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Please. Unfriend Me.

Please. Unfriend Me.

Last updated on: June 12, 2022 at 2:19 pm by Dan Peterson

Please. Unfriend Me. 2022-06-12T14:19:05-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Salzburg im Winter –though it isn’t exactly winter right now
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

***

A new Witnesses-related short feature has been posted for your viewing pleasure:

“Witnesses of the Book of Mormon — Insights Episode 8: What was the Cost of Being a Witness?”

What price did the witnesses pay for being witnesses—and for never denying their testimonies of the Book of Mormon?

This is the eighth in a series compiled from from the many interviews conducted during the course of the Witnesses film project. This series of mini-films is being released each Saturday at 7pm MDT. These additional resources are hosted by Camrey Bagley Fox, who played Emma Smith in Witnesses, as she introduces and visits with a variety of experts. These individuals answer questions or address accusations against the witnesses, also helping viewers understand the context of the times in which the witnesses lived. For more information, go to https://witnessesofthebookofmormon.org/ or watch the documentary movie Undaunted.

Short clips from this episode are also available on TikTok and Instagram.

Be sure to Like and Share this video, as well as subscribing to our YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/c/theinterpreterfoundation and our other social media channels on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.

***

I simply haven’t had much time for blogging over the past forty-eight hours. And yet it’s my personal goal to post a blog entry of a certain minimal length every day. So, right now, in order to meet my goal for today and to make up for having fallen a tad short yesterday, I intend to cheat. I’m going to share, again, an entry that I originally posted almost exactly four years back and that I’ve lately remembered because I’ve thinking about . . . well, Nazis. Some of the references will be just slightly dated, but I haven’t changed anything (including my now objectionable use of the term Mormon):

Some years ago, I read Ralph Hancock’s translation of Alain Besançon’s A Century of Horrors: Communism, Nazism, and the Horrors of the Shoah.

I believe it was in that book that I encountered this interesting observation:

Nazism, Besançon wrote (if it was indeed Besançon), had a finite goal. At least in theory. Once the Jews and the Gypsies were gone, the Slavs enslaved, and so on, the perfect Nazi society would essentially have been achieved. Aryan supermen would be in power, and equilibrium would have been reached.

Communism, by contrast, would never be done. The most minute deviations from the Party line, whatever the party line happened to be that day, would be sought out and lethally punished. And there were always deviations. The slightest differences of opinion were criminalized; the slightest policy variations were deemed treason.

The history of the leadership of the Soviet Union, Communist China, and other such states — with their continual purges of previously favored leaders and apparatchiks, their endless heresy hunts and show trials — illustrate that fact in spades. I recall the story — I don’t know whether it’s true or not — of a cabinet minister who once dared to suggest an alternative course of action during a meeting with Enver Hoxha, First Secretary of the Party of Labour of Albania from 1944 to his death in 1985. Hoxha, it’s said, pulled a pistol, shot him in the head, and continued with the meeting.

Ideologues are always searching for heresies and heretics, and they tend to be unforgiving.

That’s one of the reasons why I cannot sign on as a straight Libertarian, and it’s among the reasons that I had reservations about some in the Tea Party movement, despite my inclinations toward the former and my deep sympathy with the latter. I can’t stand it when, so concerned with ideological purity that practicality goes out the window, we nominate obviously flawed candidates, support splinter factions, and effectively hand elections over to Leftists.

Anyhow, over the years responses to such things as my article on Islam in the April [2018] Ensign, my criticism of a California bishop who (explicitly identifying himself as a Mormon bishop) published a blistering attack on then-Senator Harry Reid, and my reservations about President Donald J. Trump have been instructive. Some have disagreed, which (though they’re wrong) is fine. Many, on the other hand, have agreed with my stances.

But some who disagree have been extraordinarily unpleasant. And they’ve been people who, I’m guessing, mostly vote the same way I do, with whom I likely agree on many if not all political matters, and who likely worship the same way that I do on Sundays.

It’s the “friendly” fire that’s been most disheartening. Really, at times, profoundly depressing.

In online posts and personal emails, I’ve been denounced as a liar, compared to Judas Iscariot, pronounced a socialist, declared a “cafeteria Mormon” who doesn’t really believe in the Restoration at all, unmasked as a “pretend” conservative who’s masquerading as such for some unspecified but nefarious end, and exposed as someone who is morally indifferent to evil and who believes that politicians, and especially left-leaning ones, should be exempt from scrutiny because politics and morality have nothing to do with each other.

To my enormous delight, one angry Mormon denounced me as a covert enemy of the Church and of Western civilization, linking me with my co-conspirators, Elder Dieter F. Uchtdorf and Elder Patrick Kearon.

One morning, I was rather ostentatiously unfriended on Facebook as a “defender of abortion” by somebody who probably wasn’t even born yet — yes, I’m that old — when I began to oppose abortion with my voice, my vote, and my wallet. If she can’t even endure reading my wickedness online, though, could she stand with me in the temple? Have I, like Senator Reid, forfeited any right to fellowship with the Saints?

And all of this because I think it wrong to demonize Brother Harry Reid, no matter how strongly — and it’s very strongly — I disagree with him on political issues; because I find the character and personality of Donald Trump worrisome and troubling; because I know too much about Islam to buy into the simplistic caricatures of it that some folks like; and so forth.

I take my stand — simply and solely but decisively — on the principle that merely political disagreements should not be permitted to sunder the fellowship of the Saints and to divide the Kingdom of God.

Yet I see that happening. I’ve experienced it myself.

If you’re one of those who wish to toss me out of the Church, please, at the very least, stop reading my blog and unfriend me on Facebook. You’ll do both of us a great favor. Our lives will be much more serene. Certainly mine will.

Posted from Ruhpolding, Upper Bavaria, Germany

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