LDS Freedom Forum

Great material by Gregory Smith. A recent article was posted in which a woman struggling with her faith reported a “punch in the gut feeling” because Elder L. Whitney Clayton of the Seventy told BYU grads...https://www.fairmormon.org/blog/2016/04/29/9425

From the article:

C.S. Lewis once observed, in a similar vein:

I am inclined to think a Christian would be wise to avoid, where he decently can, any meeting with people who are bullies, lascivious, cruel, dishonest, spiteful, and so forth. Not because we are ‘too good’ for them. In a sense because we are not good enough.

We are not good enough to cope with all the temptations, nor clever enough to cope with all the problems, which an evening spent in such society produces. The temptation is to condone, to connive at; by our words, looks and laughter, to ‘consent’.…

Things we hold sacred will be mocked….We are encouraging him to believe that ‘those Christians’, once you get them off their guard and round a dinner table, really think and feel exactly as he does. By implication we are denying our Master; behaving as if we ‘knew not the Man’. On the other hand is one to show that, like Queen Victoria, one is ‘not amused’? Is one to be contentious, interrupting the flow of conversation at every moment with ‘I don’t agree, I don’t agree’? Or rise and go away? But by these courses we may also confirm some of their worst suspicions of ‘those Christians’. We are just the sort of ill-mannered prigs they always said.

My rule of thumb with using ellipses in a quotation is that the omitted information ought to strengthen my position if researched by an interested reader. Reciprocally, if I come across a quote that I like that has been presented with ellipses, I always try and read the original material before absorbing it into my repertoire, if possible. To quote the article, "Text without context is error."

(As a side note, if the people at Fairmormon abide by this principle themselves, the resultant reduction in bias must be countered by an increase of pure prejudice for modern teachings in order to explain their conclusions.)