Layne_H_Brotato

christ at peace. Analog art

Haha, still at it with the bare assertions, eh sport? "He wrote most of it. Quite simple really." "He wrote most of it. Why is that difficult to understand?" Bro, you've said the exact same nothingburger four times now and still haven't even come close to explaining how a barely-educated 23-year-old farm kid with no manuscript, no notes, no revisions, dictated over 500 pages of complex narrative, chiasmus, consistent geography, and linguistic features in just a couple of months, while duping everyone around him into believing his supernatural tale with real props. That's not an answer. That's dodging the actual data while patting yourself on the back using bare assertions. If it's so obvious and easy, stop repeating yourself and actually lay out the naturalistic process that accounts for the historical and linguistic facts. Or just admit you can't, and all this "he just wrote it" stuff is pure hand-waving. Your move, genius. I'm still waiting for anything resembling substance.

@manmotion He wrote most of it. Why is that difficult to understand?

There will always be bad actors, But the LDS Church is light years ahead of any other group when it comes to incidents of sexual abuse. Based on available data, If you were to compare Abuse incidents to Number of Days of rain in a calendar year: Public schools, it would rain 35 days a year Catholic Clergy, 14.6 days a year General Male population 3.6 days a year Southern Baptists 1.1 days a year But for LDS, it would rain 1 day every 12.5 years.

@Rainskiphouse I didn't make any claim. You seem to be failing your reading comprehension. Stop hand waving and actually engage with the data. How did Joseph Smith "create" the Book of Mormon- while addressing the known historical and linguistics facts? Or just admit you can't.

@manmotion Claiming it is of divine origin is a supernatural claim. Hebrews in America writing in Egyptian of Jesus visit, a golden book given to Smith by and angel and translated with magical peep stone. Youre not dealing with data. Feel free to provide evidence of any if that.

Sure. I respect your response. Twitter isn't a good place to engage in what probably needs to be a more long form dialogue or engagement. I disagree a bit with some aspects of what you said, but I don't consider you bad faith. I'm on Tik Tok some and have had good discussions at times, but there are too many bad faith actors. Thanks for the respectful response.

Thanks for the response, Layne. A couple things: 1) With respect to you, I don't have the resources of time and/or talent your comment supposes that I do, in order to produce the version of that post that you seem to think is "minimum viable product". 2) You seem to have a misapprehension of what I am doing here, and what that post summarized. That is a reflection on my experience with and observations about "LDS Apologetics so far". I could more properly phrase it "LDS Apologetics on X". I am not writing some treatise, or an organized polemic against LDS apologetics, as such. I also certainly didn't set up to compose some 'Summa' about the LDS church, it's members, or its doctrine/theology. So, while I appreciate your articulation of what you judge to be the appropriate way to proceed with what you think ought to be my approach to what you understand my objective to be: I disagree. FWIW, I do engage with "crippling tropes" and the "tortured historico-critical approach" many amateur - and some who suppose they are professional - apologists use on here. Regularly. In fact, some have suggested I do that far too often. I'm not sure, but I'm just as, if not more interested in engagement with deeper ideas that are almost entirely absent on X (e.g., take the linguistic analysis about causal construction in the BoM I was just posting about a couple hours ago). Anyway, I hope you'll follow along and comment/converse where you'd like. Thank you again.

My Experience with LDS Apologetics So Far After ~20 years of attention in other areas, I recently decided to refresh my understanding of and engagement with LDS, primarily by interacting (not always successfully) with LDS apologists on X, as well as “rank-and-file” members, some of whom I know IRL and get along with in peace. Some observations so far: • Among LDS apologists, preservation of the unique religious culture LDS have and continue to cultivate seems to be the primary concern. • LDS apologetics frames TCoJCoLDS as a society forged in the trauma bond of a shared persecution complex. I think this might be a feature of a faith tradition premised as a right to 1700 years of wrong and unapologetically proclaiming it, not a bug. • The unique role of LDS apologists is to maintain or even strengthen that bond by 1) making a credible defense wherever possible, and to 2) sally forth on offense to a) show a token formidability to rank-and-file members, and b) incite those being attacked into countering, which adds fuel to the persecution complex as new members and old sustain the attack. I’m not suggesting LDS apologists consciously set out to nourish this trauma bond, etc. I’m sure most if not all of them would take issue with that characterization. Regardless, that is what is happening. • LDS is full of apologetic tropes that successfully preach to the choir (check any comment section for the standard backslapping by the usual suspects) and obviously serve to allay any superficial skepticism among missionary targets. But, among those who critically engage, these tropes - perhaps the biggest is their unstudied, almost reflexive enmity toward “creedalism” - suffer from crippling problems. Caricatures, strawmen, informal fallacies, textual games and a tortured historico-critical approach help to create an interesting study in contrasts: • While LDS continues to grow, its critical theological rigor is declining. This seems to correlate with its managed-but-inevitable cultural assimilation, of which there is endless evidence. • LDS apologists - not all, but most - rarely engage and sustain engagement on level ground. Their tactics are well-known: non-falsifiability is always close-at-hand as an escape hatch, denigration of critics as bad faith actors, constant reference to “continuing revelation” as the deus ex machina that delivers them from many theological checkmates, etc. • Accusations of being a “cult” are overstated: if anything, LDS was one, and grew out of it. But the imprint is there in LDS apologetics: insularity, tactical disengagement and fallback onto strategies inculcated from spiritual infancy, doctrinaire and unyielding adherence to distinctive, highly eccentric beliefs, practiced argumentative mechanisms for deflecting and temporarily mitigating unresolved critiques, etc. • Many “regular” LDS - even some of the apologists - are genuine in their intent, fervent in their devotion, seeking truth, goodness and light. So far, there are a few LDS thinkers on here willing to engage respectfully on hard questions: • s/o to @jacksonfrandsen for this. A lot of AI, but on the whole an earnest and respectful interlocutor. A rare individual out here. • Also @stackerco, whose exact LDS status is difficult to know; but who is uncommonly honest, goes where others fear to tread even if it’s messy, and does it with the raw, unblinking fortitude of someone who is genuinely seeking and trying to wrestle, not shrink back into safety, with their inherited tradition. • There are others - PIMOs, ExMos - who are trying in their ways to work things out, but get blasted. Stay strong. For the many LDS who have blocked me or muted me because I asked you tough questions and insisted on legitimate argumentation: you won’t see this, but I wish you’d reconsider. For those who haven’t: thank you. My purpose is not to offend, but engage. Where I overstep, as I may, I ask your forgiveness.

Haha. Ok sport. I didn't make a supernatural claim. I just said to engage with the data. How did he do it naturalisticlly accounting for the data? Go for it. As you add up all the "lucky guess/genius things that he "did" back to back (all like a perfect storm) coming together at the same time compounding probabilities; the likelihood he naturalistcally did it becomes highly improbable if not nearly impossible. You can still think he did it, but it wasn't simple or likely. Most people, like you just hand wave it off without engaging with the data. The few that have, have their own highly improbable claims of like Mass hypnosis (Dan Vogel). Feel free to engage with the data (or hand wave it off). But just saying he just did it is just hand waving.

@manmotion Yes it does. And unless you provide evidence for your supernatural claims, the simplest and most likely answer is the best one.

@LukeFHan @JWhitebread1 @JS_StrngstSldr If this eventually comes across his desk, (maybe he is just that busy) then would we expect any acknowledgement from Shapiro?

@JWhitebread1 @JS_StrngstSldr Ben Shapiro doesn't make the hiring decisions and he doesn't watch the other hosts shows, he's way too busy with all the stuff he's doing. This is quite a stretch, I'm honestly confused why people want to believe the entire company hates them.

Really?

@Rainskiphouse That doesn't engage with the data at all.

@manmotion He wrote most of it. Quite simple really.

The data is much bigger than that. But it is a decent point. There isn't a lot of good data to mine about this. (Note: the lack of data from many groups just isn't publicly available) But that doesn't mean we don't try to understand the data that we do have. Most organizations keep this kind of data "close to the vest" so we just do the best analysis we can with what is available. Thankfully, LDS have a critical website (floodlit) that works tirelessly to expose every loosely connected SA accusation they can find against the LDS church, - going back as far as they can, and posting it into a database to "showcase" all the abuse the LDS church perpetuates. So we have data for the LDS church.

It’s the shrunken sample fallacy. Imagine you flip a coin 1000 times. By the end, it’ll be pretty close to 50/50 heads tails. But at any given point along the line in a sample of 10 flips, it very well could’ve been 90/10 heads tails. Focus only on those ten flips, while ignoring the larger data set, would be an obvious fallacy. Yet that is exactly what church antagonists do.

@GuyInco15542744 Yes it is on YouTube as well. youtu.be/eymH9ZX08ag?si…

@manmotion Is this video on YouTube? It’s good

@Rainskiphouse Turner doesn't even come close to explaining how Joseph Smith was able to "create" the Book of Mormon (Other than calling him a genius, with no detailed explanation).

@manmotion You can learn why.

@ShaunMcKnight Thanks!

@manmotion This video is incredibly well done, Layne! 🙌🏻🤩

A unusual book was published on the American frontier in 1830. Was it a Statistical Miracle or an Impossible Hoax? Watch The 1829 Aberration. An Original video.

@LatterDayBean x.com/manmotion/stat…

@manmotion Good stuff. Where is the data sourced from?

@Mormonger I'm to old. All I can think of is the old "My Name is Trinty" western movies from the 70s.

I'm getting cooked in the comments

@Matthew_T_Lowe x.com/i/status/20376…

@manmotion What happens when the calculation is done per capita? Public schools and the Roman Catholic Church are huge compared to Mormons.

@RichMiro @CrowMtnMunin Until then, The data is from what's available. Here's per capita from the data. x.com/i/status/20376…

@CrowMtnMunin @manmotion You can’t compare raw or loosely adjusted numbers across massively different populations and reporting systems. Without per-capita rates and consistent reporting standards, this isn’t analysis - it’s packaging.

Right, zero is the only acceptable number, no argument there. I don't think any abuse is okay, and the analogy wasn't meant to suggest otherwise. It was highlighting how rare cases are in the LDS context compared to schools or other churches, based on available data. The real focus should be on better safeguards everywhere.

Imagine comparing how often it rains to how often sexual abuse happens in the LDS church? 0 is the only acceptable number when it comes to sexual abuse incidents. My god man, good luck looking god in the eyes knowing you accepted any other number

The Salt Lake Temple renovation and 2027 open house involve multiple leaders and teams. Official Church updates highlight Brent Roberts and Andy Kirby in key oversight roles for the project. Gordon Bowen's involvement in the creative aspects is stated in his own professional bio on the AAF site. It is based on his history with Church-related projects including the 2002 Olympics. There has been no direct Church announcement naming him as the overall lead.Serious allegations have been made against Bowen in connection with the David Hamblin case. However no criminal charges have been filed against him and they remain unproven in court. Presuming guilt without convictions or official findings risks unfair harm to an unconvicted person. On data transparency and privacy: Large organizations face significant legal and ethical hurdles. These include defamation risks for the accused and privacy protections for both victims and the accused. Many victims of sexual abuse do not want their names stories or case details made public. Disclosure can cause re-traumatization stigma harassment or loss of control over their own experience.The LDS Church like most institutions handles reports internally while complying with mandatory reporting laws to authorities where required. Comprehensive public databases naming individuals are uncommon without specific legal triggers such as major lawsuits or subpoenas. This approach also helps protect victim confidentiality. Some Catholic dioceses released credibly accused lists after external pressure. Even in those cases victim experiences with the publicity have been mixed. Independent trackers compile cases from available court records and news.

It is difficult to express how ridiculous this is, on all levels. Hey, @manmotion, what do you think about the fact your church hired a child molester to lead the creative team for the 2027 Salt Lake Temple Open House? And could you tell us exactly what data sets The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints makes available regarding abuse in the church? I’m so tired of dishonest “Saints”. 😞

@4thand1sports @orthute roughly 9.6% of U.S. students in grades 8–11 (at the time of the underlying surveys) reported experiencing unwanted sexual misconduct by a school employee (teacher, coach, administrator, etc.) at some point during their K–12 school years.

@manmotion @orthute Forgive my ignorance, 10% chance of being molested by a public school educator? Or of all incidents known, 10% are public educators?...

@4thand1sports @orthute x.com/i/status/20376…

@manmotion @orthute This is per capita?