I Thought Harold Bloom Was Our Friend!

[Storm Rider]

Even if you only learned everything that Smith ever taught, you know almost nothing about his history. A person is not merely the sum of what he teaches. Besides, the LDS Church officially presents only a tiny fraction of what he taught. The church does this for good, practical reasons, but they fail to convey much insight as to who he really was, because they lack historical context.

I believe that I know Jesus well, but yet it is only from a spiritual perspective. Do I need to know the historical perspective to know Jesus better? No, I don't think so. In fact, I don't think I need to understand the historical perspective to understand the importance of the messages of any of the prophets from Adam forward.

Attempting to present a need to understand historical perspective to know the man is to overlook his purpose or his calling from God. This standard is a personal issue, but it holds no eternal value.

[Xander]

That was a pretty dumb rant by Bloom. I hate conspiracy theories. Say what you want about Mormon doctrines, but on the whole they are good people who aren't interested in theocratic takeovers.

[thesometimesaint]

Xander:

Until Jesus the Christ does it.

[Loran Blood]

I read Bloom's The American Religion: The Emergence of The Post-Christian Nation in 1993 when it was first published (I still have it here, somewhere) and there should be no illusions that Bloom was ever a "friend" of the Latter day Saints. Bloom was "friendly" to the Church only in the sense that he saw it as one of the main (I believe primary, in his thesis) element of an indigenous American "gnostic" movement away from traditional Christianity and to a unique American religious synthesis. His analysis was purely sociological in nature, and Bloom is a staunch secularist with no interest in defending the Church, or any other religion. He was simply making a sociological/anthropological point about the Church, in that book, not supporting it in any way as over against any other religion on personal philosophical grounds.

[Loran Blood]

The Conservative narrative is that greed is a euphemism for motivated self-interest, which is the precise cause of America's greatness. For conservatives, “corporate greed,” is an entirely good thing.

Except that rational self interest has nothing whatsoever to do with "greed," that being an entirely different concept. The latter is a bad thing, as much - I would say on balance, more - for conservatives, and especially religious conservatives, than for many others. No economically successful society, if economic success is defined as a situation in which general affluence and economic opportunity is overwhelmingly normative for the vast majority of its members, has ever existed on any other principles that the former.

[thesometimesaint]

Here is how Mr. Bloom describes himself He would later come to describe himself to interviewer D. Leybman in the Paris Review as a "Jewish gnostic," explaining "I am using Gnostic in a very broad way. I am nothing if not Jewish... I really am a product of Yiddish culture

[Loran Blood]

Probably a topic for a different thread, but when the rubber hits the road I just don't see any "crippling" going on from pornography. Ultimately, I suspect the internet is much more damaging to the Church for the ease with which it makes information available as opposed to the ease with which it makes pictures of

available.

Probably because what you "see" here is, quite obviously, purely impressionistic, on your part, and grounded in nothing more than those vague impressions. Pornography's crippling of the soul, mind, and brain, including its cruel addictiveness, are hardly going to show up for anyone who's standards of evidence are as low and as nebulous ad Cinepro's.

The full-throated pro-porn bias at "the other board" is deafening, not in its silence but in its celebratory mood. As I've found out recently, serious discussion of the subject usually succumbs to one of two things in the dark corridors of the Great and Spacious Building, the first being an immediate deterioration of discussion on the topic to High School sniggering and crude humor, and to, for me odd, given long available knowledge on the subject, the aggressive if credulous rehabilitation of Kinsey and his fatally flawed (and criminal, if his own notes and claims are to be taken seriously in his work with infant and child sexuality) and long discredited studies.

Cinepro's own claims belie their weaknesses. Church attendance, home teaching, about the same? Well, perhaps it is the case that it should be greater now than in the past, given the Church's phenominal growth during the last several decades, but if it isn't, one must then wonder what elements in the surrounding cultural melieu are diverting attention away from faithful service in Zion and the "caring for the life of the soul? Want a measure of pornography's "crippling" influence (as well as numerous other features of the Great and Abominable Church of the Devil)? Perhaps its in those sparsely attended Priesthood Quorums. Perhaps its partly in those low home teaching numbers. In the old days (seventies and eighties), to access pornography, one had to go out and buy magazines, publicly attending movies houses showing such material, or buy it by mail. One both had to pay for it and seek it out.

In the Internet age, this has all changed. Pornography is now pervasive, free, and discreet. It saturates the Internet and can be had with a few clicks of the mouse.

The problem with pornography is not its addictiveness per se (although that cannot be minimized or gainsaid), but with its very nature and effects upon the soul (the spirit intelligence and body as a complete, holistic organism). Pornography represents the desacralization and banalization of human sexuality, and hence, represents a silver bullet aimed right at the heart of the family through the destruction of marriage through the destruction of the boundaries and conditions governing the meaning and purpose of human sexuality. Sex as public entertainment and voyeuristic erotic stimulation is precisely this desacraliztion and banalization. Addiction hardly must be present for pornography to represent sin and spiritual death (not to mention its central part it has played in the frightfully rapid disintegration and decline of the culture over the last forty years). Pornography is an integral aspect of the pervasive cult of eroticism that gripped much of western society beginning in the late sixties and which metastasized in the decades since and has now come to virtually define the Zeitgeist with which the Church and the Saints contend.

Edited November 18, 2011 by Loran Blood

[Loran Blood]

And what does he mean by “the moguls of Salt Lake City became plutocrats defining the Republican Party?”

Very good question, as the Republican party per se has never shed its internal mainstream core as party of vast, highly centralized, interventionist government controlled and maintained by technocratic managerial elites. Unfortunately, from my perspective, the brief Reagan interregnum (which is all it actually was) was just what this term implies, an aberration. I'm not saying the Republican party is a party of the Left, as is the Democratic party, but it is not, and never has been a classical liberal (conservative) party. There is a home for conservatives and libertarians there, to be sure, but the Republican establishment has never been friendly to it, and isn't now.

I'm afraid that Bloom is actually so far to the Left, philosophically, that he sees anything less than the institutionalization of the Humanist Manifesto as the threat of a theocratic takeover by confederate flag waving Southern Baptists. This really is fever swamp stuff, and I'll have to admit at being a bit taken by surprise by Bloom here, as I thought he was a clear, careful, nuanced thinker. Indeed, Bloom's secular humanist gnosis seems as fundamentalist and intolerant as he claims the conservative SBC folks are.

I'll have to reevaluate that at this juncture.

Edited November 18, 2011 by Loran Blood

[Loran Blood]

It probably doesn’t help that so many individual Mormons happen to vote Republican.

There is a very good reason (encompassing much of LDS doctrine) why this is the case, and it has nothing to do with the Republican party being, in some sense, the party of authentic Christianity or any other such absolutist claim. It does have to do with the Republican party, with all of its numerous and substantial warts, being the "best fit," overall, for LDS concerns and views, and the Democratic party being, for all intents, so far outside LDS boundaries as to be out of the question.

Edited November 18, 2011 by Loran Blood