What is your opinion of FARMS?
 

Seriously, I want to know the consensus here.

Don't be so polemical.

My options are not there.

I would say FARMS is a group of apologists, doing what apologists do, offering a defense of the Church's history and positions. The quality of work is disparate.

Some of the scholarship is acceptable, and some of it is just opinion based apologetics. I don't believe they intend to deceive, as they publish what they believe.

It's difficult to trust the scholarship of a group who already know the anwser to the question. They will trumpet anything positive and poo poo anything negative. Have they ever gone contrary to that M.O.? Oh yeah they can't.

It is a good place to see the might of the Mormon spin machine. Not a good place for objective scholarship.

Just like one can predict the opinions of those who've already made up their minds, namely those of the disaffected of SU and Taq Man. Neither of you are any better than they, you're just the opposite side of the coin, that is all.

Blindness in any variety is ugly.

Well said, Archaea.

Seattle, I didn't vote because you had too few choices. If you want honest opinions about FARMS, you need to have more options available such as "I don't really have an opinion of it, as I don't need FARMS to validate what I believe".

Are you ever going to post an answerable poll?

You're spouting a lot of cliches. Nobody but FARMS who takes an empirical approach to Mormonism's claims reaches the conclusions FARMS does. The academic world takes for granted what Taq Man and I believe. The other day I asked for a single example--just one--of a scholar at a reputable university that has even thought the question of whether the Book of Mormon was actually an English translation of an ancient record was even worth asking. Not one name was provided. I renew that challenge. Since you think our minds are closed, Archea, give us the kind of authority we regard as worth spending any time on to consider with an open mind. Come on. See if you can. If you think our minds are closed give us someone other than Nibley and FARMS to weigh.

Has FARMS ever claimed that they are engaged in objective scholarship?

This whole topic is such a dead horse.

Exactly. They are the same thing as that famous think tank here in Seattle, The Discovery Institute, that issues papers on intelligent design dressed up as real scholarship. Thus how ridiculous Archea looks calling Taq Man and me "closed minded" and the other side of the FARMS coin because we choose to wholesale reject FARMS' work as persuasive of anything.

Has a single scholarly authority even examined the BoM, who wasn't LDS? The answer is no. So if no nonLDS look at it, you have your answer.

We aren't important enough and your retorts are lower than cliches, that's why cliches demolish subcliches. I use only the most modest of weapons against those unthinking retorts.