Smoot Nails It!!!! The Facts About Jeremy Runnels

[6EQUJ5]

See here:

 

http://www.plonialmonimormon.com/2016/02/ces-letter-author-jeremy-runnells-to.html

 

Quote

Frankly, Jeremy is a textbook example of apostasy as defined by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He has quite literally set up a non-profit foundation so that he could get paid to attack the Church and lead people out of it. (Yes, seriously.)

Why do Apostates embrace these bald-faced and unashamed liars?  Runnels should be ashamed.  He's no sincere doubter.  He's a fraud.

[VideoGameJunkie]

I don't mean to be harsh but the Book of Mormon example I can think of is Korihor.

[Rivers]

Was Korihor a member of the church or was he attacking from the outside?

[strappinglad]

1 hour ago, Rivers said:

Was Korihor a member of the church or was he attacking from the outside?

Hard to say. Reading between the lines, it appears he knew quite a bit about the church because he admitted he was deceived . ( or am I confusing him with another whose name is often seen here ?)

[The Nehor]

1 hour ago, strappinglad said:

Hard to say. Reading between the lines, it appears he knew quite a bit about the church because he admitted he was deceived . ( or am I confusing him with another whose name is often seen here ?)

One reading of it is he used to be a priest because Alma points out that he knows very well that the priests are not paid (unless serving in a judiciary capacity). A bit of a strained reading but Korihor seems the type to be an ex-member.

[Monster]

Some Points

• Jeremy certainly is an apostate according to how the church defines apostates currently.
• The article was a classic ad hominem piece. Attack the bearer of the message not the message

[Monster]

11 hours ago, 6EQUJ5 said:

See here:

 

http://www.plonialmonimormon.com/2016/02/ces-letter-author-jeremy-runnells-to.html

 

Why do Apostates embrace these bald-faced and unashamed liars?  Runnels should be ashamed.  He's no sincere doubter.  He's a fraud.

You would have to show examples of actual lies to make that claim. Not just opinion.

[RevTestament]

I think he'll be excommunicated for the same reasons Dehlin was:

• Disputing the nature of our Heavenly Father and the divinity of Jesus Christ.
• Statements that the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham are fraudulent and works of fiction.
• Statements and teachings that reject The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as being the true Church with power and authority from God.

I believe if you asked Jeremy if Joseph Smith was a true prophet, he would say no.

He would also deny that D&C are true scriptures.

He would deny that Joseph Smith restored the true gospel and priesthood. 

He would deny the truthfulness of the additional principles of the true gospel such as baptism for the dead.

Thus, Jeremy has suffered a complete loss of testimony and faith in the restored gospel. 

That is fine as well. My parents are inactive, and suffered a loss of testimony. 

But they aren't preaching actively that these principles are not the true principles of Christ - Jeremy is, and therefore he is preaching against Christ has denied his priesthood, and is apostate. 

Perhaps, one day Jeremy will see that he has been defeated by the cunning arguments of men and the devil. I am working toward that goal. But, he has gotten so far down that path of denial, that he doesn't seem to respond to any true facts and principles shown him to counter these positions he has adopted, but responds with some vitriol or at least disdain. Thus, he has shown he is not open to any other "truth" and is in open rebellion, and is inviting others to follow his path - to follow him away - and now he is asking others to help support him in this effort. I am not saying I am necessarily in favor of his excommunication, but I think it safe to say that he is in a state of apostasy. He should be a man about it, and ask to be removed from the records of the church, rather than play his cat and mouse game - and stop playing a "martyr" for a church he no longer believes in.

[Nevo]

12 hours ago, 6EQUJ5 said:

Why do Apostates embrace these bald-faced and unashamed liars?  Runnels should be ashamed.  He's no sincere doubter.  He's a fraud.

I don't think Runnells is the Antichrist. I think he's a sincere disbeliever. And his backstory isn't mysterious. He's consistently maintained that he became disaffected in the summer of 2012. In fact, on the first page of the Letter to a CES Director, he writes: "Obviously I’m a disaffected member who lost his testimony so it’s no secret which side I’m on at the moment."

I think it's fair to question whether the CES Letter was ever intended to be "a sincere attempt to obtain answers" (Runnells's mind seems to have been pretty much made up when he wrote the letter) but I don't doubt that he was, as he said in the letter, "genuinely interested" in what responses might be made to the objections he raised. Though the letter primarily functions as an apologia for Runnells's disbelief—the published version of the letter is subtitled "Why I Lost My Testimony" and is dedicated to "my beautiful young children…that you may one day understand"—I suspect he may have also wanted to test the strength of his arguments.

I can understand why many here are appalled at Runnells and see him as an agent of the Adversary. If he wasn't a full-fledged apostate in 2013, he certainly is now. He is actively drawing people away from the Church (and monetizing it). But Runnells's view is that "If we have the truth, it cannot be harmed by investigation. If we have not the truth, it ought to be harmed." As he sees it, unfounded beliefs, based on fraud and deception, "ought to be harmed."

While I don't "stand with Jeremy," as a new Facebook meme puts it, neither do I condemn him. That people like Jeremy have lost their testimony because Google is a tragic but not unforeseen consequence of the Church presenting an inaccurate, sanitized version of its past to its members.

 

Edited February 13, 2016 by Nevo

[Kevin Christensen]

Presenting "The Church" as though it were an omniscient calculating moral agent rather than a ragtag gathering of individuals doing the best they can based on the light they have been given  is an important, if not essential part of controlling the narrative. 

 If you haven't, you ought to consider Kuhn's chapter on "The Invisibility of Revolutions", particularly the discussion of Textbooks.

"Textbooks, however, being the pedagogic vehicles for the perpetuation of normal science, have to be rewritten in whole or in part whenever the language, problem-structure, or standards of normal science change. In short, they have to be rewritten in the aftermath of each scientific revolution, and, once rewritten, they inevitably disguise not only the role but the very existence of the revolutions that produced them. Unless he has personally experienced a revolution in his own lifetime, the historical sense either of the working scientist or of the lay reader of textbook literature extends only to the outcome of the most recent revolutions in the field."

"Textbooks thus being by truncating the scientist's sense of his discipline's history and thus proceed to supply a substitute for what they have eliminated. Characteristically, textbooks of science contain just a bit of history, either in an introductory chapter, or more often, in scattered references to the great heroes of an earlier age.From such references both students and professionals come to feel like participants in a long standing historical tradition. Yet the textbook-derived tradition in which scientists come to sense their participation is one that, in fact, never existed. For reasons that are both obvious and highly functional, science textbooks (and too many of the older histories of science) refer only to that part of the work of the past that can easily be viewed as contributions to the statement and solution of the text's paradigm problems.  partly by selection and partly by distortion, the scientists of earlier ages are implicitly represented as having worked with the same set of fixed canons that the most recent revolution in scientific method and theory has made seem scientific. No wonder that textbooks and the  historical tradition they imply have to be rewritten after each scientific revolution.  And no wonder that, as they are rewritten, science once again seems to be largely cumulative."

"..More historical detail, whether of science's present or of its past, could only give artificial status to human idiocyncracy, error, and confusion. Why dignify what science's best and most persistant efforts have made it possible to discard?"

Kuhn, 137-138.

My point is, why hold historians and text book writers of the past (not THE CHURCH as giant omniscient moral agent) up to standards, methods and sources that they did not know or understand and in some cases could not possess or comprehend if they did?  Why not first consider the beam in my own eye, with the expectation that once I deal with my own limits, THEN i can see clearly.

It happens that I am on record, twenty years ago, as saying "Take note that those who send out the young unprepared, or who create faulty background expectations for them, have just as much to answer for as those who stand in the great and spacious building, zealously or morbidly pointing out problems. Whether they intend to or not, both camps can lead innocent individuals to feel shame at clinging to the iron rod, and to lose their way, and wander lost in the broad roads. The disillusioned got their illusions somewhere." 

http://publications.mi.byu.edu/fullscreen/?pub=1436&index=8

It's one thing to encounter new information by going, "Oh,.. that interesting.  I did not know that before.  I wonder what it means for me?  Where can I go to learn more?"  And quite another to decide, after a close and exclusive confrontation with the counsel for the prosecution, that I am an abused victim and need revenge in the most public and profitable venue I can find. 

If Othello had been as interested in removing the beams from his own eye as he was in being a victim, much tragedy could have been averted.  Sure, he ran across bogus information, but what he did with it, in the face of his claim to love his wife, is what makes tragedy so different than comedy.

FWIW

Kevin Christensen

Bethel Park, PA

 

Edited February 14, 2016 by Kevin Christensen

[carbon dioxide]

2 hours ago, Monster said:

Some Points

• Jeremy certainly is an apostate according to how the church defines apostates currently.
• The article was a classic ad hominem piece. Attack the bearer of the message not the message

I disagree.  The article includes links that does attack the messag including some of his own links done by himself.  Another attack on the message would require another huge article to be written.  It is not a cheap attack on Jeremy that he is dumb or an idiot.  It simply shows what his position is regarding the Church.  He is not member who simply wants answers or is searching. 

Edited February 13, 2016 by carbon dioxide

[Tacenda]

I wish the church would just leave people like Jeremy alone.  It just fuels the fire when they go after him.  Any church should just let people alone, like the Dehlin's and Runnell's.  If the church is true, and Christlike, it should turn the other cheek.  You never know what could happen if the church did that, these people might see a way for the church to work for them.  The church set itself up for the fall with it's holding back of crucial information, and if the Lord is running things He'd want to just love them back.

Edited February 13, 2016 by Tacenda

[juliann]

49 minutes ago, Nevo said:

 

While I don't "stand with Jeremy," as a new Facebook meme puts it, neither do I condemn him. That people like Jeremy have lost their testimony because Google is a tragic but not unforeseen consequence of the Church presenting an inaccurate, sanitized version of its past to its members.

 

Even so, I think everyone in this drama needs to demand consistency. Anyone who demands accuracy from another should provide it.  He has the same problem he accuses others of. And ironically, holding his feet to the fire has been the only thing that has gotten him closer to providing what he demands from everyone else and he still has a long way to go. 

What we do know from example is that pulling the Mormon rug out from under them seriously erodes their influence. Not just among Mormons, which would be the church's first concern, I think, but with media. Dehlin used to be able to represent the Mormon view as a Mormon. Now reporters must provide another "inside" viewpoint as a counter. Does anyone seriously doubt that underlies the objection to excommunication? Especially when someone expected their hobby to support them financially? Runnells just doesn't have Dehlin's charisma, marketing skills or breadth.  He has but one product that will be replaced with a better one after he leaves the stage. 

Edited February 13, 2016 by juliann

[canard78]

The faux outrage from some quarters about Runnels' excommunication is pathetic and, as one who would now openly accept the label of "critic", it's embarrassing. 

Runnels clearly has spent the last few years in a proactive effort to undermine faith and draw people out of the church. 

If his first ever version of the letter was the sincere questions of a concerned member, most of what he's done since then is undoubtedly the actions of an apostate. The CES Letter is a shallow and sensationalist fluff piece. 

I was dissapointed  to see so many "moderate Mormons" (those who still maintain activity and faith in spite of their doubts) coming out in support of him too. 

Perhaps the only real surprise in all this is that the church has waited so long before calling a hearing. It would have been perfectly justified many months ago. 

[6EQUJ5]

26 minutes ago, Tacenda said:

I wish the church would just leave people like Jeremy alone.  It just fuels the fire when they go after him.  Any church should just let people alone, like the Dehlin's and Runnell's.  If the church is true, and Christlike, it should turn the other cheek.  You never know what could happen if the church did that, these people might see a way for the church to work for them.  The church set itself up for the fall with it's holding back of crucial information, and if the Lord is running things He'd want to just love them back.

And I wish people like Jeremy would cut the crap and leave the Church alone.

 

[6EQUJ5]

11 minutes ago, canard78 said:

The faux outrage from some quarters about Runnels' excommunication is pathetic and, as one who would now openly accept the label of "critic", it's embarrassing. 

Runnels clearly has spent the last few years in a proactive effort to undermine faith and draw people out of the church. 

If his first ever version of the letter was the sincere questions of a concerned member, most of what he's done since then is undoubtedly the actions of an apostate. The CES Letter is a shallow and sensationalist fluff piece. 

I was dissapointed  to see so many "moderate Mormons" (those who still maintain activity and faith in spite of their doubts) coming out in support of him too. 

Perhaps the only real surprise in all this is that the church has waited so long before calling a hearing. It would have been perfectly justified many months ago. 

But canard, didn't you read Jeremy's most recent press release.  He's only a sincere doubter and the Church never reached out to him "pastorally."

Runnells is merely a more intelligent version of David Twede.  He lies and mainuplates the media trying to control the narrative.

But unfortunately Jeremy is like George Costanza.  The Jeremy and "kolobot" worlds are colliding and the narrative is impossible to spin.

[Teancum]

While personally I think excommunication is an antiquated idea and used to control membership of any religious organization that uses it I also think Jeremy is not sincere right now and all that staging, press conferences, etc. are an attempt for 15 minutes of fame.  More and more I tire of this type of tripe.  Dehlin did it and encourages it and others jump on the band wagon. 

I mean really what did Jeremy expect?  We know the Church we belong to. It is an authoritarian organization that strongly frowns on public dissent.  Don't pretend you are some innocent doubter when you have been very public for quite some time about the fact that you believe the Church wrong and its founder built it on fraudulent claims. 

[bluebell]

40 minutes ago, Tacenda said:

I wish the church would just leave people like Jeremy alone.  It just fuels the fire when they go after him.  Any church should just let people alone, like the Dehlin's and Runnell's.  If the church is true, and Christlike, it should turn the other cheek.  You never know what could happen if the church did that, these people might see a way for the church to work for them.  The church set itself up for the fall with it's holding back of crucial information, and if the Lord is running things He'd want to just love them back.

The church doesn't excommunicate people because it's mad at them and can't forgive. 

Membership in the church is a privilege. The church does not owe people the right to do and say whatever they want about the gospel of Christ (as the church believes it) and remain a part of it.

Membership in the church is conditional and always has been. It is the Lord who has set up excommunication as an option when people refuse to meet those conditions. 

[consiglieri]

Smoot is likely unaware of the irony of the definition of hagriography he uses against Runnells:

Quote

Today, however, hagiography has also come to take on a pejorative sense for a biography that is uncritically reverential or positively biased in the portrayal of a given individual.

It is a good thing Smoot does not belong to a church that engages in this type of thing.

One might otherwise thing he was being a tad hypocritical here.

Edited February 13, 2016 by consiglieri

[Sky]

Nothing more than another garden-variety anti-Mormon, in my opinion.  None of his arguments are things I haven't heard before.  He'll have his 2 minutes of fame and then gradually fade away.  He'll have a hero status with the ex-Mormons.  I also question his sincerity in asking these questions in the way that he did...  

He expects the Church to prove all of its claims?  No church can do that; the only difference with the LDS Church is that it's only a couple hundred years old.  When all is said and done, physical evidence and absolute proof is nice, but it will always be a matter of faith.  

We'll never be able to prove that Jesus Christ performed the Atonement and bled from every pore for every human soul that will ever live - but it is nevertheless a fundamental truth claim / belief / faith.

Nobody should expect to remain a member of a church when you are actively fighting against it, and trying to persuade others.   

 

             

[Nevo]

34 minutes ago, Kevin Christensen said:

Presenting "The Church" as though it were an omniscient calculating moral agent rather than a ragtag gathering of individuals doing the best they can based on the light they have been given  is an important, if not essential part of controlling the narrative. 

Ragtag, adj.: made up of different people or things and not organized or put together well

Do you really think that that is an accurate description of the entity that produces the materials that bear the official logo of the Church? As organizations go, the institutional Church is about as monolithic as they come. I certainly don't see it as comparable to a loose community of scholars(!)
 

Quote

My point is, why hold historians and text book writers of the past (not THE CHURCH as giant omniscient moral agent) up to standards, methods and sources that they did not know or understand and in some cases could not possess or comprehend if they did?

I'm not sure what you have in mind here specifically, but the "standards, methods, and sources" I'm thinking of were pretty well in place by the early 1980s and the Church—or rather the motley assortment of individuals publishing official church materials—chose to disregard them for the next 30 years. But I suppose reasonable people can disagree about such questions.
 

Quote

It happens that I am on record, twenty years ago, as saying "Take note that those who send out the young unprepared, or who create faulty background expectations for them, have just as much to answer for as those who stand in the great and spacious building, zealously or morbidly pointing out problems. Whether they intend to or not, both camps can lead innocent individuals to feel shame at clinging to the iron rod, and to lose their way, and wander lost in the broad roads. The disillusioned got their illusions somewhere." 

Well said.

[Nevo]

1 hour ago, juliann said:

Even so, I think everyone in this drama needs to demand consistency. Anyone who demands accuracy from another should provide it.  He has the same problem he accuses others of. And ironically, holding his feet to the fire has been the only thing that has gotten him closer to providing what he demands from everyone else and he still has a long way to go.

I agree completely. I think we would all find more common ground if accuracy mattered more to us than tribalism, but such is human nature. Mutual understanding and sympathy remain as elusive as ever.

Edited February 13, 2016 by Nevo

[omni]

1 hour ago, 6EQUJ5 said:

And I wish people like Jeremy would cut the crap and leave the Church alone.

 

Do you believe the prophets when they make declarations such as these:

1. "Well it's either true or false.  If it's false, we're engaged in a great fraud.  If it's true it's the most important thing in the world." - President Hinckley.
2. "Each of us has to face the matter, either the Church is true, or it is a fraud.  There is no middle ground.  It is the Church and kingdom of God, or it is nothing." - President Hinckley
3. "Either the Book of Mormon is what the Prophet Joseph said it is or this Church and its founder are false, fraudulent, a deception from the first instance onward." - Elder Holland
4. "If we have the truth, it cannot be harmed by investigation.  If we have not the truth, it ought to be harmed." - J. Reuban Clark

I personally don't hold such a black and white view of the Church which is why I feel no need to warn by tbm friends and family of the "great fraud".  That being said, if this is what is being taught within the highest levels of Church leadership, then I can certainly understand why others, such as Jeremy, might feel the same.  

If you believed your friends and family were involved in a great fraud that required 10% of their income, several hours of week of their time, and placed restrictions on their choice of clothing, entertainment, language, diet, etc., would you sit idly by, or would you do something about it?

From the moment we become members of the Church, we are taught one of the greatest acts of service we can provide to others is sharing the "truth" we have.  I can think of no other church or religion that places a greater emphasis on missionary work than our own - it is what we are known for.  Yet when our belief paradigm changes we are suddenly expected to remain silent. 

 

[volgadon]

4 hours ago, Monster said:

Some Points

• Jeremy certainly is an apostate according to how the church defines apostates currently.
• The article was a classic ad hominem piece. Attack the bearer of the message not the message

The article is about a specific claim which centers on Jeremy Runnels himself. Thus a critique of that is not an ad hominem fallacy.

[Calm]

2 hours ago, Tacenda said:

I wish the church would just leave people like Jeremy alone.  It just fuels the fire when they go after him.  Any church should just let people alone, like the Dehlin's and Runnell's.  If the church is true, and Christlike, it should turn the other cheek.  You never know what could happen if the church did that, these people might see a way for the church to work for them.

You might feel differently if you were listening to the heartbreak of the stories of families whose happiness has been destroyed by a member accepting Runnells' stuff as Truth without questioning it.

When someone is using their membership to rob people of their savings (I have a temple recommend, you can safely invest your money with me), do you think the Church should let them alone and allow them to continue to make the claims that destroy people's lives?  After all, the Church has taught people to be prudent with their money. Isn't that enough care t give them?