Runtu how I would have responded asan apologist UK

Runtu : how I would have / http://proza.ru/2023/11/25/444  / responded as an apologist Australia

I am not sure
why it took me 40 years
to figure out
I was wrong.

2017_ The-Stanford-Prison-Experiment _ Black Lives Matter in Prisons: QLD and Indigenous Gays in Australia: Prisons in QLD _ Рюнтю Юри _ Runtu _ Writer _ Journalist Yuri Ryuntyu _ Gay Culture in Prison: QLD: Cairns _ Stanford University: academician Yuri Ryuntyu _ academician Iouri Runtu _ Gays and Prisoners in QLD_NSW_ TAS_ACT: Gays in Prisons: LGBTQ _ Lotus Glen Correctional Centre _ 2012-2017 _ Gays in Prison: QLD: Australia : 2024

     2015 : UN : Gays 'projects : USA _ Australia :  Stanford University : academician Yuri Matthew Ryuntyu : BIO : Personal Science Subject: Stanford University : Australian Gays in Prison : Lotus Glen: Correctional Centre: _ Prison for Gays in QLD _ NSW _ ACT _ LGBTQ _  Prisoners : Black Gays in QLD _ Black Lives Matter and Indigenous Australians _ The-Stanford-Prison-Experiment _ USA : Рюнтю Юри _ academician Uri  Runtu _ Writer _ Journalist Yuri Ryuntyu _ Gay Culture in  Cairns _ academician Ryuntyu Yuri_ academician Iouri Runtu _ QLD_NSW_ TAS_ACT _ Australia 2012-2017: LGBTQI – Cultural Gay Projects: 2024: since the 1st of September 2012 until the 1st of September 2017:  USA _ Australia _ Russia _ NZ _ UK – _ Black Gays in Prison: QLD :  Gays in Prison : QLD _ Australia: Lotus Glen Prison : QLD _  2012-2017

    QLD : Australia : Queensland’s parliament on March 22, 2017  passed an amendment to the criminal code to remove the so-called “gay panic” defence-homophobic law) for accused murderers trying to reduce their charge to the lesser crime of manslaughter.

     2017 :  “Queensland’s criminal code must not be seen to condone violence against the gay community, or indeed any community,” said in a statement the Queensland’s Attorney-General and Minister for Justice Yvette D’Ath. “The passing of this legislation sends an important message that discrimination is not acceptable and that we value the LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, and intersex) community.”

      South Australia is now the only state allowing the “gay panic” defence.


    Being labelled a homosexual can bring about your death even if you're not one.

     That law is a danger not only to homosexuals but a danger to anyone – anyone can say he made an advance on me and get out on manslaughter.

   Ic;ne mondiale du web: Black Lives Matter and Indigenous Australians: Lotus Glen Correctional Centre: _ Australian Gays in Prison: QLD: : 2024


Статья ' На 2017 - Узаконили Браки Лесбиянок - в Австралии ryuntyu'   / http://www.proza.ru/2017/11/15/260 / 2017 - Рюнтю Юри / Yuri Ryuntyu Australia/ Австралия /   

Статья ' 15. 11. 2017 Австралы - Узаконила Браки Геев Дома / http://www.proza.ru/2017/11/15/268 / 2017 - Рюнтю Юри / Yuri Ryuntyu Australia/ Австралия /   


2023 : Telegram : Runtu, Uri TikTok : ВТОРЯ СЛОВАМ Дмитрия Сергеевича ЛИХАЧЕВА:

 ' Как заметил читатель, я, прежде всего, пишу о людях. Люди — самое важное в моих воспоминаниях. Стремясь восстановить их индивидуальность, я выполнял свой долг — сохранить о них память. Сколько же их было? Как они были разнообразны и как интересны! Какую ценность представляет человеческая личность! Мне надо было бы систематически вести записи, ибо ради этих встреч стоит жить. И в основном люди — хорошие. Встречи в детстве, встречи в школьные и университетские годы, а затем… не удалось удержать в памяти все целиком. И это самая большая неудача в жизни. Остается надеяться, что мои воспоминания о них — не единственные. Но когда подумаешь о том, сколько же хороших, душевно богатых людей не оставило о себе никакой памяти… ' / http://www.proza.ru/2016/03/24/221 / Celebrities Media TV Radio Russia / Canberra ACT Australia / : Hео-трансцендентальный театр : 2022.


2023 : Telegram : Runtu, Uri TikTok : " Why do we need these? " - Rudolf Nureyev asked. "Because we need life experience from these people and only on the basis of life experience can we make predictions for the future without states self-destruction and international wars..." - he underlined. "I wish good luck for Russia, but I would like to know the true colure of the future for such a great civilization with over one thousand year’s historical record. Please remember..." - he said. "We have in Russia two-hundred-year-old theaters, two hundred and fifty years of ballet and music as well as a great and the most fascinating literature and poetry to be found in the world which is over five hundred years old. Think about and be proud to keep this tradition well and fruitful from the beginning to the end of such a fascinating cultural project. I wish you good luck and God be with you." This Rudolf Nureyev said to me in Armidale ( NSW : Australia ) on November 23, 1991 " / http://www.proza.ru/diary/yuri2008/2017-02-23 / Iouri Runtu: French : Rudolf Noureev : La Mort a Paris / Юри Рюнтю : Russian / Uri Runtu: English Yuri Ryuntyu / Celebrities RU : Hео-трансцендентальный театр : 2022.

A week ago, I posted ten reasons why I can’t be a Mormon anymore, and they provoked a rather strange response from one believing Mormon, as I’ve discussed.

I was thinking last night about how
I would have responded as an apologist.

 So, in the spirit of fair play, I’ll give
the apologist response
(at least the one currently in vogue)
 to each of my reasons.

JLO: The Book of Abraham turns out to be a common
Egyptian funeral text called the Breathing Permit of Horus.

Apologist response:

For many of us, the Book of Abraham is the smoking gun of Mormonism.

Simply put, it proves that Joseph Smith could not translate anything.

 The most common response
 (which I’m taking from a longer FAIR article)
is that we only have a small part of the Joseph Smith papyri:

“It should first be understood [sic] that we do not have all the papyri that Joseph Smith had when he translated the Book of Abraham. Some of the papyri were burned in the Chicago fire and it’s possible that other fragments were lost or destroyed elsewhere. Yale-trained Egyptologist, Dr. John Gee, believes that Joseph Smith originally had five papyrus scrolls (one of which was the hypo-Cephalus).”

In other words, they tell us it’s impossible to say
 that Joseph mistranslated because we don’t know what his source was.

This argument is so disingenuous that it makes me wonder at the honesty of its proponents.

 There is one huge problem with this argument:

we have the facsimiles (helpfully reproduced in LDS scriptures) and Joseph Smith’s translation of them.

 We also have the real translations of the same pictographs. In short,
they don’t match up.

So, the apologists are left sputtering that the “missing” parts of the scrolls could have been the Abrahamic stuff:

 “Just because the preserved sections of the Joseph Smith Papyri are funerary in nature does not mean that they could not have had other texts, either on the verso or on missing sections of the rolls [what a horribly constructed sentence, by the way].”

That’s just like saying, “Just because “Oliver Twist” doesn’t mention spaceships, it doesn’t mean that the missing parts of the manuscript aren’t about Martian invaders.”


JLO: Anachronisms and clear plagiarisms in the Book of Mormon.

Apologist response:

 There must be a lot of anachronisms
 because there are a multitude of responses:

animals, Holy Ghost,
Jerusalem, metals,
plants, and so on.

For me, the bigger issue is the literary anachronisms in the book.

 First, we have quotations from Isaiah that postdate the Babylonian exile,
making it impossible for Nephi to have read them on the brass plates.

We have Enos quoting Paul and then expanding on a Pauline theme.

 In fact, this is the pattern all the way through the book.

Joseph Smith hits on a (generally New Testament) Biblical theme and expands on it.

That should not happen if the Book of Mormon predates the New Testament.

The plants and animals and steel are just obvious anachronisms that demonstrate that Joseph Smith was unfamiliar with New World geography.

JLO: Joseph Smith’s history of claiming to be able to find buried treasure by looking at a rock in a hat, the same method he would later use to “translate” the Book of Mormon.

Apologist response: Mostly, this is met with a shrug.

 A good example is found here, where the author argues that back in those times, seer stones were considered “normal”:

“In the 1820s what Joseph did was a consistent part of the culture. Actions that were accepted and understandable by people in the first part of the 19th century are no longer considered normal.”

So, the argument goes, of course Joseph Smith
 was dabbling in the supernatural, like everyone else.

But the problem isn’t whether it was considered normal; rather, does anyone really believe that Joseph Smith could find buried treasure using a rock he found digging a well?

If he couldn’t (and one supposes he couldn’t),
then was he engaged in an honest Endeavor? And finally,
 if his early uses of “seer stones” were dishonest,
doesn’t that have any bearing on the legitimacy of his
later use of the same stone to translate a sacred text? Again,
we get a shrug.

Here’s Dallin Oaks:

 “We should judge the actions of our predecessors on the basis of the laws and commandments and circumstances of their day, not ours.”

JLO: The wholesale stealing of Masonic rites
 for Joseph’s inspired temple ceremony.

Apologist response: The response is twofold:

 1) Joseph found truth wherever he could, and

2) the two rituals are not very similar.

 Here’s a good summary of the LDS response.

       First, I have no problem with Joseph
                borrowing from the Masons :

                if that were his stated goal.

On the contrary, he told his followers repeatedly that he had restored “true Masonry,” which had been corrupted over the generations since Solomon’s temple.

                Not even the Masons believe that story.

      Second, it is simply a lie that the two ceremonies
            are only slightly similar:

 “It is also worth noting that many of the similarities highlighted by church critics are only superficial.”

 Yes, some of the Masonic rituals and symbols have been removed from the temple ceremony, such as the five points of fellowship and the symbols of ritual suicide, but many remains.

JLO: Joseph’s practice of sending men on missions and then “marrying” their wives as soon as they had left town; see, for example, the story of Marinda Johnson Hyde.

                Apologist response:

 I have to hand it to Samuel Katich, who bravely tackled this issue in a FAIR article.

Unfortunately, his article spawned the ridiculous assertion that these were marriages not in any literal sense but were “loose dynastic links between families.”

And he makes the rather interesting double-edged argument that, although there is no evidence that any of these marriages was consummated, “if there was an intimate dimension in every one of these particular marriages, it is ultimately a matter of no consequence as he ‘could not commit adultery with wives who belonged to him.'”

Although it’s tempting to spend time rebutting this argument,
I think I’ll let it stand. It speaks for itself.

JLO: Joseph’s practice of “marrying” teenage girls
 behind his wife’s back and promising eternal life
to parents of teenagers for their consent.

Apologist response: These were not really marriages but again,
attempts at a loose dynastic link between families.

Here’s another FAIR article for your reading pleasure.

Speaking of 14-year-old Helen Mar Kimball, the FAIR author tells us that:

 “polygamous marriages often had other purposes than procreation—one such purpose was likely to tie faithful families together, and this seems to have been a purpose of Joseph’s marriage to the daughter of a faithful Apostle.”


                One question begs to be answered.

 If these sealings were indeed nothing more
than religious association,
 why did Joseph keep the marriages hidden
from the public and,
more importantly, from his own wife?

The apologists’ responses to this and the previous problem
show that they are grasping at straws in attempt to justify
 some pretty reprehensible behaviour.

JLO: Widespread use of church funds to
 enrich church leaders,
 from the days of the Kirtland
Safety Society to
 Brigham Young and beyond.

Apologist response: This one isn’t dealt with much, other than
the perennial assertion that the Kirtland Bank
was completely above board.

 Even if that were true, I’m talking about the systematic
use of church funds by church leaders for nonreligious purposes.

As I mentioned, when Brigham Young died in his luxurious mansion in Salt Lake, his estate was worth $1.500 000 , an astronomical amount in 1877, of which over one million dollars was borrowed from church funds.

 The only time I’ve heard anyone respond to this is to say
that we shouldn’t judge Brigham Young by today’s accounting standards.

JLO: The Mountain Meadows Massacre.

Apologist response: It was an isolated event and was not really anyone’s fault, least of all church leaders. In a BYU article, BYU president Rex Lee
 (a descendant of John D. Lee, who was executed for the massacre) said,

 “Any attempt to recreate the human dynamics that were at work in southern Utah in the fall of 1857 can only leave us bewildered as to how rational human beings at any time, in any place, under any circumstances could have permitted such a tragedy to occur.”


Note how curiously disembodied it all seems.

It isn’t that people did something horrible; no,

they merely permitted a tragedy.

JLO: Racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Apologist response: Most critics I know have merely asserted that
 the church is not doctrinally racist, sexist, or homophobic,
 but that its leaders’ teachings reflected the attitudes
of the times they lived in.

 From another FAIR article:


“From our perspective—as ‘enlightened’ people of the early twenty-first century —virtually everyone in America up until the last few decades held grossly racist beliefs, prophets and other LDS leaders included.”

I’m sorry, but “everyone else was like that, too” is not an excuse
for a church that believes itself in constant communication with God.

I’m sure the folks with scarred genitals from BYU electroshock feel better knowing that their suffering was just a product of cultural ignorance.

JLO: Most of all, the church’s pattern of hiding all of these things.

If you grew up Mormon, you were never told any of these things.

Apologist response: It’s not the church’s job to air its dirty laundry.

 And besides, all of the information is freely available to those
who put in the effort. Those who don’t are just lazy.

This is probably the response that bothers me the most.

 Growing up, we were told to avoid “anti-Mormon” literature like the plague.

 Don’t stray from the manual, we were told.

Mark Hofmann made a lot of money off the church because of its need for secrecy.

 When I worked for the church, certain authors
were blacklisted from church publications,
and certain topics were off-limits.

Yet people like Daniel Peterson insist that the church does
not hide the truth and does not discourage its members
from doing their homework;

in fact, he seems to have made a living by sneering at those
of us who have studied church history and have found it horrifying.


In the end, that’s how I feel about Mormonism: horrified.

I believed it first because I bought the line out of Salt Lake;

 when I could no longer believe the official history,

I rationalized for many years that we still

had something “true” and something of value.

I am not sure
 why it took me 40 years
 to figure out
 I was wrong.

2023 : Франко - Англо - Pусско-язычный писатель и журналист: Академик Юри Рюнтю / Yuri Matthew Ryuntyu: b. 1949: / : Автор избран в 1996 - академиком в 45 лет и - был рекомендован на почетное избрание в 1995: академиком Беллой Ахмадулиной : 1937-2010 / http://www.proza.ru/2018/05/27/1033 / и академиком Махмудом Эсамбаевым: 1924 - 2000 / http://www.proza.ru/2018/01/26/1133 /. Фото: диплом - члена Академии Информатизации России: Москва 1996 / http://proza.ru/2009/12/15/1018 /. Новая Академия - была создана - как элитарная интеллектуальная альтернатива - Академии наук СССР - пропитанной политизацией науки - искусства и литературы под руководством - КПСС СССР: 1922 - 1991 ). Одновременно были избраны: академик - Борис Ельцин: 1931-2007, академик - Юрий Лужков: р. 1936 и другие Знаменитые Россияне, как и - писатель, драматург и журналист из Австралии: Юри Рюнтю ( номинация за книгу - 1995 : " Руди Нуреев - Без Макияжа " - напечатано в Москве ). В тот год - Издательство Новости - опубликовало - только - ТРИ КНИГИ - " Михаил Горбачев - Биография: 2 тома " 1995 / http://www.proza.ru/2017/12/14/143 / и Майя Плисецкая " Я - Майя " 1995 / http://www.proza.ru/2018/01/26/257 / и - книгу Ю. Рюнтю, как друга Фредди Меркьюри: 1946-1991 и личного секретаря - Рудольфа Нуреева: 1938-1993 - за последние 6 лет его жизни: Париж: Франция - Ли Галли: Италия - Лондон: Англия - Санкт - Петербург: Россия ( 1987 - 1993 ). С 1993 - 2001: автор создал - 35 томное издание: из более 50 томов " Мировое Интеллектуальное Наследие Рудольфа Нуреева : Россия - ХX век " на ДВД-1: 10 000 стр.и 4 000 фотографий / http://www.proza.ru/2019/10/12/532 / French: Rudolf Noureev : La Mort a Paris : Hео-трансцендентальный театр : 2022.


21 КНИГА - The Self-Will Pogrom-Makers 1906 книга Ryuntyu - история и политика, / http://www.proza.ru/2012/09/25/1111 / : 2012.
Книга Cамопогромы Интеллигенции 1906-1991 ryuntyu - история и политика, / http://www.proza.ru/2012/09/26/1001 /: 2012.

22 КНИГА - The Self-Will Pogrom-Makers 1991 книга Ryuntyu - история и политика, / http://www.proza.ru/2012/09/26/994 / : 2012.
Книга Самопогромы Интеллигенции 1991-2001 ryuntyu - история и политика, / http://www.proza.ru/2012/09/25/1104 /: 2012.

23 КНИГА - The Slavonic Heart - Ilya Glazunov книга Ryuntyu - история и политика, / http://www.proza.ru/2012/09/25/929 /: 2012.
Книга Славянское Сердце - Илья Глазунов ryuntyu - история и политика, / http://www.proza.ru/2012/09/25/915 /: 2012.

24 КНИГА - Bella Akhmadulina and Joseph Brodsky книга Ryuntyu - / http://www.proza.ru/2012/09/25/906 / : 2012.
Книга Белла Ахмадулина и Иосиф Бродский ryuntyu - история и политика, / http://www.proza.ru/2012/09/25/885 /: 2012.

25 КНИГА - The Queerness of Passions and Stars книга Ryuntyu - история и политика, / http://www.proza.ru/2012/09/25/874 / : 2012.
Книга М. Ростропович и Галина Вишневская ryuntyu - история и политика, / http://www.proza.ru/2012/09/25/865 / : 2012.

26 КНИГА - St. Tikhon Tragedy Patriarch Russia книга Ryuntyu - история и политика, / http://www.proza.ru/2012/09/25/797 /: 2012.
Книга Трагедия Патриарха Империи Тихона ryuntyu - история и политика, / http://www.proza.ru/2012/09/24/1559 / : 2012.

27 КНИГА - His New Truth Andrei Sakharov книга Ryuntyu - история и политика, / http://www.proza.ru/2012/09/25/789 /: 2012.
Книга Выбор Правды - Андрей Сахаров ryuntyu - история и политика, / http://www.proza.ru/2012/09/24/1540 /: 2012.

28 КНИГА - I Fear No Evil - Nathan Scharansky книга Ryuntyu - история и политика, / http://www.proza.ru/2012/09/24/1409 /: 2012.
Книга Узник Сиона Анатолий Щаранский ryuntyu - история и политика, / http://www.proza.ru/2012/09/24/1399 /: 2012.

29 КНИГА - The Cross - Alexander Solzhenitsyn книга Ryuntyu - история и политика, / http://www.proza.ru/2012/09/24/1295 /: 2012.
Книга На пути к Богу Александр Солженицын ryuntyu - история и политика, / http://www.proza.ru/2012/09/24/1285 /: 2012.

30 КНИГА - The Temptation - Boris Yeltsin книга Ryuntyu - история и политика, / http://www.proza.ru/2012/09/24/1212 / : 2012.
Книга Искушение Правотой Борис Ельцин ryuntyu - история и политика, / http://www.proza.ru/2012/09/24/1173 / : 2012.