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Originally Posted by MikeWaters
why do people thing that serious scholarship will damage testimonies?
why is it the closer we get to the truth, some say, the less likely we are to believe?
Instead of calling Bushman "faithless", I call his critics faithless.
If we have serious discussion/scholarship on blacks and the priesthood at BYU--it will cause students to lose their testimonies?
or is it more likely that they struggle on their own, never get any information, and lose their testimonies when they eventually encounter "anti" information on their own?
I understand milk before meat. But a meatless life is intellectually dishonest. For the flagship educational institution of the church to be meatless is a shame.
There are a lot of things that could be done, that have little to do with "meat" that would improve religious education at BYU. One idea I had was to require every student to read a diary of a Utah pioneer/settler. Students should come away with an understanding of their LDS cultural heritage. Right now, I would argue they don't.
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I agree with just about all of that, Mike. Especialy the part about a meatless life being an empty thing and how easy it is to get messed up by anti stuff when the Church has made absolutely no move to inform its membership of certain 'large' facts in the early days of the church.
I do, however, think that people can be a critic of Bushman(or any other author) so long as they have a basis for doing so. Kneejerk critics don't do anyone any good. I'm guessing that the latter category is the one that you are talking about it.
I, for one, am frustrated at the sheltered (church)educational existance that I lived in high school and college. Somehow the bit about Joseph Smith and his 33 wives(and the situation in which he married some of them) somehow got left out of all the seminary & institute lessons. Oh, and all the BYU religion courses that I went to as well.