think you are claiming it is off topic simply because you don't know how to deal with it. But it is on topic. I have answered your question about justifying Young's statement, now answer mine.

[Deborah]

My investigation has led me to discover that there was a whole heck of a lot that I was never told about in Sunday School or Sacrament Meeting.

Please not that old canard!

[wes]

Problem is I don't think you would post on that thread because you are resistent to answer the question which is about your own consistency. Am I misreading you that you believe Young's quote disqualifies him from being a prophet? So the topic would be what qualifies on for being a prophet, am I wrong? Therefore, if you are using this quote from Young to disqualify Young as a prophet, I am simply asking if you can justify the god, which most Christians believe was Jesus, of the old testament using your own criteria that you have stated about the Young quote which is the topic. How is my question off topic? I think you are claiming it is off topic simply because you don't know how to deal with it. But it is on topic. I have answered your question about justifying Young's statement, now answer mine.

I think this is getting off the point of this post which is Brigham Young and not my beliefs. I do not claim to understand the Old Testament. I do not endorse genocide nor would I follow any leader who did. I believe in Jesus who never advocated genocide. In fact, he preached loving your enemies. Again, please start another thread if you want to discuss this further.

Please not that old canard!

Call it whatever you want Deborah, but it's the truth.

[ryanelwood]

I think this is getting off the point of this post which is Brigham Young and not my beliefs.

So you are denying that you BELIEVE this quote from Young disqualifiies him as a prophet since this is not about your beliefs? If the topic is only the context of the quote, you have read it so you know that already.

I do not claim to understand the Old Testament.

Likewise, a Mormon can use that same get out of jail free card as well by saying they do not understand Brigham Young.

I do not endorse genocide nor would I follow any leader who did. I believe in Jesus who never advocated genocide. In fact, he preached loving your enemies. Again, please start another thread if you want to discuss this further.Call it whatever you want Deborah, but it's the truth.

So Jesus was not the god of the Old Testament who did order genocide?

Christians I have met in person do the same thing. They ask a question, I answer. I ask them the exact same sort of question and they refuse because they know they cannot logically deal with the question posed.

[wes]

So you are denying that you BELIEVE this quote from Young disqualifiies him as a prophet since this is not about your beliefs? If the topic is only the context of the quote, you have read it so you know that already.

Likewise, a Mormon can use that same get out of jail free card as well by saying they do not understand Brigham Young.

So Jesus was not the god of the Old Testament who did order genocide?

Christians I have met in person do the same thing. They ask a question, I answer. I ask them the exact same sort of question and they refuse because they know they cannot logically deal with the question posed.

I'll be happy to discuss this in another thread.

[ryanelwood]

I'll be happy to discuss this in another thread.

Well if you insist I guess we can start another thread and discuss the same things. You originally asked for Young's context, you know it now right? Your other statement in the opening thread was, "I am curious as to the context in which this statement was made because it gives me reasonable doubt as to the legitimacy of Mormonism." One person aske why to which you answered, "I have found the responses uncompelling. There is no context in which Brigham's statement can be justified. He both endorses murder and admits he himself would do it under certain circumstances. His words are vengeful, un-Christlike, and just plain scary. I find it hard to believe that a prophet of God who claims to be representing the true gospel of Christ would ever make such statements." So the issue is what you BELIEVE about Young based on this quote. So what is so off topic about asking you how YOU can justify the god of the Old Testament, which is Jesus according to most Christians, when that god also endorses murder and actually did it under certain circumstances, god did murder at Sodom and Gomorah and flooded the entire world. Gods words and actions are vengeful, un-Christlike, and just plain scary. I find it hard to believe that a God who did such things could be a loving God.

I can use your own words to demonstrate that it is not off topic. How is it off topic?

[wes]

Well if you insist I guess we can start another thread and discuss the same things. You originally asked for Young's context, you know it now right? Your other statement in the opening thread was, "I am curious as to the context in which this statement was made because it gives me reasonable doubt as to the legitimacy of Mormonism." One person aske why to which you answered, "I have found the responses uncompelling. There is no context in which Brigham's statement can be justified. He both endorses murder and admits he himself would do it under certain circumstances. His words are vengeful, un-Christlike, and just plain scary. I find it hard to believe that a prophet of God who claims to be representing the true gospel of Christ would ever make such statements." So the issue is what you BELIEVE about Young based on this quote. So what is so off topic about asking you how YOU can justify the god of the Old Testament, which is Jesus according to most Christians, when that god also endorses murder and actually did it under certain circumstances, god did murder at Sodom and Gomorah and flooded the entire world. Gods words and actions are vengeful, un-Christlike, and just plain scary. I find it hard to believe that a God who did such things could be a loving God.

I can use your own words to demonstrate that it is not off topic. How is it off topic?

I think it's off-topic because it speaks to the nature of God and Jesus which is an entirely different subject.

[Daniel Peterson]

Thanks for sharing your opinion Daniel. I understand that it is based on years of reading about him. Mine is also based on much reading about him and I have come to an entirely different conclusion. I think we will have to agree to disagree.

Alright.

Then, for the record, let me just say, very clearly, that I think your judgment of Brigham Young's character is fundamentally wrong and inaccurate. And I'm reasonably certain that, in saying so, I reflect the overwhelming consensus of serious historians who have worked on and "around" Brigham Young. (I've spoken with a number of them, good friends of mine, on this very subject over the years.)

[wes]

Alright.

Then, for the record, let me just say, very clearly, that I think your judgment of Brigham Young's character is fundamentally wrong and inaccurate. And I'm reasonably certain that, in saying so, I reflect the overwhelming consensus of serious historians who have worked on and "around" Brigham Young. (I've spoken with a number of them, good friends of mine, on this very subject over the years.)

Thanks again for sharing your opinion Daniel. I've read historians who vastly differ with you, so again we'll have to agree to disagree.

[tomfoolery]

Just for the sake of future readers that do not wish to wade through the mass of previous posts, I will quote a post by selek to make you aware of the nature of this thread and it's OP.

Given that wes keeps hitting the same note in the fugue, but won't elaborate on why, and based upon the characteristics emphasized below, I think it's time.

Beeeeep... beeeep... beeeep...

The TEW (Troll early warning) system is now activated...

We are under a troll watch condition. This means that there may be a troll in the vicinity. Keep on the lookout for posters without a history making accusatory posts, then leaving the discussion unfinished.

Please be advised this is only a warning. People with a real life may not have time to respond to their own threads and only appear as trolls. Also people who have been indoctrinated by anti-mormon ministries may have TTS (Temporary Troll Syndrome) which is characterized by having a single issue and the desire to debunk all mormonism in a single thread.

Trolls will eventually prove their existance by a complete lack of regard for reason and civility when pushing their point. However, if a troll is actually spotted we will broadcast a troll warning. At which time you will be instructed in emergency troll baiting procedures.

We now return you to your regular broadcast thread.

[Daniel Peterson]

I've read historians who vastly differ with you

Who?

Can you name them and their books?

[wes]

Who?

Can you name them and their books?

One example would be Will Bagley and "The Blood of the Prophets"

[Daniel Peterson]

One example would be Will Bagley and "The Blood of the Prophets"

And that, I fear, is probably the best you can do.

Color me unimpressed.

[cinepro]

One example would be Will Bagley and "The Blood of the Prophets"

[Deborah]

Call it whatever you want Deborah, but it's the truth.

You are responsible for what you know or don't know. Some of us have not had the same problems finding information that some of you claim you have.

[Daniel Peterson]

On the Bagley book, see

http://farms.byu.edu/publications/review/?...um=2&id=509

Also relevant to the Mountain Meadows Massacre:

http://farms.byu.edu/publications/review/?...um=1&id=528

And here's what I myself wrote in my "Editor's Introduction" to FARMS Review 15/2 (2003), entitled "Of 'Galileo Events,' Hype, and Suppression: Or, Abusing Science and its History":

Other essays in the present Review can likewise be viewed as responses to what I have termed "hype" and "suppression." Will Bagley's Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows, for example, has received media attention and kudos out of all proportion to its merit as history and on the basis of little or no significant new evidence.84 In their highly critical review of Blood of the Prophets published in a recent number of Mormon Historical Studies, W. Paul Reeve and Ardis E. Parshallâ??respectively a professor of history at Southern Virginia University and an experienced independent researcher based in Utah Valleyâ??acknowledge that the book has some good qualities, but find those seriously outweighed by its defects.85

Bagley's research is extensive and takes advantage of sources not known to Juanita Brooks. His handling of those sources, however, is problematic and at times is manipulated to fit his thesis, and both his prejudices and biases quickly become apparent. Bagley is intent upon implicating Brigham Young in the massacre. To do so, he repaints nineteenth-century Utah with blood. . . .

Bagley is a superb storyteller. Yet the manner in which he constructs his story is designed to reinforce the notion that nineteenth-century Utah was a corrupt cauldron of blood, vice, and hypocrisy. Bagley's prejudices and unexamined assumptions permeate the narrative. In countless places, Bagley labels Mormons and anyone with a kind word for them as ridiculous or worthy of dismissal.86

"In some cases," they say, "Bagley substitutes unsubstantiated gossip for evidence."87 They excoriate him, moreover, for his "manipulation of information" and for announcing conclusions that "go well beyond his evidence." Worse, at a very crucial point in his argument, Bagley has misrepresented the contents of a vital document, an inexcusable act that Reeve and Parshall identify as "a direct violation of the American Historical Association's Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct."88 "Perhaps the real message in Blood of the Prophets," they suggest,

is that considering Bagley's extensive research, he could come up with no better evidence than Dimick Huntington's journal to link "Young to facilitating the murders." And to make even that unsustainable claim, he had to put a new word into Huntington's pen.89

"Even though Bagley claims to be aware of 'the basic rules of the craft of history,'" Reeve and Parshall report, "he consistently violates them in Blood of the Prophets. As a result, Juanita Brooks' The Mountain Meadows Massacre remains the most definitive and balanced account to date."90

84. Will Bagley, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002).

85. W. Paul Reeve and Ardis E. Parshall, review of Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows, by Will Bagley, Mormon Historical Studies 4/1 (2003): 149â??57.

86. Ibid., 150.

87. Ibid., 154.

88. Ibid., 152. On Bagley's truly spectacular distortion of a piece of evidence that is fundamental to his argument, see also Lawrence Coates's review of Blood of the Prophets, by Will Bagley, BYU Studies 41/1 (2003): 153â??58. Two other valuable reviews of Bagley's book, by Paul H. Peterson and Thomas G. Alexander, accompany that of Coates in the same number of BYU Studies, at pp. 159â??66 and 167â??74, respectively.

89. Reeve and Parshall, review of Blood of the Prophets, 156.

90. Ibid., 149.

[The Nehor]

This thread is going places:

[ttribe]

Unbelievable.

[LifeOnaPlate]

One example would be Will Bagley and "The Blood of the Prophets"

I strongly doubt you've even read Bagley.