Cognitive dissonance, Mixed messaging, Double standards and Shrugging...and aliens

[Robert F. Smith]

1 hour ago, sunstoned said:

The church is "strongly unified" because it is organized in a top-down authoritarian structure.  Talks, teachings, and instruction are checked and regulated.

Nonsense.  The LDS Church is overwhelmingly horizontal.  I have never given a regulated talk -- have always been given free rein, whether in Sacrament Meeting, Sunday School, or High Priests Group.  Indeed, anyone familiar with the Church is likely to say that the best HP and Elders Quorum meetings have always been the least regulated.  Latter-day Saints have free agency and they run with it, despite Correlation from SLC.

My late friend Hugh Nibley used to publicly attack LDS social practices (including BYU dress & grooming standards) and get away with it.  He even asked the Brethren whether he should tone it down:  They said no, not at all.

1 hour ago, sunstoned said:

All the lesson material is strongly correlated, and any deviation is frowned upon.

The notion of Correlation in the Church has been to be helpful, not dominating.  As Sunday School President I never felt dominated by SLC, and none of my teachers appeared to be either.  I attended all their classes just to assess the teaching quality, and was never disappointed with the verve and inventiveness of those wonderful teachers (aside from the goodies they frequently brought to the youth classes -- yum, yum).

1 hour ago, sunstoned said:

   Even this type of structure has not prevented a list of splinter groups as long as my arm.  Here is a partial list of break-offs just in the last twenty years: Chad Daybell, Julie Rowe, Sufferites, The Church of the Firstborn and the General Assembly of Heaven, The Church of Jesus Christ in Zion.

Those splinter groups are quite minor and tend not to last very long, some of their leaders now sentenced to life in prison.  Even without the magisterium of Roman Catholicism, the Latter-day Saint enterprise is unified (which you admit), and the reason is that the Holy Spirit is our magisterium.