Gaslighting

[probablyHagoth7]

39 minutes ago, Danzo said:

you wouldn't say "the church chugs Vanilla Coke" if it wasn't generally true of its members. and an expected  action for church members.

Danzo chugging Vanilla Coke doesn't make it a church thing.

K. Is there a post in this thread that claims something to the effect that "the church does...." x?

(This concern may boil down to nothing more than semantics.)

[BlueDreams]

30 minutes ago, MiserereNobis said:

I am Catholic, but I do not take personally the attacks leveled at the Catholic Church.  I also don't take it personally when people discuss and denounce (and rightfully so) the evils of the sexual abuse scandal.  Catholics committed those crimes and enabled those crimes, but I wasn't one of them, even though I am Catholic.  Danzo seems to be taking the position that an accusation against something going on in the LDS church is an accusation against him.  This doesn't make sense to me, since there could reasonably be a temple class teacher who is doing bad things by withholding information, but that doesn't mean that Danzo is doing it.  To take it back to me, there were lay Catholics who helped cover-up the priest abuse scandal, but I wasn't one of them.

I think there's 2 big differences. 

The first is that it's not a good correlation. To make the analogy to the sexual abuse scandal assumes that the accusation of gaslighting is even accurately described in this thread and is systematic. I explained why that's not the case here. Currently the way the definition is being loosely tied is closer to if the CC didn't have an actual scandal with real stories but if the priest was being accused of sexual abuse was be described as such because he always smiled broadly at the children and stated they were beautiful/handsome that day. Maybe someone felt uncomfortable by this....but that's not sexual abuse. And to assume such is reckless and an over-extension of the terms.

The other is in the structure of the church itself. Whereas there is an obvious distinction between lay members and clergy in the CC there isn't in the LDS church. The bishops, stake presidents, areas presidency, etc are all member who may have very recently been the one helping out at primary or be released and become that temple prep teacher. We have a few life-long callings. Apostles and prophet being the most obvious, but there's also stake patriarch (mostly) and probably a couple more that I can't think of right at the top of my head. The temple workers and temple prep teachers are me and Danzo and Rongo and several others just like us around the world. What this makes, is a church where there can't easily be a major distinction between the average church member and a 70 and whoever is on the correlation committee to make varying manuals. It's difficult to parse "the church" from the members. And though I don't take this as personally as Danzo, I can't help but feel similarly. It's how I interact with the church....it's like interacting with my community....recognizing that I make a part of the dynamics in that community. It also leads to an inevitable criticism of someone who is apparently never in the room. It's not me or Danzo in question, but someone else. Always someone else that no one interacts with who's actually pulling the chords to the mormon show. That's a problem.

I critique our culture plenty. I literally use my job as a form to critique and move our culture and church ideology. But I don't sit there, externalize the problem away from myself, and then throw random half-jargon potshots at it in doing so. I can get Danzo's irritation. Both for the reason mentioned and for the irritation of watching psych terms used incorrectly and very obviously misapplied. Reducing the severity of gaslighting, so that it can fit a relatively innocuous problem.

 

With luv,

BD