[SeattleUte]

Originally Posted by Archaea

You're just as guilty as you accuse Noah of. You've oversimplified and ignored aspects of French society and their "relationship" with their church.

Noah has valid access in that he lives there.

What is your relationship to France? How well do you converse in French?

I admit my relationship at times with French society is superficial, but it has existed for 36 years, ranging from travel, linguistics, and poetry.

First point. Not all segments of any society, let along French society are sophisticated. As an example, when I served a mission in Germany, I was excited. I thought here will be a sophisticated bunch of intellectuals who understood Goethe and Lessing. For whom Kant would be commonplace. Boy was I disappointed. The average German heard about those things once in school, but had no familiarity with it. Same with the French; just because their reading of the telephone annuaire sounds cool, doesn't make it anything more than a phone book.

Second, French intellectual traditions often are almost counter-intuitive. In French writing, they go bottoms up, starting with a thesis and seeking out information that merely complies with their thesis. At one time, double blind scientific studies were uncommon, or at least not required. I remember researching a case for the FTC in hair growth. The studies proposed by the scheisters were French and Finnish, non-double blind studies, basically testimonials and they passed that off as science.

Third, France, as well as Germany, reject religion, not out of intellectual sophistication, but out of wealth. Education probably plays a role, but in my research a smaller role. Money plays a bigger role, usually, in religiosity. If you're needy, you think about things, but if you have no needs, you play and stop thinking about things, to state it overly simplistically. The Church has demographics as to which groups are most receptive and least receptive. The French have almost no relationship to their Church. It's very odd to be religious in French society. It's frowned upon. Mind you, I like the French, I try to understand them, but it's very awkward being French, it's awkward to work within the labyrinthian maze which is French society. It is cumbersome, but I wouldn't characterize French relations with her Church to be sophisticated. Yes, there are French intellectuals who recognize the roles her Church played, but the average French citizen has abdicated his religion and the average Frenchman is not very cultivated or sophisticated. That is the greatest myth ever perpetrated.

The least receptive are the very wealthy, not the most educated. The poorest have no time either.

Whatever this post means, it doesn't support the thesis that French are not receptive to Mormonism because of Catholic bad acts. Yes, they are most emphatically not religious. But whatever they currently find objectionable about religion they see in Mormonism. The LDS Church's lack of success in France speaks for itself.

Noah strikes me as one of the more thoughtful and educated folks I've met in these parts, but his assertion which I've paraphrased above speaks for itself in its lack of insight and thoughtfulness. By the way, it's quite possible to retain chauvinistic and parochial attitudes even while living in Europe, Brodie's mother's example notwithstanding. I have a close Mormon relative who has traveled extensively in Europe. I was once at an art museum with him and an accomplished scholar in Rennaissance culture and my relative lamented that Michelangelo painted Catholic themes because the Church forced him to do it. I was embarrased.